Nearly 75 years ago, Gilbert White, considered to be the father of floodplain management, argued that “Floods are acts of God, but flood losses are largely acts of man.”
Despite this longstanding knowledge and despite the increase in occurrence and severity of extreme weather events, the structural tools the United States uses to govern flood risk are in need of serious upgrade.
Why is this important? Flooding is the most common and expensive natural disaster in the United States, costing the nation more than $845 billion in estimated losses from flood- and hurricane-related disasters since 2000, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This growing disaster toll has strained the capacity of federal, state and local governments to respond, and amplifies other disasters (i.e. COVID-19). The federal government, using taxpayer dollars, often pays a significant portion of these repair and recovery costs, sometimes paying to rebuild the same school, fire station, road or other structure multiple times.
This increasingly more costly cycle of flood damage and repair is driven in part by the outdated approaches of federal agencies that focus on historical data and fail to account for today’s weather patterns and future risk. Congress should address this problem by directing federal agencies to plan for future risk as they evaluate spending taxpayer dollars in flood-prone areas.
