Slate - "Why are FEMA's Flood Maps so Horribly Flawed"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/09/here_s_why_fema_s_flood_maps_are_so_terrible.html

They fail to take climate change into account, and they’re hard and expensive to maintain. Plus, they can be manipulated by local governments.

By Ramin Skibba


Last week, Hurricane Harvey devastated the city of Houston. The scale of the tragedy shocked even the National Weather Service. But perhaps the most shocked set of people is the 40 to 50 percent of Houstonians who live outside Federal Emergency Management Agency’s mapped high-risk flood zones and yet still found their living rooms underwater.

FEMA’s maps represent the government’s best estimates of flood plains. They hold a lot of power: When property isn’t included on FEMA’s “magical map,” its residents aren’t required to buy flood insurance. This tends to impart a false sense of security, says Rob Moore, senior water policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That’s why these flood maps lead to such risky behavior and have such tragic consequences.”

But as we have seen, both last week and in years previous, FEMA’s predictions are also frequently wrong. Why?

Some of the reasons are the ones you might have guessed. FEMA’s maps are backward-looking, often out of date, and based on historical flooding and development. They don’t anticipate trends pointing to the future of climate change and rising sea levels, shown by repeatedly flooded areas in Houston that lie outside of supposedly 100-year and 500-year flood zones. And, of course, 100-year and 500-year floods are occurring much more frequently than we’d expect, implying that those zones need to be updated. The maps also don’t account for rapidly expanding development in flood-prone suburban and exurban regions.

But another issue is the amount of control local politicians exert on these maps. snip

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read the rest at the link above

[gratuitous]

1. Citizens are taught to mistrust their own government

Sometimes government earns that mistrust. Other times, it's because politicians of a certain party (if you know who I mean) don't want accurate information getting to citizens, because they want citizens to regard anything connected to the government to be extremely suspicious.

There are real world consequences for this, as detailed in the article. Once upon a time, believe it or not, FEMA was a model government agency. Citizens could depend on dispatches from FEMA, make plans with confidence, and know that FEMA was going to be there in an emergency with appropriate assistance. Now? Practically anything connected with FEMA is regarded as a joke, citizens don't trust FEMA to be able to tie its own shoes (metaphorically speaking), let alone assist in an emergency. Citizens get the idea that they are best able to figure out for themselves what they should do in a disaster, and when 100,000 people all do 100,000 different things, the natural result is chaos, needless suffering, and avoidable deaths. Local agencies struggle to get people to act in concert, because everyone is convinced that he's an expert or knows better than the authorities how best to respond, without regard for the safety of everyone.

This doesn't just happen. There has been a decades-long program designed to destroy our form of government, and alienate citizens from one another. Who's doing this? Cui bono?

[Docreed2003]

2. Here's a great example of this problem...

Last summer, the Baton Rouge area was swamped with a massive storm that stalled over the area. Several of the communities around the City were completely flooded. My in laws' community was one of them. Their house was built in the 70's, survived a "historic flood" in the early 80's without taking on a drop of water, and their house wasn't listed in the flood plain maps for Baton Rouge. They weren't required to have flood insurance, but they purchased it when they bought the home in the early 80's because a 3x3 ft area on the backside of their property was included in the flood plain. Their home took on over four feet of water lasted summer in the devastating flooding and, despite all of the losses they sustained, they were able to rebuild thanks to that flood insurance....many people weren't so lucky. Harvey isn't some new thing, it's a symptom of what our country and our world will be facing with the future ahead.