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

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The Nation’s Responses to Flood Disasters: A Historical Account
By the end of 1995, most of the agency representatives on the task force had
retired from federal service, including Frank Thomas who had provided sound leadership
and direction. Thus, the task force lacked continuity and follow-up mechanisms for its
recent work, including the recommendations from the 1994 report. In an effort to
consider and implement the recommendations, FEMA convened a group of about 40
nationally recognized experts at the ASFPM’s’ annual conference in Little Rock,
Arkansas, in May 1997. FEMA prepared a report on the forum, 162 but no action has been
taken on the 1994 recommendations. In addition to problems of continuity in leadership,
the Unified National Program for Floodplain Management has traditionally suffered from
lack of high-level attention from presidential administrations. No entity exists to act
upon the report’s recommendations and those of the national assessment.
THE GREAT FLOOD OF 1993
The 1993 flood in the upper Mississippi and lower Missouri River basins from
mid-June through early August provided sobering evidence that the nation had yet to
reach an accommodation between Nature’s periodic need to occupy her floodplains and
their present human occupancy and use. The flood reached record levels at many
locations within these basins. Various sources attempted to assign recurrence intervals
(e.g., a “500-year” flood) to the flood, but they were subject to considerable error because
of the complex and widespread nature of this event, the short historic data record upon
which to base an analysis, changing observation methods, and the difficulty of assigning
flow rates and elevations to past historic events. Although labeled by various media as
the “flood of the century,” the 1927 flood on the lower Mississippi (see Chapter 2, “A
Period of Floods and Acts”), was the greatest flood disaster in our nation’s history in
terms of overall human suffering and misery. A comprehensive evaluation of the 1993
flood is contained in a book published in 1996. 163 Table 1 compares the two floods.
No source prepared a final account of the costs/losses from the flood. In remarks
delivered several years after the flood, Gerry Galloway stated “the flood is over. No one
now cares.” 164
162 Report on the Forum on the Unified National Program for Floodplain Management Goals, (Federal Interagency Floodplain Management Task Force, 1997).
163 Changnon, Stanley A., ed., The Great Flood of 1993: Causes, Impacts and Responses, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
164 Galloway, Gerald E., National Flood Policy, Progress Since the 1993 Floods, (paper delivered at the Association of State Floodplain Managers Annual
Conference, San Diego, CA, 1996).