Flood events like those in Wilmington, N.C., after Hurricane Florence are not purely natural disasters but are often aggravated by man-made problems, according to a presenter at the American Planning Association’s recent “Policy and Advocacy Conference” held in Washington, D.C.
Forbes Tompkins of the Pew Charitable Trusts Foundation told the audience that flooding is not just a coastal issue as eight of the 10 top ten states impacted by flooding are inland. Tompkins pointed to the country’s aging infrastructure and unsustainable development practices as the prime culprits in exacerbating these disasters.
“The margin of safety isn’t sufficient. We should stop calling these natural disasters but rather extreme weather events that become disasters when we keep making these poor investment and planning decisions,” he said. “These are dated policies that need to be updated. We can’t afford to continue the status quo.”
Pew’s Flood Prepared Communities Initiative works to promote FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, using nature-based solutions to flood hazards, resilient infrastructure, and pre-disaster mitigation, Tompkins noted. He also stated that disclosing flood risk to homeowners is not currently required by federal law and that spending money on cleaning up after a disaster is more expensive than mitigation efforts by a factor of six to one.
Panelist Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of Floodplain Managers, stressed the important role played by the National Flood Insurance Program and suggested that even though 1 million miles of creeks and rivers have been mapped more is needed to help with flood hazard identification. He also suggested that a lot of “new subdivisions are going into areas that aren’t flood-mapped – cornfields and cow pastures.”
He urged the planners to lobby Congress about the need for flood mapping even though some question the worth of the maps. “I would say on balance they serve the nation a lot better than not having any maps at all,” said Berginnis. He also cited the state of Indiana using Community Development Block Grants from HUD to map 18,000 miles not covered by FEMA’s mapping.
Berginnis laid out how future floods are a factor of climate and land use. He advocated utilizing the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act which is being updated by Congress and stressed the need for local mitigation efforts using the town of Findlay, Ohio as an example. Findlay instituted a sales tax dedicated to flood mitigation. “There are no easy solutions and you can’t put all your eggs in the federal basket,” he said.
Sagar Shah, planning and community health center manager at the APA, revealed findings from a new hazard mitigation study undertaken by the APA and funded by FEMA. Shah and his team found that 40 states do not require any mandatory guidelines for hazard management in their comprehensive plans and 47 states don’t have any specific language related to climate change in their state planning legislation.
“We reviewed state legislation of all 50 states and put the findings into three broad buckets: state level planning legislation, state level enabling planning legislation, and national hazard legislation related to planning. We were looking at these for planning and land use perspective,” he said. The information will be available to public on a website later this month, he added.
