New Orleans       There’s nothing good about having your home and neighborhood flooded.  It’s critical to know the risks, even if you accept them with your eyes open.  In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina and many before and after that, have taught us lessons in both preparation for disasters, as well as what we might call calculated risks.

Losing an old fishing camp across Lake Pontchartrain from the city, I paid off the remaining mortgage over the years since, but I knew better than to rebuild there.  We had faced flooding in previous storms before we lost it all in Katrina.  We faced the music.  Fifteen years later with another fishing camp, we were raised nine feet.  We calculated the odds, paid for the flood insurance, and bit the bullet figuring that lightning wouldn’t strike in the same place two times, and that we would enjoy every day until then, and hope for the best and lady luck.  In New Orleans, the whole family stays on high ground, full stop.  We pay for flood insurance, even though we were among the small percentage of the city that didn’t flood.

I share one family’s set of decisions, partially to underline how important campaigns like that of Arkansas Grassroots United’s are in their efforts to win better warning systems in that state for flooding.  Studying the work of First Street, a climate-modeling firm, reported in the New York Times and elsewhere and sharing its maps widely, on a state by state, town by town level, anyone can see where there has been flooding and projections on where flooding will be likely in coming decades with climate change.  Much of their work gives a clearer picture than FEMA maps, because they are solely based on available data and science without the possibility of local business, politics, and homeowners’ appeals for modification.  AGU is trying to educate communities around the state to the risks they face.  People have the right to know.

All of which makes it amazing to read about the devastation of the floods in Texas and the tragic death toll of children summer campers.  The area was in a flood path, appealed to FEMA, and were exempted.  At the local and federal level, who wouldn’t want to take back that decision?

Lots of people in many communities locally and at FEMA, is seems, are not taking these lessons to heart.  Jeremy Porter, the chief economist at First Street was quoted as saying, “Flood risk shouldn’t be negotiable.  Flood risk should be something we can determine from scientific, empirical data, and it isn’t that under the FEMA mapping process.”  Going further, the Wall Street Journal  quoted a FEMA representative saying, “Map updates include community input to ensure local knowledge, and areas of concern are incorporated.”

At one level that sounds fair as well, but based on the record in practice, it doesn’t seem credible.  As the Journal reports,

Thousands of properties are removed from high-risk flood zones every year following appeals, federal data show.  More than 6700 appeals to take properties out of a zone – 86% of the total – were approved between October 2024 and late August this year, according to FEMA.  Another nearly 2900 requests – 93% of the total – to remove areas elevated by fill, typically in new developments, were also greenlighted over the same period, FEMA said.”

We have to ask, who is FEMA protecting?  For sure, not the safety of the whole community, but maybe the local developers, real estate brokers, and even compliant officials.

Homeowners may not want to pay flood insurance and live on the wild side of the risk equation.  Homeowners may not want the value of their homes to decrease, inherently therefore hoping to pass the risk onto some future buyer, perhaps unaware, rather than accept the consequences of their own decisions and calculations.

Cities rolling the dice to get off of flood maps, need to the learn the many lessons from Texas, Louisiana, and elsewhere.  This isn’t caveat emptor – let the buyer beware, but life and death.  FEMA needs to work on that basis as do our local politicians.