Trusting in Levees

You would have thought that people would have learned after the 1993 floods in the Midwest that levees failed.

You would have thought that people would have learned after Hurricane Katrina that levees fail.

Every year, we know that levees fail around the country after significant rainfall and flooding, and yet every year we arrive back at the same place.

Thousands of people are displaced, many lose their homes, and businesses and farms are devastated by floodwaters after levees fail. Critical infrastructure built by the Army Corps, the states, or private entities fail on an all too frequent basis.

Others look at the flooding and wonder whether the Army Corps or state and local governments have had a role in the flooding because of development affecting the hydrology or that communities or entities upstream released water to protect their own systems, impacting those communities downstream.

The latest story is not altogether different than earlier stories about levee failures and flooding, except this particular town was told by the federal government that flood insurance wasn't needed because it was protected by a levee that was supposed to withstand a 100 year flood.

Gulfport was protected by a levee rated to withstand a 100-year flood. Although it wasn't designed to protect the town from a flood on the scale of last week's, it was enough protection that the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not require business or homeowners to purchase flood insurance.

Only 28 of the town's 200 residents had federal flood insurance. The rest trusted the levees would hold. Residents Rick and Gina Gerstel, who lost everything, say no one from their bank to the municipal or federal governments ever told them they were at risk and ought to buy flood insurance.

Some residents told CNN they felt misled about the risks of not having flood insurance. They said they thought the chances of a catastrophic flood were miscalculated.

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, agrees. He supports legislation that would require anyone living in an area protected by a levee to have flood insurance.

"I don't know how you define 'protected' or call that protected when you're telling people 'you don't have to have this, you don't need it' ... and you're watching families being devastated," said Dodd. "But the opportunity to get on their feet again is going to be very difficult for many families. And, that's one of the major shortcomings in the flood insurance program."

FEMA says its risk assessment of Gulfport was accurate and the agency is currently spending $1 billion to upgrade outdated maps and reevaluate flood dangers.

That last sentence shows the problem - on the one hand it claims the that the risk assessment in Gulfport was accurate, but on the other it says that it is spending $1 billion to upgrade outdated maps and reevaluate flood dangers. Is it possible that Gulfport's flood dangers were not properly assessed? How many other towns and cities around the country have inaccurately assessed flood risks - especially those towns and cities protected by levees that are all too prone to failure? It is all about the risk and statistics. What level of risk are people willing to live with, and is it a risk that has been calculated using the best available information?

When one talks of infrastructure that has been underfunded over time and which gets overlooked while politicians look to groundbreaking and ribbon cutting on more glamorous projects, these kinds of projects are supposed to protect land and investments along rivers and streams throughout the country.

I know that when we were looking at houses in Northern New Jersey, we frequently checked with the NFIP guide (similar to the FEMA maps here) to see whether they were in the flood plain and their risk assessment for flooding. In two cases, they were on the border of the 100 year flood plain and would have had to purchase flood insurance. In the end, we went with a house in a different area that was not within the Saddle River or Passaic River flood plain.

If the flood risk assessments are wrong, how many people are at risk of being underinsured if they are subjected to flooding? How many are taking the government at their word that levees will protect them from damaging floods? Why should people make those assumptions given the evidence that the government has repeatedly failed in this area?

People really need to be more proactive and demand that the basic infrastructure is at a level it is supposed to, and not accept promises that it is so. The empty promises from the Army Corps regarding the New Orleans levees shows that there is a way to go before one can trust the government to protect against these floods as those levees failed to hold against a storm that crossed over the city far weaker than the Category 3 storm it was designed to withstand (and indeed, it appears that the levees were defective and destroyed not by overtopping but by seepage - a problem that continues to this day).