Ideas from Oklahoma can help NC plan for future of increased flooding

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— Hurricanes, storms and even excessive high tides routinely bring flooding to eastern North Carolina. It’s an area where water is rising, and so is the population.

“This is a really complicated mix,” says Dr. Gavin Smith, professor of Landscape Architecture at North Carolina State University. “What are we going to do to remedy these problems where people are continuing to move into the coastal zone and into flood prone areas?”

Smith is joined in that question by county planners and emergency services directors around the country.

“There’s a new normal, things are changing,” Smith says. Climate change means “we’re gonna, we’re actually gonna have to re-calibrate our models.”

Smith believes current flood modeling doesn’t take in account the long-term effects of climate change. He says planners are already making huge mistakes. “In New Orleans, we spent $15 billion to rebuild the New Orleans levee system. It’s already out of date. In climate change, the 100-year flood is going to be different.”

It’s that difference where Smith thinks planners need to concentrate.

“There is no simple solution. Maybe that’s the obvious answer. So I would argue that we’ve got to look at it on multiple fronts,” he says.

First, he says, is to look at federal flood insurance, something the government subsidizes so that people will buy it.

“Since the rates are low, people are buying flood insurance in high-hazard areas and offering some level of protection.” Smith says that level of protection is having the opposite of the desired outcome. “So in some ways, it incentivizes the development in these high-hazard areas.”

Smith wants to see a change at the federal level. “We need to change the National Flood Insurance Program, and we need to change post-disaster aid. In that sense, the Flood Insurance Program needs to move towards actuarially sound rates that reflect risks that send a signal to people who have flood insurance, who purchase flood insurance, that that’s a dangerous place to be at.”

Next, Smith recommends a re-evaluation of flood prone areas and getting people out of harms way.

“After hurricanes Fran and Floyd and Irene, and now Matthew and Florence, we’ve done large-scale buyouts of flood-prone properties,” he said. Those buyouts generally use federal grants to pay for the property. “As of today, I believe there’s about 7,000 homes that have been bought out in, you know, in between ’96 and current time,” Smith explains.

Pender County along the North Carolina coast just announced its latest series of buyouts.

“This is the realization of what allowing development in risk areas can produce,” says Kyle Breuer, planning and community development director for the county.

Breuer is standing in front of a home sitting on pylons more that 16 feet above the normal level of the nearby northeast Cape Fear River. Still, he says, flood waters from Hurricane Florence made it into the home’s first-floor living room.

Pender County will buy and demolish more than two dozen homes in this round of buyouts.

“Nothing will be will be built here,” Breuer says of the land where the house is built. “We have deed restrictions that go with the land. It goes into county ownership.”

However, Smith says buyouts don’t work by themselves. “There is continued rapid development in floodplains and barrier islands that are flood prone. And so we don’t know, on the aggregate, if we’re buying out 7,000 homes and say, you know, another X number of homes are being built, we may not be making a difference in the aggregate.”

Smith points to land-locked Oklahoma for some guidance.

While Tulsa doesn’t deal with sea-level rise, they have had major flooding from rain events and the Arkansas River leaving its banks. The response to the flooding has been comprehensive.

“Not only did we implement strict building codes as to where you could build and how you could build in a floodplain, but we created master drainage plans for all of the creeks and streams in our community,” said Joseph Kralicek, executive director of Tulsa Area Emergency Management. “We just decided enough is enough and we were going to address it,”

Tulsa County also created a storm water mitigation fee that’s tacked on to water bills to help pay for the programs.

“As a result, we have some of the cheapest flood insurance in the entire country, despite having a history of major flooding, because we have implemented these procedures,” Kralicek said.

The benefits go beyond storm clean-up. “It actually has made it cheaper for us to have home ownership here in the community, as well as to be able to prepare for and prevent those disasters,” he said.

Smith believes North Carolina needs to adopt that same attitude. “We’ve got to come up with some remedy, some ideas, to what we should be building. What is the right design standard, in an era of climate change, and there’s still great uncertainty, how to do that,” he said.

The only thing that is certain, Smith says, is that the problem will only get worse if not addressed. “There’s no doubt that climate change is real. It’s happening. It’s already here.”