Report Calls for Reform of Army Corps, FEMA Flood Insurance Program

Washington, D.C. — As Congress considers a massive new water projects bill, a new report released shows how flood risk is increasing because of poorly designed and managed federal flood-control projects, damage to coastal wetlands and global warming. The report by leading national environmental organizations Environmental Defense and National Wildlife Federation touches on several issues currently under debate in Congress as it considers passage of a $15 billion water projects bill, the Water Resources and Development Act (WRDA). The full House and Senate will likely vote on the bill soon after Congress returns from its April recess.

“We learned from Hurricane Katrina that our federal flood-control policies are broken and putting lives at risk,” said Jennifer Kefer, principal author of the report and a consultant for Environmental Defense. “We found that even as the Army Corps of Engineers has spent $123 billion on flood control projects since the 1920s, flood damages in real dollars have tripled. Because global warming is already leading to more severe storms, the time has come to ensure that flood prevention measures take people out of harm's way instead of putting people in danger."

The report shows how global warming is increasing flood risks around the country. In coastal areas, where half of the U.S. population lives, rising sea levels increase damage from storm surges. In the Atlantic, warming ocean temperatures have doubled the destructive potential of hurricanes and the number of Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes over the last 30 years. Inland, global warming will lead to stronger storms and convert snow into rainfall, which likewise increases flooding. The new report focuses on a few vulnerable areas in particular, including:

• New York City, a peninsula whose citizens don’t usually think of themselves as coastal residents. Global warming is causing rising ocean temperatures, increasing the risk of hurricanes along the entire Atlantic coast. Four of New York’s five boroughs are islands, it is surrounded by 1,500 miles of coastline, and many of its emergency exit routes are tunnels whose entrances are built less than 10 feet above current sea levels, leaving the city vulnerable to increasingly powerful storms.
• Coastal Louisiana, where much of the natural hurricane buffer provided by wetlands has been destroyed as a result of poorly designed manmade projects, including levees and navigation canals. More than 1.3 million acres of wetlands, forest, and marshes – an area larger than the state of Delaware – have disappeared since the 1930s. All of the levees that collapsed during Hurricane Katrina were exposed to open water, while all those levees buffered by wetlands survived. Yet wetland restoration efforts continue to move slowly, and it remains uncertain whether new levees will be constructed in densely populated areas and if those levees will have the effect of encouraging new development on vulnerable land.

“Global warming has raised the stakes and we can no longer afford to allow politics to guide federal flood-control policy,” said Lisa Moore, a scientist in the Climate and Air Program at Environmental Defense. “We need to fix our priorities, and fund critical repairs now.” The report calls for changing the criteria for evaluating Corps projects so we can move taxpayer dollars where they are most needed and stop encouraging development in flood prone areas. It also calls for better environmental standards and independent, expert review of Corps projects to de-politicize the system. Environmental Defense and National Wildlife Federation support incorporating these critical reforms in WRDA.

The full report is available here.