“Our hope is that the realization of the substantial flood risk our country faces today and how it’s changing in the future is finally going to be understood,” First Street founder and executive director Matthew Eby said.FEMA established that the effective date for the new Broward County flood maps was August 18, 2014. The median income for Black households, meanwhile, decreased to $30,000.īut many times a disaster occurs and there’s no official assessment of the aftermath. By 2013, white people in New Orleans were doing better than ever-their median household grew 40 percent to $60,000. The textbook example of this is 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which caused $125 billion in damage and killed over 1,200 people. “Richer people have the political clout to lobby the government,” said Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida who will be studying the First Street data to see if federal flood prevention money is distributed equally. When water recedes, wealthier communities often have an easier time accessing government relief assistance than poorer ones. Those disasters can then make social inequalities even worse. Like the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately affected Black people, flooding disasters linked to climate change are “revealing events that show the underlying disparities and vulnerabilities that were already there,” said Tate. “I don’t know whether we’ll get anything from it or not,” Welch told the Charleston Gazette-Mail in 2018. People like 89-year-old Imogene Welch were forced to spend years in public housing after that disaster waiting for assistance from the federal government. West Virginia also has an above average poverty rate, which makes it harder to rebuild from disasters such as the catastrophic 2016 floods that killed 23 people. Even worse, a resilience office created to help manage the risks of the state’s narrow valleys which funnel torrential rains into communities “is barely functional,” according to NPR affiliate WKMS: “It has one employee.” Nearly one-quarter of its properties are exposed. The state with the greatest proportion of its properties currently at substantial risk of flooding isn’t even on a coastline: West Virginia. “We have these histories that create these places within cities that have lower opportunities and then many of these places are often more exposed to flood hazards, and when flood disasters come they recover more slowly,” said Eric Tate, an associate professor at the University of Iowa who is one of roughly 100 researchers now studying the social, economic, and political implications of the First Street data. This has unsettling implications for the city, where according to a separate study, 87 percent of flood assistance claims come from low-income communities of color where housing is older and denser and the sewer system is less well-maintained. “And also their maps are highly politicized,” said Porter, referring to the pressure FEMA sometimes receives from community members and local legislators to downplay the risk designating areas as being at high-risk for flooding can decrease property values and hurt development.įirst Street’s arguably more comprehensive model, which was developed with scientists from Columbia University, MIT, and other prominent research organizations, had other surprising findings.Ĭhicago currently has 77,212 properties at substantial risk, which makes it third only behind Cape Coral and Los Angeles, the study says. Even the most current FEMA maps rely mostly on historical data, which might not reflect the rapidly changing rainfall patterns, sea levels, and other risk factors caused by our warming climate. flood risk than the federal government is because potentially 75 percent of FEMA flood maps are out of date. One reason that First Street calculates a much higher level of U.S. First Street calculates that the true number is 451,700-2.2 times higher. FEMA estimates that 205,700 properties are at substantial risk of flooding in Illinois. For many areas, however, the risks are much larger than most people assume.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |