The Next Wave
We’re spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money to repair or rebuild flood-damaged public facilities. If those new buildings aren’t designed better and smarter, that total will rise as swiftly and scarily as sea levels.
In January, an executive order from President Obama updated the flood protection standard that guides the design of federally funded projects in or near floodplains and along coastlines. By building things smarter — and with future flood risk in mind — the updated standard will ensure that projects built today are better sited and better prepared to face a greater risk of flooding in the future.
My team at NRDC decided to find out how much the federal government is already spending to repair public infrastructure in the wake of floods. This wasn’t the easiest question to answer, due to the number of federal agencies that can distribute assistance and the variety of programs and budget lines that assistance might come from.
So we focused on one specific pot of money: FEMA’s Public Assistance Grants. These grants are routinely given to states after a federally declared flood disaster, and they are specifically intended to assist state and local rebuilding and recovery efforts. Over the past several weeks, my team examined the data available on FEMA’s Data Feed website to find out how these funds are being used.
We were surprised to find that so much of this money goes specifically towards repairing and rebuilding public facilities and infrastructure. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell if a specific facility has been repaired or rebuilt more than once using this data, but you can see quite easily that some parts of the country have been hit by multiple flood disasters — and have received tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to rebuild public infrastructure.
Looking at these numbers, it’s not hard to understand why the new flood protection standard is needed. We’re already spending tens of billions of dollars to repair flood damage to public buildings and infrastructure. How much more will the federal government spend as sea levels rise and the risk of flooding increases with climate change?
We assembled a map that shows a year-by-year breakdown of how much money counties and states have received via Public Assistance grants in the wake of floods from 1998 to 2014. If the new standard had been in place, how many of these damages over those 17 years might have been avoided? And how much in future damages can we avoid by implementing the more protective, updated standard?
The Obama administration’s updated flood-protection standard will ensure that federally funded projects incorporate an additional margin of safety. Public buildings, facilities, and infrastructure will be sited and designed so that they are protected from floods that could happen today or decades from now.
But these future flood risks don’t seem to register with some members of Congress opposed to the new standard, like Senators Cochran (Mississippi), Blunt (Missouri), and Vitter (Louisiana). Ironically, these Senators happen to represent states that are among the most vulnerable to flooding and among the top recipients of FEMA Public Assistance grants. Given the frequency of flood damage in their states, one would think that they’d understand the importance of building facilities in safer locations following more protective standards. Apparently not. They have supported various riders that prohibit federal agencies from implementing the updated commonsense flood protection standard.
The old design standard was based on the so-called “100-year flood.” But we know that floods of that magnitude now occur more frequently than once a century. And we have scientific proof. A study out of the University of Iowa found that floods are happening much more frequently than in the past. Another study by Washington University in St. Louis revealed that FEMA flood maps and estimates of flood levels by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers severely underestimate the true risk of flooding on Midwestern rivers. You can also use tools like Climate Central’s Risk Finder to see that there are hundreds of public facilities and buildings facing flood risk due to sea level rise — and many of those buildings would have to rely on some amount of federal funding to be repaired or rebuilt.
The consensus is clear: new projects should be built with rising flood risk in mind. And that’s why the updated federal flood protection standards are so important. It doesn’t always make sense to simply rebuild the same thing in the same place after a flood. Same goes for when building something new. Because of the impacts of climate change, federal agencies have a responsibility to taxpayers to ensure that public infrastructure is sited and designed to not only withstand levels of flooding that have occurred in the past; but can also be protected against the floods of the future.
The Obama administration’s updated flood protection standard will do just that. New federal flood standards would require federal agencies to take a harder look at what infrastructure is built, how it is built, and where it is built. Federal agencies would have to consider whether it makes sense to relocate a project to higher ground. And if the building can’t be relocated, the foundation should be elevated, so flood waters won’t be able to reach it.
