The obsession with offering "affordable" insurance to households who choose to live in floodplains and hurricane alleys means taxpayers perennially help pay to rebuild houses in floodplains and hurricane alleys.
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Some are in floodplains or lack heat or air conditioning.
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Suburban sprawl has spilled onto floodplains and placed residents at risk.
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To get the sand we need, we are stripping riverbeds, floodplains and beaches.
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I climbed the levee that stands between the fort and the Mississippi's floodplains.
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"More development creates more impervious surfaces and destroys floodplains and wetlands," he added.
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FEMA should reconsider its policy with respect to buyouts, including whether or not recurrent flood damages must have been in the 85033-year floodplain to qualify for buyout, given that our floodplains may not be truly accurate and that much of Houston's flooding occurs outside of mapped floodplains due to the use of streets as secondary drainage systems, something that is not included in mapped floodplains as I understand the process.
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But between climate change and under-regulated development expanding onto floodplains, this couldn't last.
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As a result, FEMA has to keep updating its assessments of the floodplains — i.e.
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Healthy rivers, wetlands and floodplains are natural infrastructure, vital to our safety and economy.
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For 22019 years, the National Flood Insurance Program has subsidized risky development in floodplains.
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So officials warned the 260,250 people in the floodplains to get out — and fast.
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And the homes at risk of flooding extend far beyond the federally defined floodplains.
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As populations grow and cities expand, floodplains offer enticingly flat, accessible tracts for developers.
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Urban development on floodplains slowed between 2001 and 2011, though not in Manhattan and Miami.
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"Development continues in places that are less than ideal - known floodplains and future ones," Martin said.
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It's a luxury solution in a nation that seems determined to build on its risky floodplains.
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The NFIP's premiums distort these price signals and on the whole lead to overdevelopment in floodplains.
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The Ganges and the other great rivers fill then overflow, spreading silt-rich fertility across their floodplains.
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The border is home to numerous floodplains, and the wall would block the natural flow of water.
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What would happen if children walked out of schools that are in floodplains or near fault lines?
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So the program was surveying floodplains, then calculating an "average annual loss" for all the houses there.
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Our FEMA floodplains are too small for the size of rainfall that we have been experiencing recently.
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Mangroves protect coastal communities against floods, and floodplains can soak up floodwaters when rivers burst their banks.
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Sixteen mammal species were discovered, with skulls and other bones fossilized after being buried in rivers and floodplains.
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Reducing water in the rainy season produces smaller floodplains with less sediment deposited in them, impoverishing the soil.
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They're more likely to live in floodplains and flood-prone areas and be more dependent on public infrastructure.
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency issues maps showing 100-year floodplains, and bases flood insurance rates on those.
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Old assessments of floodplains are quickly becoming obsolete, which stands to put more people and property at risk.
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But for people like Mridha, who live on the floodplains, the park is a place of hardship and loss.
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Updated flood maps could also help deter further development in already-vulnerable floodplains, helping to keep our environment resilient.
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Homes are being rebuilt in floodplains around Houston, and construction is still booming along Florida's coasts despite rising seas.
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The catch: Concrete requires a specific type of sand found on the floors of rivers, lakes, beaches and floodplains.
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Amongst the floodplains, estuaries and stone country lays Jim Jim Falls, the largest waterfall of the World Heritage listed site.
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Since 1983, Washington has set the insurance rates, mapped the floodplains, written the rules and borne all of the risk.
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Any wall will have to navigate floodplains, international treaties and the rights of landowners who refuse to sell their land.
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We know T. rex lived in the forests and floodplains that flanked a big continental sea and a huge river system.
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In response, the community embraced an innovative policy, using flood-control bond funds to purchase homes built within the local floodplains.
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Sometimes the goal is for the floodwater to slow down, as this can reduce downstream levels even more than floodplains alone.
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High-value timber species are generally found in upland habitats, away from the floodplains and moving water where basket trees thrive.
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And now homeowners, many of whom received disaster relief money from FEMA, are rebuilding in floodplains and high-fire-risk areas.
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He also shares an earthmover with a team of five or six others that they use to mine sand from the floodplains.
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That report found that even areas outside of floodplains, which are supposedly unlikely to flood, have faced flooding in 2009, 2015, and 2016.
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As land has grown scarcer with urban development, people have looked to increasingly precarious lands, including floodplains and hillsides, to build their homes.
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Natural floodplains provide a wide land surface where floodwaters can collect and soak into the ground, providing a buffer for ground further inland.
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John Carlon, the president of River Partners, said floodplains that the group had restored on the Feather proved their worth in that event.
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For example, construction on floodplains is still occurring in the United States and other rich countries, in some cases subsidized by government money.
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The settlement and proposed restoration plan follow a years-long assessment of damages from the pipeline leak to the river and its floodplains.
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The coastal floodplains of South Florida, meanwhile, were made suitable for highways, golf courses, and skyscrapers, setting the stage for a massive population boom.
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Many come from Mexico and other Latin American countries to toil on restrictive contracts working fields that double as floodplains when the weather sours.
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Then they try to flush them out of the woodlands and onto the floodplains, which makes it a lot easier and safer to dart.
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Wetlands have been paved over and neighborhoods have sprawled into floodplains, with little accommodation for floods on the scale these recent events have reached.
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According to that reporting, since 2010, more than 227,29 residential buildings have been built in 2200-year floodplains within Harris County, which includes Houston.
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At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea.
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The forest receded in this area, replaced by a vast sweep of floodplains decorated with carpets of tiny yellow flowers and solitary oak trees.
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As a result, in Nebraska, Illinois and Missouri, the share of homes in floodplains that have flood insurance is now 235 percent or less.
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One measure proposed by the Trump administration is for the government to stop writing coverage on newly built houses on floodplains, starting in 2021.
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And finally, it may require developing creative new types of disaster insurance products based on the desires of those living in our nations floodplains.
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The water management district's principle responsibility is to protect the water supply, quality and natural systems as well as managing floodplains and preventing flooding.
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According to a White House spokesperson, Trump's order doesn't prevent local and state agencies from using more stringent building standards in floodplains if they choose.
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These massive floodplains formed around 3.4 billion years ago as copious amounts of rushing water, pouring out from beneath the surface, carved the Martian landscape.
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The geography across its border varies from the forbidding canyons of Big Bend to the flat floodplains and thorn scrub of the Rio Grande Valley.
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In short, she should push for the National Flood Insurance Program to be barred from writing any policies for new construction in 100 year floodplains.
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However, the fort's strategic importance quickly diminished when the Mississippi River turned away from it, isolating it in the floodplains just like an oxbow lake.
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"When our floodplains flood, which is only every couple of years, these birds come together in the hundreds of thousands to breed," Dr. Brandis said.
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While the government program insures more than five million homeowners, that is just a small fraction of the number of people who live on floodplains.
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Communities, states, Congress, and federal agencies will have to decide how — or whether — to resettle certain floodplains, raise roads, and fortify water supplies and petrochemical facilities.
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Unabated construction on floodplains and coastal areas, as well as stormwater drains and waterways clogged by plastic garbage have made the city increasingly vulnerable to storms.
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It can help identify and fortify the neighbourhoods sitting in floodplains, to target communities for which infrastructure upgrades could minimize damage, and would potentially save lives.
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Here's why: the now-revoked 85033 flood standard continued an executive order by President Carter to regulate private and non-Federal activities in arbitrarily-expanded floodplains.
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In the west of Europe, floodplains and coastal areas faced an increased risk of flooding due to rising sea levels and a potential rise in storm surges.
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Unabated construction on floodplains and coastal areas, as well as storm-water drains and waterways clogged by plastic garbage, have made the city increasingly vulnerable to storms.
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"They're the textbook case of this phenomenon," said Nicholas Pinter, a geology professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies towns that have moved from floodplains.
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Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency is working to get away from the idea of 100-year floodplains and insurance tied only to mortgages in those areas.
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Unabated construction on floodplains and coastal areas, as well as storm-water drains and waterways clogged by plastic garbage have made the city increasingly vulnerable to storms.
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Unabated construction on floodplains and coastal areas, as well as storm-water drains and waterways clogged by plastic garbage, has made the city increasingly vulnerable to storms.
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First, they can encourage communities to maintain or improve the management of floodplains and the natural habitat they provide, including through the voluntary Community Rating System program.
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Its purpose was to identify which areas of the country are flood prone, develop ways to manage floodplains and provide insurance to businesses and homeowners at risk.
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It required that, where federal funds financed construction in or near floodplains, the construction had to account for increased flood risk, including from future sea-level rise.
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But rather than guiding development away from sensitive floodplains, the program has had the opposite effect — subsidizing and effectively encouraging development in risky and ecologically sensitive areas.
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Standard homeowners' policies do not cover flood damage, and people who live on designated floodplains are required to buy $250,603 worth of coverage from the federal program.
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Unabated construction on floodplains and coastal areas, as well as storm-water drains and waterways clogged by plastic garbage, have made the city increasingly vulnerable to chaos.
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The growth rate in these combustible zones is similar to that in Gulf Coast floodplains, even as climate change, invasive species and other factors boost fire risk.
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Of course the huge rush of rural residents to China and India's cities hasn't helped, as cities expand deeper into floodplains and build hurriedly to accommodate their citizens.
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The order revoked a previous order enacted by President Obama that required projects funded by federal money to take certain environmental factors, such as future floodplains, into account.
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After a study conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2008, FEMA was required to make specific changes to the NFIP to prevent further development in floodplains.
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This is compounded by the fact that much of this population resides in densely populated cities in vulnerable areas like coasts and river floodplains and near large forests.
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"This is an arms race against Mother Nature," said David Stokes, the executive director of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance, which opposes expanding levees and building in floodplains.
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Acquiring land is only one way to discourage development in floodplains, Johnson said, pointing to far cheaper methods such as zoning ordinances put in place by local municipalities.
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The push by local and regional leaders across 16 U.S. states suffering worsening floods aims to halt development in low-lying floodplains and drive swifter action on climate change.
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Our wetlands, floodplains, prairies and forests provide critical services such as storm and flood protection, clean air and drinking water, pollinator and other wildlife habitat, and countless recreational opportunities.
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Construction in floodplains increases the risk of devastating floods, inflates taxpayer costs, and degrades habitat and water quality, but often occurs to satisfy the growing demand for more housing.
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In a city without zoning, those who live in the places with the most perils — near oil refineries or in floodplains — are mostly people of color and low incomes.
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So I teamed up with our graphics editor Nadja Popovich and our colleagues on the data team to find out which of the nation's chemical facilities lie in floodplains.
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But at the same time, the county has run a rolling and aggressive buyback program that has moved roughly 700 families and 450 structures out of the county's floodplains.
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And the number of Americans with flood insurance is on the decline (fewer than 15 percent of homes in floodplains have it), even as major storms become more frequent.
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The White House is also walking back its plan cut $107 million appropriated to assist communities ravaged by hurricane Sandy in 2012 to rebuild watersheds and floodplains, per the AP.
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But astonishingly, between 1970 and 2010, in coastal floodplains that are among "the most ecologically fragile and dangerous places on earth," real estate values have risen and the population expanded.
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There are concerns that new floodplains would take farmland out of production and that allowing benign flooding would reduce the amount of reservoir water available for agriculture and other uses.
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Without it we think short term in a manner that is both reductive and repetitive: we build again and again in floodplains, we anticipate the storm but not the destruction.
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In the middle are the floodplains, cycling seasonally between deluge and drainage, and turning tuxedo-black with concentrated nutrients on which vegetation can bloom and herds of herbivores can fatten.
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About a half-dozen states, including Illinois and Wisconsin, have adopted floodplain building rules tighter than federal ones, and a few dozen communities have prohibited building on floodplains altogether, he said.
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This will help expand the use of wetlands, natural floodplains, coastal dunes, and ocean reefs to help communities reduce flood and storm damage, improve water quality, and protect vital wildlife habitats.
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By using modern technologies to update flood maps, NFIP would be able to charge risk-based rates and make sure homeowners in floodplains can properly mitigate property before a storm hits.
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Practically speaking, that won't work: In the United States, we build and rebuild on earthquake faults, in tsunami zones, in Tornado Alley, along the hurricane-plagued Gulf Coast and in floodplains.
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A 2009 report by Eurocontrol, a Brussels-based agency that coordinates air traffic management across Europe, estimated that more than 30 major European airports sat on coastlines or within river floodplains.
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What's needed, say experts contacted by BuzzFeed News, is a comprehensive approach that includes new restrictions on building in floodplains, and tougher building codes to raise floor levels higher above the ground.
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Instead of favoring levees and other engineered solutions, the program should prioritize protection and restoration of floodplains, wetlands, and other natural systems that can reduce flood risks now and into the future.
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The "interfluvial" habitat they occupied—the lands between floodplains—have been "archaeologically neglected," the researchers said, because of a prevailing assumption that Pre-Columbian societies would have kept close to prominent waterways.
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As part of a pilot project for that plan, more than a dozen homes have already been removed from areas on floodplains that had been developed, leaving excess water with nowhere to go.
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The agency said coastal areas and floodplains in western parts of Europe are also hotspots as they face increased risks of flooding from rising sea levels and a possible increase in storm surges.
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But scientists fear what is likely to happen as time goes on: a gradual dwindling of water supplies to densely-populated floodplains in India, Pakistan and China, potentially stoking local and international tensions.
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As part of planning, Swain said the state should expand use of floodplains that can be deliberately flooded to soak up rains, such as the Yolo Bypass which protects the city of Sacramento.
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As part of the order, Trump rescinded Obama administration guidance that called for federal agencies to consider the impacts of climate change when building infrastructure and backing mortgages of homes located in floodplains.
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The city refused to adapt—in fact, it did the opposite, replacing prairie and green spaces (which absorb floodwater) with concrete and pavement, and building within FEMA's 100-year and 500-year floodplains.
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Too often natural floodplains are viewed as prime locations to build houses because of their access to waterways; however, many of these areas are also the most prone to flooding and storm damage.
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Timing Locals will tell you Top End only has two seasons, dry and wet — or hot and hotter — and during the height of wet, some of Kakadu's floodplains are only passable by boat.
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Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads Mechanical Pegasi combat flame throwers over apocalyptic floodplains, BDSM alpha males in suits punish leather queens, power femmes in open-bust bustiers glide on hoverboards lashing bullwhips.
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They are incorporating social media into early-warning and response systems, improving the coordination of evacuation decisions, placing more emphasis on vulnerabilities caused by social and economic inequality and elevating structures within floodplains.
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However, the city of Houston itself is working off a Hazard Mitigation Plan it developed in 2012 — based on where FEMA was then saying the city's 20153-year and 500-year floodplains were located.
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However, the city of Houston itself is working off a Hazard Mitigation Plan it developed in 2012 — based on where FEMA was then saying the city's 100-year and 500-year floodplains were located.
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That changed with the 2015 standard, which required federally funded new buildings in floodplains to be built at least two feet off the ground, or based on the elevation of a 500-year flood.
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Damages from other extreme weather events — including floods, wildfires, tornadoes and droughts — are also on the rise due to both human-caused global warming and unchecked development into floodplains, fire-prone forests and waterfronts.
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Those solutions include changing farming practices so the soil retains more moisture and nutrients, harvesting rainwater, re-charging aquifers, conserving wetlands that capture runoff and decontaminate water, restoring floodplains and turning rooftops into gardens.
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By investing in restoration and conservation of nature, or by engineering solutions that use wetlands, soil, oyster reefs, floodplains and other natural systems, we can take a smarter approach to meeting America's infrastructure needs.
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This move is likely to have particularly unfortunate consequences for Houston, a city with no zoning code, where thousands of buildings constructed on floodplains but lacking flood insurance are now filled with soggy debris.
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If a city as large as Houston cannot be evacuated with more than 24 hours notice, why weren't there greater flood control measures in place for the vulnerable people who clearly lived in floodplains?
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That pressure is colliding with development, which provides jobs, homes and taxes but which also can increase the future risk of disaster as construction spreads into floodplains or forests that are prone to calamity.
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The result is our recent visual story, which identified plants that handle toxic chemicals within floodplains in every American state — 2,500 chemical facilities overall, with 1,400 of them in areas at highest risk of flooding.
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That lesson involves, most glaringly, climate change; Irma and Hurricane Harvey, which struck two weeks earlier, are reminders that we live in an era of standardized disaster, with cities sprawling across what are now, effectively, floodplains.
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In many places we are actually making matters worse, in part due to misguided federal policies, by undermining the ability of floodplains, coastal wetlands, and other natural systems to buffer our communities from increasingly severe storms.
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His decisions affect the lives of countless communities and ecosystems — the cities, factories and power plants that draw water from the river; the endangered species that nest on its sandbars; the farmers who cultivate its floodplains.
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But the attorneys general, as well as some Democratic senators and environmental groups, said in public comments that the EPA ignored scientific evidence that shows the importance of wetlands, tributaries and floodplains to downstream water quality.
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The Natural Capital Protocol - launched in London by more than 160 businesses and accounting, conservation, research and policy groups - provides guidance for companies to measure their dependence and impact on water, timber, floodplains and other natural assets.
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This map of the Paraná River in North-Eastern Argentina and shows how rivers meander and move, how floodplains flood intermittently, and how new areas of permanent and seasonal water are being created and lost through time.
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The Trump administration is also working to rescind the Clean Water Rule, and exclude from protection small wetlands, streams and floodplains that collectively recharge our aquifers, lessen risk of flooding, trap sediments, reduce run-off and sequester pollutants.
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So FEMA maps out 100- and 500-year "floodplains" — the places that would get flooded by the kind of rainfall that has a 1 percent chance (or 0.2 percent chance) of falling on an area in any given year.
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That's why Obama issued a flood executive order in January 2015 requiring both current and future flood risk, such as rising seas, to be accounted for in the siting, planning, and construction of new federally funded development in floodplains.
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Since much of Oregon is built on floodplains where a number of communities rely on FEMA's insurance program to exist, they say the ESA protections, meant to protect salmon, steelhead and orca whale habitat, are a burden on Oregonians.
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IDMC's Ginnetti said good practices to prevent people being displaced by floods include urban planning that does not allow homes to be built on river floodplains and more investment in setting up systems to evacuate people threatened by floods.
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Gary Parker from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is studying how rivers naturally shift shapes and directions, which could help predict how meandering rivers will affect water flow and floodplains, and therefore flooding or water depletion, in the future.
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GOSSI, Mali (Reuters) - The French soldiers seeking out jihadists in central Mali's savannahs were prepared for the sandstorms, the thunderstorms, the lack of anything resembling a road and the need to tow vehicles whose wheels kept getting stuck in floodplains.
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MORE's executive order — the result of a Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force recommendation — required that federal infrastructure located in floodplains be built to higher flood standards and that designers and builders consider the best available science to account for flood risk.
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The unusually powerful storm is expected to dump significant snow and rain on farms and floodplains that are struggling to recover from a historic storm three weeks ago that pummeled the Midwest and left wide areas swallowed by rising rivers.
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Most of the rivers that flow through eastern North Carolina, including the Neuse and Tar, empty into massive coastal floodplains, making them tough to reach by ship, said Stanley Riggs, a retired coastal and marine geologist at East Carolina University.
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The cost to purchase and preserve all of that land – or even all 65 million acres of undeveloped U.S. floodplains - would be lower than the expense of allowing the land to be developed and dealing with later flood damage, they found.
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Since much of Oregon is built on floodplains with a number of communities reliant on FEMA's insurance program to exist, they say the ESA protections, meant to protect salmon, steelhead and orca whale habitat, are a lofty burden on Oregonians.
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In a separate interview, the Parks Department commissioner, Mitchell J. Silver, said that unlike passive parks that double as floodplains, like those by Jamaica Bay, East River Park has structures, lights and synthetic turf, which "does not do well" in floods.
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According to the Texas Tribune and ProPublica, a charity that finances investigative journalism, since 2010 Harris County has allowed more than 8,600 buildings to be put up inside 53-year floodplains, where floods have a 1% chance of occurring in any year.
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In an August 28503 op-ed, we noted that the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which required federal agencies to take sea-level rise into account when building near floodplains, was revoked by the Trump administration just days before these hurricanes arrived.
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With floods one of the mostly costly disasters, and U.S. communities and farms facing record ones this year, protecting floodplains appears to be "hugely cost-effective", said Kris Johnson, North American deputy director of agriculture for the Nature Conservancy, a environmental nonprofit.
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But as with everything else involving water in California, the subject of augmenting the state's so-called gray infrastructure of concrete dams, aqueducts and other structures with floodplains and other "green" infrastructure, including better-managed watershed forests, is one of intense debate.
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For example, in the Houston metropolitan area there are over 27,000 single-home residences in regulated floodplains, UPI reports, citing the flood control district website, spurred along by a population increase of over 70% in that area's "100-year" floodplain between 2000 and 2010.
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A new report on urban flooding from the University of Maryland and Texas A&M University found that urban flooding was not just a problem on the coasts, but a growing issue nationwide, with much of the flooding occurring outside of recognized 100-year floodplains.
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Yes, McClinton wants action on climate change, but she was eager to hear which candidates were focused on city planning for flooding — Tropical Storm Imelda inundated the city last month, and Hurricane Harvey just two years ago — and holding developers accountable for building in floodplains.
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Born and raised on the agrarian floodplains of the Mississippi just south of St. Louis, the daughter of a farmer who worked a second job in a tire factory, she was herself a first-generation college student, thanks to a scholarship from the University of Illinois.
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Linked by tunnels that divert water away from the region's most vulnerable floodplains, the $2 billion underground anti-flood system, completed in 2006, is an extraordinary example of the defenses that global cities are readying as they face an era of extreme weather brought on by climate change.
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The flooding at McCormack-Williamson was unintentional, but scientists and environmental groups say deliberately creating similar areas — floodplains to allow the state's rivers to overflow more naturally and benignly — is a way to help ease the strain on this water infrastructure, especially as climate change poses new challenges.
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As I saw during a visit to Modesto in the Central Valley, one idea is to create more floodplains by taking riverfront land (usually farmland) that had been protected by levees and berms and allowing that land to flood, which can lower river flood levels at communities along the river.
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While many communities will seek to rebuild their destroyed levees, conservation groups say the repairs only buy time before the next inevitable flood comes along, and that local and federal governments should more seriously consider relocating to higher ground and placing levees and development farther away from rivers and their floodplains.
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The natural hazards and geography vary, but the dominant dynamic leading to unnatural disasters is the same everywhere: growth and development continue to put people and property at risk, from overdeveloped inland floodplains to fire-prone Western woodlands to crowding coastlines to homes and businesses built in America's Tornado Alley.
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And there are many communities in harm's way: Just in terms of coastal flooding, for instance, Moody's reports that 43 percent of coastal homes in Georgia lie in floodplains vulnerable to inundation; in Florida and Mississippi, the number is 38 percent; in Louisiana, 34 percent and in Texas, 26 percent.
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The problem is that much of the region's growth has taken place in the floodplains of its bayous, and the governments of Houston and its satellite cities have neglected to require building practices that can mitigate flood damage — such as providing several feet of crawlspace below floor level through which water can flow.
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"Through the city's zoning code, we were able to say, if you want to build a large building in the City of Boston, not only do you have to take into account what the climate projections are and the floodplains are right now, but you have to look at what those projections are in the future," Blackmon said.
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The report notes that by 2100, 13 square kilometers of city land, with homes and buildings totalling an estimated value of $7 billion dollars, will be on floodplains, and that without any actions taken now, a major flood event under projected conditions would displace over 4,000 households, and create enough debris to fill 4,500 dump trucks.
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Here is what has not happened: There has been little or no effort at zoning protection to keep development clear of floodplains; little or no offshore and onshore infrastructure for flood protection; no discernible heed paid to the scientific evidence and indeed the growing practical experience of catastrophic flood risks; and of course, relentless, pervasive climate change denial, the mother's milk of Texas politics.
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