LABOR TRIBUNE
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Southwestern Illinois Building and Construction Trades Council has joined a coalition of business and civic groups in Madison, St. Clair and Monroe Counties that is trying to persuade federal officials to delay new requirements on the Mississippi River levee that could raise insurance rates so high that it would retard economic development and the jobs related to it… more
BELLEVILLE NEWS-DEMOCRAT
Friday, March 19, 2010
By Mike Fitzgerald
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin has gathered 15 other senators, mostly from Mississippi River states, to look into problems with federal flood maps.
Top officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were asked to meet with the bi-partisan group by Durbin, a Springfield Democrat and the Senate’s assistant majority leader.
The issues senators want to discuss include the lack of communication on the part of FEMA and the Corps; the affordability of flood insurance; and the lack of time and resources to complete flood levee repairs before flood maps are finalized.
The senators had tried to deal with these issues administratively or legislatively, according to the letter sent Thursday to Craig Fugate, FEMA’s administrator, and Jo-Ellen Darcy, the assistant Army secretary for civil works.
“However, the underlying problems with regard to the flood map modernization program have yet to be resolved,” they wrote. “It is our hope that we are able to work together to find solutions to the overarching problems that our constituents are facing.”
Members of the bi-partisan group from nine states include Sen. Roland Burris, D-Illinois, as well as both of Missouri’s senators, Claire McCaskill, a Democrat; and Christopher Bond, a Republican. Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, are also part of the group and all 16 are from states facing river flood map issues.
Since early March, Durbin and U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Belleville, have called on FEMA and the Army Corps to produce the data leading to the determination that American Bottoms flood levees don’t meet federal standards.
Meanwhile, metro-east leaders will continue to lobby on behalf of a bill sponsored by Costello that would prevent the implementation of the new flood maps in regions of the nation that are showing good faith efforts to rebuild their flood protection levees.
The five-year hiatus will, they hope, enable metro-east leaders to upgrade the 64-mile network of Mississippi River levees to the point they can meet federal standards for containing a 100-year flood.
The fear with the new flood hazard maps — which are set to take effect next year — is they will drastically raise flood insurance rates for owners of 150,000 homes and businesses in the flood plain, while also crippling economic development.
ILLINOIS BUSINESS JOURNAL
March 2010
By ALAN J. ORTBALS
When Col. Thomas O’Hara – commander of the St. Louis District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – made his presentation last month to the Southwestern Illinois Flood Prevention District Council, he told the board that they were being held to a new, tougher standard. The Corps, he said, used to build a 30 percent (1.3) safety factor into its designs but has now raised that bar to 60 percent (1.6). This essentially means that a system is designed to handle more load or stress than what it is actually expected to. Such safety levels are routinely designed into systems to handle variations and unforeseen circumstances. “After Hurricane Katrina, we went back and we did a lot of work down at the Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Miss. to look at what happened and we realized that we just didn’t have a high enough safety factor in some specific situations,” said Alan Dooley, public affairs officer for the Corps’ St. Louis District. Dooley says he did not know if the New Orleans system was designed, built and maintained to the 1.3 standard and had failed anyway, or if other issues were responsible. The Corps was pilloried after the New Orleans levee failures. An independent levee investigation team was formed to study the failure and make recommendations for improvement. According to the team’s final report, issued in July of 2006, the failure was in part due to “the poor performance of the flood protection system, due to localized engineering failures, questionable judgments, errors, etc. involved in the detailed design, construction, operation and maintenance of the system.” According to the report, some of these engineering mistakes were related to building levee walls on foundations of peat and building levees out of substandard material. O’Hara laid out repair estimates of $111 million for the Wood River system and $159 million for the Metro East Sanitary District levees to bring these two systems up to the 500-year standard. These figures did not include an additional $30 million to fix the problems associated with the Melvin Price locks and dam area, nor does it include any repairs or modifications that may be needed for the Fish Lake and Prairie DuPont levee systems. Data collection is still ongoing in that area. Preliminary estimates have put the cost of those repairs at about $70 million…more
BELLEVILLE NEWS-DEMOCRAT
Saturday, March 13, 2010
By Mike Fitzgerald
U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Belleville, announced on Friday that he has formed the bi-partisan Congressional Levee Caucus to draw attention to the needs of America’s flood protection levees.
A top priority for the new caucus will be levee certification, as communities across the country are dealing with the effects of current Federal Emergency Management Agency flood remapping.
“Our region is experiencing first-hand the serious ramifications of the flood remapping process,” Costello said, via a press release. “More and more communities are facing the same tough realities of mandatory insurance costs without clear information from FEMA.”
Costello’s partner in forming the caucus is U.S. Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La.
Alexander, whose rural district covers the northeast corner of his home state, is a co-sponsor of H.R. 3415, a measure introduced by Costello last summer to encourage local jurisdictions to upgrade their levees while maintaining current flood maps.
Costello drafted the bill in response to FEMA plans to implement new flood hazard zone maps for Madison, St. Clair and Monroe counties.
The maps, which are scheduled to take effect by January, are based on the assumption that metro-east flood levees are worthless, resulting in soaring flood insurance costs for owners of 150,000 properties in the flood plain.
Metro-east leaders argue the new flood maps, and higher insurance costs, will wreak economic havoc on the region. With the help of Costello’s bill, they want the flood maps delayed for at least five years — enough time, they hope, to upgrade the levees to federal standards.
BELLEVILLE NEWS-DEMOCRAT
Saturday, February 27, 2010
By Mike Fitzgerald
For years, agency had said it had information showing they are unsafe
In a dramatic turnabout, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has acknowledged to U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Springfield, that it does not possess any information as to the worthiness of flood protection levees in Madison, St. Clair and Monroe counties.
This acknowledgment contrasts sharply to FEMA assertions for more than two years indicating the agency had possessed data showing that metro-east flood levees are functionally useless — therefore justifying new FEMA flood zone maps that would lead to sharp increases in flood insurance rates for owners of 150,000 properties in the American Bottoms flood plain.
In a Feb. 24 reply to Durbin’s request for FEMA to turn over all data on the structural integrity of metro-east flood levees, agency Administrator W. Craig Fugate wrote that “FEMA does not independently generate the information you requested. In fact, we have tried to obtain much of this information from a variety of sources but to date have been unsuccessful.”
Fugate said in that letter that federal regulations state that information on levees must be supplied by “the community or other party seeking recognition … of a levee system.”
Les Sterman, the chief engineer of the Southwestern Illinois Flood Prevention District Council, in Collinsville, rebutted Fugate’s claim.
“As far as we know they never asked for it from the levee district,” Sterman said. “They did, however, ask for it from the (U.S. Army) Corps of Engineers, and the Corps of Engineers didn’t give them anything. Because we saw what they gave them, which is nothing.”
FEMA spokeswoman Cat Langel sidestepped questions posed by the News-Democrat as whether the agency had withheld or misled metro-east officials concerning what it knew about local flood levees.
“FEMA’s top priority is the safety of the communities we serve,” Langel wrote in an e-mail Friday.
A central part of the agency’s commitment, she wrote, is “to ensure that people are aware of the natural hazards and risks that exist in their communities, including flooding.”
In December, FEMA officials from Chicago held a series of public meetings in the three counties during which they talked about the agency’s rationale for raising flood insurance rates, Sterman recalled.
“When we met with them, what they said was they did not ask the levee districts (for information),” Sterman said. “They asked the Corps of Engineers.”
Sterman said he was not surprised by Fugate’s acknowledgment the agency does not have any data regarding the worthiness of the levees.
“I would’ve been surprised to hear they had any information,” said Sterman, who, along with metro-east elected officials, is considering whether to file a federal lawsuit to force the FEMA to reveal its flood levee information. These deliberations are taking place after FEMA had refused to respond to requests for the levee data that are contained in federal Freedom of Information Act requests the flood district had filed in early November.
Meanwhile, Durbin on Friday called for a meeting with Fugate and other top federal officials — including U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Belleville — to discuss the lack of information that is necessary to certify five metro-east levees: the Chain of Rocks, Fish Lake, the Metro East Sanitary District, Prairie Du Pont and Wood River.
“Without complete information about the structural integrity of the levees, it would be irresponsible for any agency to certify them as safe or unsafe,” Durbin said in a press release.
FEMA’s letter to Durbin came in response to a Jan. 5 letter from the Illinois senator to FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers calling on them to reveal publicly their data on metro-east levees.
Jo-Ellen Darcy, the Army assistant secretary, replied that several interdependent Illinois levee projects that comprise metro-east levees “have been identified as deficient in their ability to provide the design level of protection. They are in need of rehabilitation and repair.”
Sterman said FEMA’s sharp change of message points out a “fatal flaw” in the flood mapping process — that FEMA can base decisions with severe economic consequences on the absence of information, rather the presence of damaging information.
“The problem is, all the information we have on the levees, including the corps’ annual inspections, show that they’re actually OK,” he said.
ST LOUIS METRO EAST LEVEE ISSUES ALLIANCE
