A new federal policy outlined a week before Hurricane Katrina struck could force residents in hundreds of communities nationwide to buy flood insurance and halt construction in some low-lying areas, including parts of California’s Central Valley.
Any flood plain protected by a levee will have to be certified by local officials to meet the 100-year flood standard, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency will assume the levee doesn’t exist for the purposes of gauging flood-prone areas.
“If we say a levee’s going to protect you from a 100-year flood, we want to make sure that’s true,” FEMA spokesman Butch Kinerney told The Associated Press. “If you say it’s good, we want to see the engineering data to prove it.”
That’s been FEMA’s policy for at least 15 years, but it’s being enforced as the agency upgrades 90,000 flood maps in 20,000 communities nationwide over the next three years, Kinerney said.
California officials said they were working to meet the requirements. They discussed the policy Friday in Fresno at a meeting of the state Reclamation Board, which approved a new policy to review all urban development proposals in flood zones.
The flood-mapping policy was revealed in an Aug. 22 memo from David Maurstad, acting director of FEMA’s mitigation division, according to The Sacramento Bee, which obtained a copy.
California officials said local flood control agencies will face extensive and expensive testing of their levees. But Kinerney said many agencies, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, will merely have to conduct “a paperwork search” to prove the levee was engineered to 100-year standards.
Homeowners protected by inadequate levees will be required to buy flood insurance costing hundreds of dollars a year, and any new homes and businesses permitted will likely have to be elevated above expected flood levels, Rod Mayer, the California Department of Water Resources’ acting chief of flood management, told The Sacramento Bee.
Mayer predicted many local agencies will find it difficult to provide 100-year flood certification, and expected a moratorium on construction in many areas behind levees.
“This is not about selling flood insurance,” countered Kinerney. “This is a real-world exercise. We want people to be safe.”
Most of the Central Valley’s 1,600 miles of levees were grandfathered into FEMA’s 100-year flood standard years ago. But an inspection would likely find many built to protect what was then farmland don’t meet modern requirements for shielding communities.
It recently cost millions of dollars to upgrade levees to 100-year standards in Sacramento, one of the nation’s most flood-prone cities.
The news comes days after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked congressional representatives to seek $90 million in federal money for critical Central Valley levee repairs.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Topics California Flood
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