New method needed to manage flood risk
The record pace of this year’s hurricane season, including Hurricane Laura, serves as the latest reminder that the country needs an updated approach to managing flood risk. Our new normal of extreme weather is underscored by the more than 33 billion-dollar floods in the last 40 years. The price tag is even more staggering. Since 2000, flooding and hurricanes have cost the nation more than $850 billion in damages. Three years after Hurricane Harvey, Texas is still recovering.
Despite these growing costs and the unprecedented frequency and intensity of storms in recent years, our federal government continues to focus on decadesold weather patterns and outdated data when deciding where and how we build projects meant to last lifetimes.
In addition to the lives this antiquated approach places at-risk to flooding, it is us — the American taxpayer — that typically foots most of the bill to rebuild after the storm. Instead of incorporating resiliency measures to threats like sea level rise and stronger storms when building back, current federal flood standards often result in critical infrastructure such as our schools, hospitals, nursing homes and roads being repaired only to their predisaster state. This loads the dice for the costly cycle of flood, damage and repair. FEMA recently put in new rebuild regulations.
Stronger local standards are important but what’s critically needed is a national policy to tackle a problem impacting all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. Otherwise, depending on local standards runs the risk of patchwork community resilience that, in many cases, still fails to account for future flood risks stemming from even heavier deluges and sea-level rise. This is even the case with communities such as Harris County that incorporate updated Atlas maps, which still only reflect the likelihood of heavy rainfall events based on what’s happened in the past events but are being used to guide where and how projects meant to last 30, 40, 50-plus years are constructed.
And the impacts of flooding extend well-beyond dollars and cents, cascading throughout communities. Lives and livelihoods can be threatened from extended power outages, shutoff access to clean water, closed schools and medical facilities, halted supply chains and shuttered businesses.
The magnitude of the problem is significant, but not insurmountable. In 2016, the Office of Management and Budget identified tens of thousands of federal assets valued at over $100 billion located within flood-prone areas. A recent Department of Defense assessment determined 930 military bases in the continental United States have been impacted by flooding over the last three decades. DoD now requires military construction projects, such as runways and barracks, in flood-prone areas mitigate future flood risk. And places like Nashville, Tenn., Norfolk, Va., and Fort Collins, Colo., are among a growing number of communities going above and beyond federal flood standards.
Incorporating greater margins of safety when building in flood-prone areas is also cost-effective. Research has shown the benefits of stronger building standards in flood-prone areas can be five to seven times greater than the additional upfront construction costs.
And establishing a stronger federal flood standard has overwhelming bipartisan support. More than 500 small businesses and 250 local elected officials spanning all 50 states have joined the call to action. Recent polling by The Pew Charitable Trusts shows 85 percent of voters support Congress requiring all federally funded projects in areas prone to flooding be built to better withstand future flooding.
One of the top priorities during our combined decades of leading the nation’s emergency management and homeland security efforts was to apply new knowledge, information and lessons learned from disasters like Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy to better ensure a safe and prosperous future for all Americans. As Congress considers spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on upgrading the nation’s infrastructure, they should first pass legislation to address our federal flood standard’s failure to account for future risk. Doing so will help safeguard the nation’s infrastructure, better protect our communities and businesses, and conserve taxpayer dollars for generations to come.