An ounce of prevention

Families evacuated from their homes. Landowners standing in tears on washed-out properties. Local government agitating for economic relief from the state and federal government–and getting too little too late. It’s all getting to be too drearily familiar.

If, as some have claimed, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” we here in the watershed of the Upper Delaware River are living in the loony bin. Sanity demands that we take a new look at our policies and regulations regarding construction on floodplains and see what we can do to fix them.

In deciding on a strategy, we might want to take a leaf from the book of the residents of this nation’s largest river valley, the Mississippi. Before 1993, flood management strategies in that area focused mainly on structural control mechanisms like levees and dams. And there, as in the rest of the nation, FEMA introduced new building standards in the 1980s designed to make structures less vulnerable to flooding. The idea was that all humans need to do is to build the right things the right way and we can conquer the forces of nature.

The Great Flood of 1993 changed all that. Over 1,000 levees were breached or wiped out; seventeen million acres were inundated; $12 billion in damage was inflicted. And one of the things swept away by the flood was the old philosophy that the best way of handling flooding is by controlling the water more strictly and making better and stronger buildings. Instead, people started realizing that floodplains are for flooding, not for building. Tens of thousands of residents of the Mississippi River Valley started voluntarily moving off the recurrent danger zone of the flood plains. And the government stepped in to help.

Since that time, a number of public programs have been implemented that provide people with incentives to relocate from flood plains and encourage communities to let those areas revert to their natural function. Such programs include the Emergency Watershed Protection Program, which provides assistance to landowners for floodplain easements, setting back levees, or limiting land uses; FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance, which provides grants to relocate or acquire floodplain structures before floods; and Community Development Block Grants extended by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which can be used for property acquisition and relocation of flood-prone homes.

Many of these programs require cost sharing by the locality in question, and that probably does mean some proportion of the burden would have to be born by local taxpayers. But that upfront cost should be more than offset by the permanent long-term reduction of flooding losses due to the simple fact that there will be less to damage.

This is not to say that every building needs to be taken off the floodplain. A variety of other approaches, including coming up with more effective building standards and minimizing the damage done to storm water runoff by development in general, need to be considered. A comprehensive solution is required, and now, when many of our local communities are sitting down to consider reshaping their comprehensive plans, is an ideal time to develop it.

On its website FEMA states that its mitigation division has a priority of addressing “repetitive loss properties” including “structures with four or more losses within a ten-year period, and structures with two or more losses where cumulative payments have exceeded the property value.” Good. Sounds like just what the doctor ordered. Let’s find and solicit the help we need to get the people who are already suffering out of harm’s way and break the endless cycle of destruction and reconstruction in which we are currently bound.

A list of programs related to floodplain management can be found at: environmentaldefense.org/documents/573_Programs.html

A “Local Floodplain Management” workshop is being held on Monday, May 23 from 8:30 to 4:00 p.m. at the Delaware Township Municipal Building in Dingmans Ferry.

Dr. Punnybone

No More Mr. Nice Guy!