I'm beginning to think that it's not an Orwellian society we're heading for but a Lewis Carroll world

FEMA website says Ivan, Katrina did no flooding damage to Gulf Coast
By Jeff Amy
April 08, 2010, 9:01AMView full sizeThe Federal Emergency Management Agency would like more people to buy flood insurance. To prompt them, FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program has built an elaborate Web site -- Floodsmart.gov -- that examines past flood damage in every county in the United States since 1993. There's a catch, though. Look up Mobile County or Baldwin County, and the histories estimate that flooding from 2004's Hurricane Ivan caused $0 in damage. The same applies for 2005's Hurricane Katrina. Look up a location in coastal Mississippi or southeast Louisiana, and those histories don't even acknowledge that Katrina happened. Hurricane flood damage usually doesn't have a dollar value attached, even though the program's own statistics show it paid $23.5 billion over the last 10 years for its 17 costliest tropical systems.
Flooding map updates on track, says ADECA
State officials are still on track to update coastal flood plain maps for Mobile and Baldwin counties by 2012, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, or ADECA, said this week.
The project, once set for completion this year, was held up for lack of money, according to a Press-Register report in January.
For coastal dwellers and developers, the maps are an essential tool in determining where to build and what measures to take to defend against storm surge.
Although they might not be aware of it, thousands of Alabamians are at risk because out-of-date maps didn't reflect their true flood risk, the Press-Register reported in a 2007 series of articles.
Despite their importance, revising the maps is time-consuming, said Larry Larson, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers Inc.
"You've got to do the engineering, you've got to deal with the community," he said.
In Mobile County, for example, the state has updated flood maps for "riverine" areas around Gum Tree Branch, Miller Creek and seven tributaries of Eight Mile Creek, according to Larry Childers, the ADECA spokesman.
The fresh studies, carried out by engineering contractor Malcolm Pirnie, were conducted in 2005, Childers said via e-mail.
Preliminary versions of the resulting digital flood maps were distributed to local communities in 2007 and then reviewed by both federal and state officials. They became effective last month.
-- Sean Reilly and Jeff AmyBy contrast, the eight largest non-hurricane floods have produced $1.1 billion in damage. The whole flood insurance program is in legislative limbo because Congress failed to reauthorize it before going home for Easter. Existing policies are not affected, but people can't buy new ones. That's made it difficult for homebuyers if a lender requires flood insurance. Some mortgage companies have continued to lend, expecting that Congress will reauthorize the program when it returns. Regardless, people who surf over to Floodsmart.gov might not get a very clear idea of how susceptible an area is to flood damage, given the lack of estimates of damage resulting from hurricanes. FEMA didn't use its own data, instead relying on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the National Weather Service, FEMA spokesman Brad Carroll wrote in an e-mail. "Floodsmart.gov has a number of resources to ensure that people are aware of the natural hazards and risks that exist in their communities, including an interactive map that shows flooding data at the county level from NOAA," Carroll wrote. It remains unclear why the Floodsmart data is incomplete. A NOAA spokeswoman referred comment to FEMA. Another FEMA spokesman, who said he could not give his name for the record, said there were no county-by-county breakouts available from the program's own data. Ivan is the third most-expensive event in the history of the National Flood Insurance Program, costing $1.58 billion to cover more than 27,000 claims. Katrina was the most expensive event, resulting in 167,000 claims with $16.1 billion in payments, according to data elsewhere on the program's own Web site. In Mobile and Baldwin, where damages were estimated at zero on the Floodsmart site, local officials found that 500 houses in the city of Mobile and another 500 in Bayou La Batre were heavily damaged by Katrina, most by storm surge flooding. Others were flooded elsewhere in southwest Alabama. FEMA's Carroll did not respond to an e-mailed question about the cost of creating the flooding history on the Web site. He did write that "FEMA is continuously working with our partners to improve and expand the information on our Web sites and encourages everyone to take steps to ensure their families are prepared in the event of an emergency."