Do we really need a better system tho? I've never lived thru a hurricane or had to evacuate due to one, but watching tv from afar and it seems pretty obvious to me that if one comes, you leave. Doesnt matter the wind speed or the predictions or the size of it. All of them cause floods. Why don't people who live in those areas see it the same way?
I think the reasons are complex. The big driver in this is the flooding. I can tell you the reasoning. There is a strong temptation to try and defend your property from water to the last reasonable moment.
If your house blows down or the roof blows off, you will almost certainly have good insurance coverage. Your mortgage company will have insisted on it for one thing. Everybody is at least under insured for flood damage, and worse data shows most have no coverage against flood. It is not required unless you are in the 100 year flood plain, and I have already explained how useless that is. If you are well outside the 100 year flood it is likely flood insurance will not even be available to you. With these weather events more and more are getting flooded out, well outside the 100 year corps flood lines. So flooding really tends to wipe people out financially. SBA loans are usually made available, but they have to be paid back as well as the original mortgage. When I was flooded in a flash incident in 1979, Federal Flood paid better than it does now. But I still needed a small SBA loan on top of my mortgage to get the house habitable.
That was quite an incident. The power went out, and phones, no mobiles then. I did manage to get into the builder's trailer next door and phone the emergency center. Then I had a real Monty Python type conversation with the command center. They denied we were flooded and accused me of having put them on. I repeatedly described the scene and need for assistance. They said "no all the flooding is at River Side, no flooding where you are, you just have a bit of seepage!" We got no official assistance. We had to wait until the builder, building the house next door. turned up. My wife and I with four children, the youngest a baby, evacuated in the bucket of his front end loader with the dog swimming behind. Anyhow the point is flood is a mega stress on multiple levels.
The flood in Grand Forks of 1997 was a massive event. I fought with all my might not to get flooded again and the neighborhood. Most of the town was not lucky. Of course there are never enough contractors. So people lived in FEMA trailers in their drive ways, where they learned to rebuild their homes. The vast majority of homes were rebuilt DIY, for financial reasons and lack of professional help. The thing that staggered me is how quickly the people brought the city back and the surrounding areas. This all achieved while people had to hold down their regular jobs. Minot ND went through the same thing with the Souris river flood of a few years ago from massive snow melt in Saskatchewan.
Floods are a huge issue and devastating on many levels.
In this country we need much more buy outs and getting people permanently out of harms way and intelligent flood control and abatement engineering. With the later in the US there is a big problem as the formula the Corps have to use is not fit for purpose. The ratio of flood mitigation cost versus property and infrastructure protected does not in any way strike a reasonable balance. The cost always comes out too high, (probably because the corps wants and easy life) and the cost of rebuilding grossly underestimated. In my view the Corps need getting out of this and as much as possible returned to local control.
Manitoba really shows the way, using bold flood protection engineering, raising structures out of flood plains and abatement. They are also very good at engineering on the fly in crisis. Like building an emergency diversion in that Souris flood that drains into the Assiniboine and threatened Winnipeg. The diversion from Portage La Prairie to Lake Manitoba reached capacity. So they dug an emergency channel from the Hoot and Holler Bend on the Assiniboine to the Red River. That is quite a long way, and I think at least five farmsteads were bulldozed, but Winnipeg was saved in the nick of time.
So you can see the temptation to try and protect property from flood. The potential financial disaster and the inconvenience are just massive. Anyhow that is what I have observed, and more, about flood events.
