The Nation's Responses To Flood Disasters: A Historical Account

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The Nation’s Responses to Flood Disasters: A Historical Account
localities made the list. The following year, the Corps authorized the creation of a
Floodplain Management Services (FPMS) Branch in the Planning Division of the Office
of Chief of Engineers. George Phippen, a geographer with considerable experience in
water resource planning, was appointed branch chief.
THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY’S ROLE
Historically, the USGS has been actively involved in flood issues and problems.
Flood data are documented in a multitude of USGS observations, reports, and
publications. Starting in the mid-1950s, the agency played an important role in
developing procedures still used for estimating flood risk at a particular site.
The USGS was also involved in early flood inundation mapping efforts at the
national level by helping to initiate the change from reporting only elevations and
discharges of floods to publishing more interpretative information, such as areas covered
by floods of selected frequencies. For instance, in reporting data on the floods of 1959 in
Ohio, the USGS adopted for the first time, flood-inundation maps as another means of
depicting flood information. Publishing flood-inundation maps delineating boundaries of
inundated areas, providing water surface profiles, and showing flood-frequency relations
became a standard means of reporting about specific floods. 70
In 1954, USGS employee Walter Langbein designed a report format consisting of
a map with pertinent text in the margins. This report became Hydrologic Investigations
Atlas No. 1 (HA-1). The successful format was repeated when HA-14 “Floods at
Topeka, Kansas” was published in 1959, the first of a series of flood atlases for that area.
A second flood atlas, HA-39, “Floods near Chicago Heights, Illinois,” followed in 1960.
The third flood atlas published in 1961, HA-41, “Floods at Boulder, Colorado,”
summarized results of a special study of Boulder Creek at Boulder, Colorado, in which
areas inundated by floods of several frequencies were constructed synthetically from past
records and physical surveys of the flood plain.
Interest in the flood maps grew, and cooperative programs with the USGS to map
metropolitan areas rapidly increased in the early 1960s. Following the 1959 flood, the
Ohio Legislature appropriated funds to finance a cooperative agreement with the USGS
to prepare flood atlases for the 12 cities that had suffered the most severe flooding. After
HA-39 was published in 1960, the Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Planning
Commission entered into an agreement to cooperatively finance a flood-inundation
mapping project for six counties in northeastern Illinois, involving the preparation of
flood atlases for 43 7.5-minute quadrangles. The project was later expanded, and 31
additional atlases were completed by 1973. By the end of 1966, USGS had prepared 69
flood atlases at sites in 17 states.
70 Hudson, H. H. and J. S. Cragwell, Jr., A History of the Water Resources Division, U.S. Geological Survey, (vol. VI, 1996).