Floodplain Management

Introduction

What is a Flood?

What is a Floodplain?

Programs

References

The management of floodplains has changed from the traditional structural methods that were used to newer nonstructural methods. These include: land acquistions, easments in rural areas, relocations, elevations, and flood-proofing of flood-prone structures. These methods are not only reducing the risk of damage to homes, businesses, farms and loss of life, but there are helping to restore the natural floodplains and habitats (Christen 1). The fedral government has provided funds that have been put towards these nonstructural methods of mitigation. The fedral government has also created new programs to assist in this process. They include: Emergency Wetlands Reserve Program (EWRP), which is in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS).

"The idea is to make sure that agencies, states, and local communities are working together to fix levees and structures after a flood, but if there's a site where a nonstructural approach would work better than a structural on, we want to work with local land-use goals and ecosystem patterns. We don't want to spend more money to build a new levee in a floodplain area than it cost to just buy some of those properties and put easements on them." Bonnie Galvin, program manager for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget's Water and Power Branch (Christen 2)

More and more larger metropolitan areas are realizing that by haveing surfaces that are impermiable, like parking lots, that they need to create areas for the water from major storm events to go to. If they don't create these areas they see that the water runs off into the streams much faster causing higher peak discharges (Richman1-2).

River Corridor Approach

Along the Iowa River the land has been flooded in the last 28 out of 30 years. Nearly 75% of the landowners have signed on to a program to restore the area back into wetlands and the remaining 25% are to be bought out by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Iowa Department of Natural Resource, or the county conservaton boards. Other than this project Iowa has 11 projects similar to this one that are in the making (Chriten 2).

Fort Collins, CO

The mitigation efforts of Fort Collins taken prior to the massive flood that hit them in 1997 when torrential rains hit recording the largest amounts of rain recorded in their history. Fort Collins took several steps in preparing for the next big flood. They organized outreach programs to make the public aware of the dangers, set local ordinances to regulate development within the floodplain, held flood preparedness and warning activities, acquistion of land in the floodplain, created a drainage system, and created a database containing the local flood and erosion hazards. By taking these precautions the city of Fort Collins was able to reduce the amount of monetary damage and the loss of life (Grimm 2-3).

Tulsa, OK

The geography of Tulsa, being located on the Arkansas River and also having several sever thunderstorms pass through each year makes the city very suceptible to flooding. After being hit by several large floods the city decided that they had to do something about the problem. The city has now invested more than $200 million into programs to help reduce the damages of flooding when it hits. They create both structural and nonstructural comonents, by relocating buildings and homes that are located in the floodplain and they also charge a sromwater utility fee to buildings that would create a higher flood or that could be damaged by a flood. The city has bought out almost 1000 properties and has moved them to a drier location and has turned that land into parks or open spaces (Grimm 2).