May 19, 2010

FEMA Speaks

Ask a simple question: "What is a flood plain?"


"Our experience leads us to advise the public that everyone lives in a floodplain," said Louis Botta, federal coordinating officer for FEMA.

About three sentences later, FEMA says:

FEMA statistics show that homes in a floodplain are 26 times more likely to incur damage from a flood than from a fire during a 30-year mortgage.

Okay Louis, if "everyone" lives in a flood plain, to what are you comparing "homes in a floodplain?"

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This is the sort of thing you run into when your Podunk city council unanimously passes an ordinance to apply for federal flood insurance, a FEMA operation.

Our local gentlemen didn't seem to have a very good sense of what they were voting for, so I thought it would be a kindness to point them to a fact or two. The most disheartening one is that bedding down with the Feds adds one more complete layer of building, zoning, and land-use laws to what ever such gobshitery has been dreamed up and enacted by the local authoritarians.

I may or may not persevere in the research. Reading stuff written in Washington makes my head ache and embeds in my butt a deep sense of fatigue.


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