ShareThisAs Congress begins to work out details of an economic stimulus package likely to include large sums to fix the nation's roads and plumbing, two new reports urge federal officials to update flood protection as part of the effort.
One panel, the National Committee on Levee Safety, recommends that lawmakers immediately give the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers enough money and authority to conduct a national inventory and inspection of levees.
The committee estimates that more than 100,000 miles of levees, many of them at least a half-century old and of uncertain soundness, stand between floodwaters and millions of Americans.
"The current levee safety reality for the United States is stark -- uncertainty in location, performance and condition of levees and a lack of oversight, technical standards and effective communication of risks,'' the committee wrote in a draft report to Corps and congressional leaders released Jan. 16.
A second report, released Friday by the National Research Council, recommends that the Federal Emergency Management Agency work with other federal, state and local agencies to produce more accurate and easily-updated flood hazard maps.
FEMA's $1 billion, 5-year effort to modernize the maps is ongoing, but has been slowed in thousands of communities because of uncertainties about the condition and capacity of levees to hold back floods.
Both the Corps and FEMA have used a 100-year flood standard to assess the risk to people and property in flood-prone areas, a practice even those inside the agencies consider dangerously inadequate.
In recent years, thousands of home and business owners exempt from having to purchase flood insurance because elevation or a levee have placed them beyond a 100-year-flood zone have still been swamped by floods.
The Research Council said even though it costs more to prepare accurate hazard maps, the benefits outweigh the costs by better reflecting the actual flood risks. It noted that FEMA is beginning to draw interactive maps that show flood zones and the consequences of various flood levels.
Both reports largely echo the findings of a Scripps Howard News Service review of levee safety and the mapping of flood hazards near levees published last summer.
The levee safety panel also recommended that a new system to convey the severity of risks posed by the failure or overtopping of levees be established to prevent people living behind flood walls from having a false sense of security.
But the first priority, the committee said, is to simply figure out where levees are.
While the Corps has a fairly good idea about the condition of several thousand levees that are the federal government's responsibility to maintain or repair, no one knows how many there are outside the federal system, nor what they protect or what shape they're in, both the committee and Scripps found.
"That's the critical first step that has to happen now," said Eric Halpin, a Corps official who chaired the levee committee. "We can't really estimate the scope and cost of a safety program until we know what's out there."
On the Net: http://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/ncls/index.cfm
http://www.nap.edu
E-mail Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
