FEMA Shifts Course on Flood Map Modeling in Illinois

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is offering a reprieve to property owners in southwestern Illinois and other areas guarded by aging levees that it had considered decertifying, staving off fears that some could have been forced to buy flood insurance.

FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate told federal lawmakers that the agency would hold off on decertifying 64 miles of earthen levees protecting St. Louis’ Illinois suburbs, saying it would stop using a questioned assessment technique and turn to more nuanced methods to measure the protection the levees provide.

Previously, FEMA regarded communities protected by unaccredited levees as being entirely without levees. Dozens of congressional members from both parties had lobbied for the shift.

Anger had been mounting over FEMA’s plans to unveil new floodplain maps that in southwestern Illinois’ case would rescind the accreditation of the region’s levees. The agency has said it believes those barriers, more than half a century old, do not meet its minimum threshold for certification.

Critics insist that without that accreditation thousands of property owners would be onerously saddled with higher, unaffordable insurance rates, land values would be devastated and development crimped.

Fugate assured lawmakers that the new flood maps would not be completed before a new analysis was completed.

Federal lawmakers cheered the news.

“FEMA chose to do the right thing,” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said. Mark Kirk, Durbin’s Republican colleague from Illinois, said FEMA’s decision “ensures that common sense prevails as new maps are drawn.”

In southwestern Illinois, “this will buy us another few months as FEMA figures out how to deal with this problem. Beyond that, we have to see what their proposed methodology is,” Les Sterman, who oversees the region’s flood-protection construction, said as levee districts in the area continue hustling to shore up their aging earthen barriers before any new maps come out.

“If we accumulate enough of the delays, we may have enough time to get the job done,” Sterman said.

FEMA is assessing whether levees can handle a 100-year flood – that is, an inundation so big that it has only a 1 percent chance of happening any given year, which is FEMA’s threshold for classifying an area as high-risk.

Those levees in southwestern Illinois, protecting a swath of land known as the American Bottoms, were built after World War II to weather a 500-year flood – one with a 0.2 percent chance of happening any year.

Though none has ever failed, the Army Corps of Engineers believes those river defenses could require hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs to get them up to FEMA standards before the new flood maps come out.

Without repairs, FEMA planned to declare them functionally useless – a downgrade that would force thousands of the region’s homeowners with federally backed mortgages to buy flood insurance, even if they’ve never been swamped.

Banks offering federally backed mortgages to borrowers in high-risk flood zones could even buy flood insurance for the properties and send the borrowers the bills or foreclose if homeowners resist getting coverage on their own. People who own their homes outright – or without a federally backed mortgage – aren’t required to carry the insurance, though they assume the loss if flooding happens – much like a motorist does while driving an uninsured vehicle.

Sterman said the agency’s reconsideration of how it assesses areas as being at a high risk of inundation won’t halt a federal lawsuit filed last year in southwestern Illinois, questioning FEMA’s methodology by three of the region’s counties, along with 16 villages and cities.

That suit asks a judge to keep the redrawn maps from taking effect.

“The lawsuit disputes FEMA’s original decision to de-accredit the levees, and that’s still an issue,” Sterman said. “We still don’t believe they have the appropriate information to de-accredit. This action (Thursday) doesn’t change it.”