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

The 1970s and 1980s: The Flood Insurance Era 43
hazard areas and regulating coastal flood hazard areas. Like the first volume, it contained
draft regulations, dealing with subdivision regulations and regulation of coastal flood
hazard areas. A number of states and localities also used the draft regulations.
An interagency work group developed Guidelines for Implementing Executive
Order 11988 – Floodplain Management, issued by the WRC in February 1978. The
report was designed to assist federal agencies in the preparing regulations and procedures
for implementing the order. Utilizing an eight-step decision-making process, the
document spelled out ways governmental agencies were to avoid supporting, directly or
indirectly, floodplain development whenever a practicable alternative existed. The report
also:
• adopted the 1 percent annual chance flood (also referred to as the “Base Flood” by
the NFIP) as the minimum level of flooding to be used by a community in its
floodplain regulations,
• defined the regulatory floodway as the river channel or watercourse and adjacent land
areas to be reserved in an unconfined and unobstructed manner in order to allow the
discharge of the base flood, and
• adopted the one-foot criterion as the permissible limit of increase in the water surface
elevation of the 1 percent annual chance flood.
Fifty-five federal agencies came under the purview of the Executive Order. The
WRC, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the FIA oversaw implementation.
Most agencies adopted implementing measures within a few years, but a few took more
than a decade, citing internal conflicts with other mandates.
Around 1980, the WRC contracted with Kusler to prepare a report to update and
supplement the two earlier volumes on Regulation of Flood Hazard Areas to Reduce
Flood Losses. The report emphasized the lessons drawn from the floodplain management
experiences of the 1970s and included new directions for the 1980s. It focused on state
and local programs, including innovations that could exemplify effective future floodloss
reduction. The work used surveys of state and local regulations and court decisions
from the previous decade to document progress and identify problems. It included a
number of state statutes and case study profiles for some 150 communities with
innovative floodplain management programs. One chapter even addressed the use of
natural resource systems as effective hazard mitigation measures. The Natural Hazards
Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
published, in two special publications, 110 the main report’s appendices documenting the
survey of state and local floodplain management programs. The third volume of
Regulation of Flood Hazard Areas to Reduce Flood Losses was prepared at the time of
110 Bloomgren, Patricia A., Strengthening State Floodplain Management, (Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, Special Publication
3, 1982); Kusler, Jon A., Innovation in Local Floodplain Management, A Summary of Community Experience, (Natural Hazards Research and Applications
Information Center, Special Publication 4, 1982).