Wet Bank Guide

The announcement today of new flood advisory maps effectively condemns tens of thousands of homes on the New Orleans area, and seems makes it official that the levees can't be relied upon in calculating flood protection.

The advisories will require homes built slab-on-grade to be elevated 1-3 feet if they are damanged more than 50% to qualify for future flood insurance, which will likely elevate the cost of reconstruction or renovation far beyond payouts for flood-insured homes, even including the mitigation payments that will pay a small part of the cost of elevating homes.

In a latter concession to some home owners, which the Times Picayune says was targeted at older residents, some homes might be allowed to rebuild or renovate at current elevations, but would have to be elevated when they are sold in the future. While this might allow some residents to return, it would effectively confiscate the value of the homes, which could not be sold without being elevated.

The target of 1-3 feet seems odd, unless one assumes this incorporates additional funding for levee armoring. This would appear to imply that, with the approval of additional funds for levee armoring, the city will end up with a Category Three system susceptible to overtopping. It is also the amount of water we could wind up with in some neighborhoods with gated drainage canals in a significant tropical storm.

Federal recovery czarina Donald Powell also announced today that the White House would request $2.5 billion "to improve levees", presumably the funds requested by the Corps for armouring the levees so they could be certified by FEMA. Without the additional funds, FEMA flood maps would be drawn as if there were no protective levees. That additional funding would indicate that FEMA is making assumptions that we have survivable Cat 3 levees.

This seems, from a distance, to be an eminently reasonable decsision. It is not

Currently, FEMA may provide grants of up to $30,000 to elevate homes, but elevating a slab-on-grade home can cost twice that amount. In the Ninth Ward, where may lower-middle-class black homeowners did not carry flood insurance and just barely qualified for mortgages, reconstruction will likely be impossible.

In much of the rest of the city, this may be the decision that tips the scale against rebuilding, as it could add as much as $50,000 above and beyond any assistance grants to the cost of reconstruction, or more for rebuilt homes, pricing many survivors out of the local housing market.

The ugly arithmetic is laid out here in a Times-Picayune article headlined "Future of slab house construction in question." Kinch of Building Big Easy explains how this will likely play out in an excellent post here. To extend his thoughts, one of two things can happen. The city can start ramping down the damage estimates and face charges of being "corrupt" and "crooked" and cheating the system.

Or we can abandon Lakeview and Gentilly, New Orleans East and St. Bernard, except for lakefront enclaves for the weathly who can afford the new elevations, which is essentially what Mr. Powell announced today.

In a single day, Bush and Powell and FEMA have done what Osama bin Laden only dreams of: they have wiped off the map a vast swath of a great American city.


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