New Orleans residents have been on an 8 month hold, waiting to see if they will be allowed to rebuild or not. Supposedly we were waiting on new floodplain maps from FEMA. But as with everything else with FEMA, it wasn’t that simple.
In their infinite wisdom, FEMA decided to not release the maps we’ve been waiting on for 6 months, but to instead issue a set guidelines based on the existing floodplain maps. (from 1984)
While many people are breathing sighs of relief that we finally have the rules, I’ve already spend a few hours pouring over them and they approach non-sensical if you try to apply them.
The base rule works like this. If you live in a house that was more than 50% damaged by the flooding from the levee failures, you either have to tear down your house OR raise it up to the “Base Flood Elevation” or 3 feet off the ground, whichever is higher. [The Base Flood Elevation (BFE) is the 100 year floodplain.]
At first glance that seems logical. But it sets up some incredibly illogical situations. For example 2 houses, same value, both sustained 51% damage from the levee breaks:
HOUSE A:
Raised House, 1 foot BELOW the BFE. Must be raised 1 foot to meet BFE.
HOUSE B:
Slab house, 1 foot ABOVE the BFE. This house, even thought it is already above the BFE must be raised an additional 3 feet.
Raising an already raised house 1 additional foot is a logical thing to do if that single foot raises it from a 50 year floodplain to a 100 year floodplain. While it is a burden for the homeowner, it is reasonable.
However, raising a slab home -already above the floodplain- 3 feet in the air is simply ludicrous. That would put the slab home 4 feet higher than the frame home. Not only does that insult common sense, it puts a grossly undue burdern on the home owner who lives on higher ground!
That is only but one of many bizarre issues caused by these guidelines.
The guidelines actually punish areas of the city that improved their drainage system in the last 22 years. As I’ve said before (and gotten pummeled in the comments by idiots) the new floodmaps should, by all rights, show LESS of a chance for flooding in most areas because of drainage improvements made since 1984. – That’s why FEMA still wants to stick with the old maps.
FEMA is trying to broker a unspoken deal here. “We won’t take Katrina into account and you guys let us use the old outdated flood risk maps. WInk. Wink.” That’s not fair to thousands of citizens who have paid for additional flood protection.
It should be noted that the new floodmaps do not take last year’s flooding -an engineering failure- into account.
In the Broadmoor section of town for example, 22 years ago it flooded if someone sneezed. 2 decades and millions of dollars in drainage projects later, Broodmoor now rarely floods. Yet those citizens will have to raise their houses simply because FEMA is using old maps. If FEMA used today’s maps, many of them would not have to raise their houses.
Of course the whole thing is bogus if you think about it. None of this would have happened if the Corps had not been negligent in the design of the levees. We have a “Pottery Barn” rule in Iraq, we should have one in America. If the Feds flood a city, the burden to fix it should not be on the people they flooded.
These rules will also probably cause many historic homes to be town down for no reason. I can’t point you to an exact example, (yet) but I know there are 100 year old homes that have never flooded before and are above the floodplain that now must be raised (or razed) because the Corps designed the levee poorly. It makes no sense unless you consider Corps negligence to be a reoccurring risk.
It gets exponentially more illogical when you dig deeper into it. Financially it stands to be a boondoggle for both the people of New Orleans and the American taxpayer. But I’ll skip that for now, it gets complex. Suffice it to say that after 6 months of waiting for FEMA to finish writing these rules, it is especially discouraging that so little thought was given to them. I could have come up with these rules in an afternoon. Why it took 6 months I’ll never know.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It won’t be weather or geography that will kill New Orleans. It will be bureaucracy and stupidity.
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Trevor:
First, my apologies for mis-spelling your name earlier. I have an excuse: I am an LSU graduate….. Now, in response to your post and other posts:
I agree that new slab-on-grade houses are pretty much done for, at least in Lakeview, if these FEMA regs hold up. (That is a BIG if.) There were, back in the mid ’90s, several experiments in raising slab-on-grade housees in Denham Springs, Louisiana, near Baton Rouge. The area floods regularly (it is on the Amite River) and two houses that I know of were raised above the BFE for the area. I believe both were succesful. I have no idea of the cost, though.
Smitty: “They ought to make a few re-usable concrete forms to build 10′ raised foundations and let the homewners raise the whole city, all they’d need is about 50 forms and a few cranes.”
Oh, really? For 100 thousand some dwellings? You have some specific process in mind and/or calculations that will back up your stated quantities?? ……. Didn’t think so. End of discussion.
Paul: Thanks for bringing this whole issue up, and giving it some well-deserved analysis. FEMA has not dropped the ball here – it lost it completely. In October they said that the revised maps were a challenge since the area was in the midst of a benchmark recalibration when the storm struck, and it would be January at the earliest. Surveyors I know confirmed that some recalibration was taking place, so I could understand. January came, and we were told that the huge disruption caused by Katrina was hampering efforts. Can’t find benchmarks. I could see that. OK. March for sure. March comes along, and we get the “we’d rather be right than fast” excuse. April first, we promise. And now, they issue out what we got this week. Can you see why everyone’s so pissed?
Cliff you or I could have come up with something more intelligent in 20 minutes.
What really pisses me off is that if someone had a building permit yesterday, they were ok, they were “grandfathered.”
But if they did what they WERE TOLD and waited for the Feds to issue rules they are screwed out of 40,000 dollars or so to raise their house.. That pisses me off.
Paul:
Yes, we could have come up with something better. Or, at the very least, come up with this MONTHS ago. My parents have refrained from sinking any money into the house waiting to see what the rules were going to be. Waited months. That is all anybody wants – tell us what the game plan will be, and we will move forward. Most of the Lakeview neighborhood, contrary to what the news reports say, is not affulent. It is mostly people like my parents – middle-age to elderly – both rich and not-so-rich. These folks have been looking for answers, but all they get is posturing, excuses, or the mayors preferences on ice cream flavors.
Oh yes: $40,000 to raise a house? Not anymore…….
>Oh yes: $40,000 to raise a house? Not anymore…….
That’s true… with the price of labor now, no telling. Good luck to your folks man.
There was a flood special here in Sacramento– which is considered at worse risk for urban flooding than New Orleans*, but which has much shorter escape routes– that mentioned one idea that I thought was interesting in regards to New Orleans. The gent involved was some kind of ecologist, and he has been watching the marshland barrier to NO disappear over the years. (When you streamline a river for navigation, you move where the silt gets deposited.
This is important because the marshlands “act as a sponge” in regards to storm surges. So his idea was to create a second channel for the Mississippi, a slow, silt channel. You keep the current one for navigation, levees and port and all, and the second one is running with minimal controls off to the side, providing a pressure release and rebuilding the marshes.
In other words, very very long-term flood protection thinking.
*The special talked about the Natomas area just north of Sacramento, a development my parents opposed for years because it’s located on a natural floodplain. Apparently, most people who buy houses there don’t know they’re at risk for flooding (the greatest risk aside from two old areas of town with inadequate levees), and many are even told, truthfully, that they’re not required to buy flood insurance (because the maps are based on the supposition of better levee protection than is actually in place.)
There’s also a real estate term which nobody seems to consider the implications of. It’s called “highwater” as in “highwater bungalow.” What this means is a house that has its main entrance on the second floor, a common sight in downtown Sacramento where floods occurred almost yearly until they raised the city and began building levees. In other words, these houses were designed for floods… and the only reason that the high entry stopped being important is that they built levees. Over a hundred years ago. Without all the necessary maintenance since.
Paul..
There is a difference between being flood prone and actually flooding. The lower 9th-Arabi-Chalmette-St Bernard area is all the same area relative to flooding from levee breach. Have you eve looked at a map? This is the most flood prone area since the levees surrounding it are substandard and will not hold even a Cat 2 hurricane surge. There is a difference between being prone to heart failure and having a couple and dying. I’d say the latter is more serious. Don’t mind the actual water, just get busy with the stats and flood maps.
Every place is immediately flood prone when a levee built to protect it breaks. My home is a couple of feet above sea level but we are surrounded by sorry CE engineered levees that have collapsed twice under the weight of CAT 3 surges, which they are supposedly designed to handle. The Industrial Canal levee broke in almost the same place as it did after Betsy. The Corps had “strengthened” it… just like they are doing now. Wonder why I’m buying on Baton Rouge?
It will take a minimum of 20 years for the area to gain any semblance of normalcy. Anybody who has not seen St. Bernard first hand, on the ground in boots, sights, smells and all, has no clue the damage this storm has done. It is 90% flood related. At 7 am my home had not even lost power and there was scant water in the streets. Wind damage was minimal, a branch fell from the pecan tree in the yard. Ten minutes later we were forcing the door against 4 feet of water. By 8 am it was 8 ft, up to the gutters. The water flowing past had whitecaps. It stopped there for awhile, which is where it stopped for Betsy, but at 10 am the MRGO levee collpsed and the water started coming from down parish. It didn’t stop rising until 2 pm at about 14 feet which is 3 tiles from the top of my roof. We were sitting on the ridge tiles with our feet in the water.
But I wasn’t worried. I knew if I Googled it I would find that there were other places even more flood prone.
Get real.
Two other items…
– Katrina and Rita have left no marsh protection around St. Bernard, New Orleans East, and the Lower 9th (on the same plain as St. Bernard). A flight over the area shows Lake Borgne right up to the levees. All of the breakwaters are gone.
– For those suggesting all of these fancy engineering solutions to be implemented by the Corps of Engineers I would suggest a trial first to see if they could handle it. Let them move Hoover dam and Lake Mead a hundred miles west so we don’t have to pump the water so far to get it to California. Once they finish that project we can let them start on New Orleans. Hopefully by the time they drown eveyone in Nevada the free market and nature will have handled most of our problems down here.
Ronnie, with all due respect, you’re being an idiot.
The floodmaps can not predict a levee failure. Can you? Apparently from your story you can’t.
The floodmaps are concerned with rain not human failure. If we just designed for levee breaks everything would be 14 feet high and we wouldn’t need levees.
You may as well accept the fact that these are the rules we now live under. It may be counterintuitive but the new floodmaps will show much of the city with less chance of flooding than the old maps.
If you don’t like that, I’m sorry but I’m not the one that needs to get real.
P
BTW I was in the parish while there was still water in some streets. I was working in a mobile home that came thru the storm unscathed. (freaky feeling)
> So his idea was to create a second channel for the Mississippi, a slow, silt channel.
B Durb, there’s no shortage of ideas like this down here. Trust me.
The question is which one is economically, ecologically and technologically feasable.
Ronnie:
I am so sorry to hear what happened to y’all. You have FAR more right to speak on this issue than I do. My apologies. My Katrina problems pale compared to yours. I will remember you and yours at Mass tomorrow night.
I have not been to St. Bernard since the storm. I confine myself to Lakeview; I cannot bring myself to “sightsee”. I believe that what you have to deal with in Arabi, and what we have to deal with in Lakeview, is very personal and not fodder for gawkers. We have too many gawkers coming by now (they even have guided tours in Lakeview!). There is a boat in the neutral ground near my parents house that we call the “picture boat”. People pull off, get the family out of the car, take a few snaps standing in front of the boat, and drive away. We have even had people stop to dig through my parents trash pile looking for souviners of their trip. People need to know and see what happened, but they need remember that this is not Disaster Disneyland.
As for Baton Rouge, it is where we are, and have been for some time. It is different, but I think you will like it. We do have Mandina’s now – with the original kitchen staff. The turtle soup is as good as ever!! No Rocky & Carlo’s, unfortuantely, but I hear that they are trying to reopen in their old location.
All the best, and a Happy Easter.
Paul:
Before you take it out on Ronnie, please remember what he has been through. If you had been through the same, you’d be pretty damn sore, too. I do not think Ronnie an idiot, nor you. Ronnie does have some contextural points that should be noted. First, The levees were supposed to resist a Cat 3 storm. The part of Katrina that hit New Orleans was a only a Cat 2-3; the system clearly failed east of the Industrial Canal. Just as they did in Betsy. The why is still a matter of conjecture – we do not have all of the facts yet. But Ronnie, like most of the flood victims, has no trust in the levee system anymore. Can you blame them?
Ronnie:
Paul is right about the flood maps. They deal with expected flooding due to reasonably expected weather events, assuming the levees work, not catastrophic events. At a certian level, you can not protect. Take seismic forces (earthquakes): we can design to resist up to a certian point, but after that, there is no reasonable way ro resist the forces. We all know that a 8.5 or 9.0 or 10.0 is going to hit California someday, but that is not the event we design to. We couldn’t afford to build anything. We have to set our limits, and assume some risk that the worst may happen.
>Before you take it out on Ronnie, please remember what he has been through. If you had been through the same, you’d be pretty damn sore, too.
Man I appreciate all that.
>I do not think Ronnie an idiot, nor you.
I didn’t call him an idiot, I said he is being an idiot on this one. World of difference. (to me anyway)
>Ronnie does have some contextural points that should be noted. First, The levees were supposed to resist a Cat 3 storm. The part of Katrina that hit New Orleans was a only a Cat 2-3; the system clearly failed east of the Industrial Canal. Just as they did in Betsy.
OK… You guys probably got here via google news on this story. If you go back in the Katrina archives, I blogged the storm from Memphis and I’ve been doing this for MONTHS.
I explained back in September WHY the Corps kept saying the levees where not “breached” they were “topped.” (and fought the idiots in the comments who had no clue what I was talking about)
Without breaking my arm patting myself on the back, I’ve been WAY WAY WAY out front on this story. Search for “no longer a voice in the wilderness” for just one example.
Actually, read posts titled “Pray II” and search for “riding out katrina in the superdome” and you’ll see I blogged this BEFORE it even happened.
If you go to our search function and type “levee” (or floodwalls) you’ll see I’ve blogged a a few things about them. (just a few 😉
The point being I’m very, very, very well versed in every nuance of the the levee failures. I’ve been leading the charge saying it was an engineering debacle for months. (With all due respect) You don’t need to tell me that the levees failed prematurely. Been there, done that! — About 3 days after the storm.
BTW- Katrina was a Cat 3 when she hit Buras and a CONFIRMED Cat 1 by the time she hit New Orleans. Don’t belive the “This was a freak killer Cat 5” hype. It’s B.S. (check the archives)
>The why is still a matter of conjecture – we do not have all of the facts yet.
Yes and no. We “know” why the levees failed. Are the final reports written? Not yet. But we know. (again, see archives atlthough admittedly I’ve focused more on the floodwalls than the levees to the east)
>But Ronnie, like most of the flood victims, has no trust in the levee system anymore. Can you blame them?
No, not a bit. But as you noted above, the floodmaps and levee failure are different beasts.
Personally, I would not live east of the industrial canal. I grew up on that side the canal and I love it out there (you know the Parish is God’s Country) but short of a concrete hurricane hut on 14 feet piles, it ain’t for me.
— If Ronnie is making the same choice, I’m not mocking him, I’d agree —
But I’m discussing the reality of the way life works down here. Chalmette is being steadily rebuilt, the flood insurance rates those people pay will be based on the floodmaps. That’s all I’m talking about.
Paul:
I’ll make this my last post, and let you have the last word. We are beginning to thrash an expired equine here.
In a nutshell, you and I are in agreement. I see that you were on this months ago. As for my comment about all of the facts not being in, I made that after sitting through several presentations by some of the LSU engineers who are doing the analysis of the failures. Each time, they have revised their hypothesis based on new data – some of which they could not obtain until a lot of debris removal was done. At the 17th Street Canal, they initially surmised that there was overtopping, and that the steel cofferdam panels were not driven in deep enough. Turns out they were in to the design depth, but driven into soils that could not resist the forces being placed on them. Ditto, London Avenue. Initially, overtopping was thought a factor in both, but it was not at the 17th Street Canal (don’t remember what he said about London Avenue). Overtopping was the culprit at the Industrial Canal and at the MGRO. Not a barge or a bomb. I have seen their forensic evidence, and it is very strong. But, as they have warned us each I heard them talk, there is much that we do not know.
And yes, you are right – flood maps and levee breaks are two different things.
All the best, and, again, thanks for taking on this issue.