Ediger said:
>It's important to remember that flood plains cannot be demarcated with any
>real precision anyway.
A few other factors are also equally if not more important than the ones
Gill mentioned. One is that as impervious cover increases due to development
in a watershed, the frequency and severity of flood events increases.
Hundred-year flood plains may become 25-year flood plains, etc. Bureaucracy
will never catch up to that until an area is completely built out, if ever.
Climate change will also likely alter flood patterns, one way or the other.
Some areas will get more rain, while others will get less. No one can predict
that, but it is already happening. Most insidious, though, is the idea, so
prevalent in Texas, that no one can tell you what you can and cannot do with
your land (the concept of "taking"). In some paces landowners complained that
flood plain designations were hurting the value of their land, and actually
lobbied successfully to get them redrawn less conservatively. Talk about
caveat emptor...
Mark Minton
