Killed Flood Protection Rule Two Weeks Ago

Nicholas Pinter
3:03 PM ET

... Just 10 days before Hurricane Harvey made landfall, the White House rescinded one of the most progressive flood-risk management tools on the books, an Obama-era executive order that added caution when building structures in flood-prone areas.

Obama’s order improved flood safety standards of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The NFIP was established in 1968 to provide federally underwritten flood insurance to residents of states and communities that agree to control development in land the government deems prone to flooding. The NFIP and its flood maps are imperfect, but they beat the pre-1968 alternative, which was basically uncontrolled development on U.S. floodplains. How much worse would things be without the NFIP? Much of U.S. floodplain land might look like Houston does today, and Houston’s floodplains would be even worse.

The biggest problem with flood maps in the U.S. is that they are drawn as “lines in the sand”—implying that there is a flood risk on one side and none on the other. That is a false and dangerous message. The best way to approach a line on a flood map is like seeing a poisonous snake: Don’t panic, but stay well clear ...

http://fortune.com/2017/08/30/trump-removes-flood-protection-laws-obama-houston-harvey/