Floods

Citation

(2007), "Floods", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 16 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2007.07316bag.002

Floods

From Flood Control to Integrated Water Resource Management: Lessons for the Gulf Coast from Flooding in Other Places in the Last Sixty Years

James P. Kahan, Mengjie Wu, Sara Hajiamiri, and Debra Knopman. Occasional Paper of the RAND Gulf States Policy Initiative. ISBN 13-978-0-8330-3984-2, 2006, 68 pp. Free onlinewww.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP164/For each of four major floods, the authors examine the steps taken before and after the events for detection, preparation, first-line response, reconstruction, and compensation. The four floods are the 1948 flood and levee break on the Columbia River in the USA, the 1953 tide and storm surge flooding in The Netherlands, the 1993 flood on the upper Mississippi River in the USa, and the 1998 floods on the Yangtze River in China. Four broad conclusions are offered: disruption of the status quo can create political conditions for social and economic change; clear delineation of roles and responsibilities in advance results in improved outcomes, ignoring history leads to even larger disasters, and an excess of cure (flood control) can be worse than the disease (flood damage).

What the Rapanos-Carabell Wetlands Decisions Mean to Floodplain and Stormwater Managers

Edward A. Thomas, 2006, Free online. pp. 4-5 in News & Views, Vol. 18, No. 4; www.floods.org/PDF/Rapanos_Carabell_10-9-06.pdfIn June, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in a case known as Rapanos-Carabell, which involves the geographic extent of the area that the federal government may regulate as “wetlands” under the Clean Water Act of 1972. This paper from the Association of State Floodplain Managers explores the decision and what it means for floodplain and storm water management.