This should be required reading for everyone who can’t understand how so many people didn’t have flood insurance in and around New Orleans (from USAToday, my emphasis):
WASHINGTON — Bowing to demands from news organizations, the Army Corps of Engineers revealed the locations Thursday of 122 levees nationwide that are so poorly maintained they could fail in a major flood.
Some of the substandard levees protect densely populated areas, such as Springfield, Mass., Albuquerque and Sacramento. Many others are in rural areas, where they shield valuable farmland but relatively few people.
Maj. Gen. Don Riley, director of civil works for the corps, said he does not know how many people live near the levees or what the required repairs might cost. He said communities have one year to fix the problems.
If a levee’s deficiencies are not corrected, people living nearby might have to buy flood insurance.
Once these levees were built, the community was responsible for maintaining them, and evidently the maintenance has been imperfect.
But I need to point out here that folks living under the protection of the levees don’t currently have flood insurance for one reason: they’ve been told they’re safe because of the levees.
And that’s exactly how the New Orleanians understood the situation.
NOLA’s residents knew (know) that their city was vulnerable to torrential rains, and that water could back up into the streets and yards from the canals… but rainstorms happen there all the time. The streets flood; the city survives.
The flood plain maps were drawn in response to the city’s elevation and its corresponding risk from rain events — not because anybody thought the levees would fail.
These communities are working under the assumption — as was NOLA — that the levees were built correctly. Given that all these levees were designed and built by the same Army Corps of Engineers, that’s not a safe assumption.
So — where’s the outcry about all these folks without flood insurance? And if when these levees fail, will the nation point its sanctimonious finger and say: Fools! You should never have lived there?