Anyone who knows me will tell you I've been screaming about the political manipulation of flood maps for decades. What just happened in Texas was a tragic example. FEMA regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic’s buildings from their 100-year flood map and loosened oversight as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain. Via the Associated Press:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency included the prestigious girls’ summer camp in a “Special Flood Hazard Area” in its National Flood Insurance map for Kerr County in 2011, which means it was required to have flood insurance and faced tighter regulation on any future construction projects.
That designation means an area is likely to be inundated during a 100-year flood — one severe enough that it only has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.
Located in a low-lying area along the Guadalupe River in a region known as flash flood alley, Camp Mystic lost at least 27 campers and counselors and longtime owner Dick Eastland when historic floodwaters tore through its property before dawn on July 4.
The flood was far more severe than the 100-year event envisioned by FEMA, experts said, and moved so quickly in the middle of the night that it caught many off guard in a county that lacked a warning system.
I can't emphasis this enough: These kind of events are foreseeable, not random acts of nature. And I guarantee you, this will happen where you live, too.
You may have a nice single house, surrounded by trees and greenery. But someone else owns that land around you, and it will be sold to a developer. Because developers gotta develop! And maybe the developer throws up 20 townhouses nestled on a gentle rise, each of them with their own concrete driveway that slopes toward your property. (Concrete is, of course, an impervious surface.)
All 20 of those driveways are funneling their runoff toward your yard, and the results aren't pretty. The home I'm thinking about had a raised deck in the back of their house, and the runoff reached the deck.
How did this happen? Wasn't there a law?
Yes, there was, one that required each county draw stormwater maps for every single watershed. Good idea! But in our county, developers were king. So the county ignored the requirement and that left outdated maps as a result.
And because developers are such hefty campaign contributors, there was no rush to prepare for the worst.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, was just one reason why I was appalled that a real estate developer from Queens was running for president. Because developers have been known to bully everyone until they get their way.
But back to Camp Mystic.
Syracuse University associate professor Sarah Pralle, who has extensively studied FEMA’s flood map determinations, said it was “particularly disturbing” that a camp in charge of the safety of so many young people would receive exemptions from basic flood regulation.
“It’s a mystery to me why they weren’t taking proactive steps to move structures away from the risk, let alone challenging what seems like a very reasonable map that shows these structures were in the 100-year flood zone,” she said.
This was a tragedy, but a foreseeable one.
