Article by Oliver A. Houck
Across the Mississippi River from the City of New Orleans State Route 45 runs from the west bank about a dozen miles to the edge of Lake Salvador, where it ends. Below the lake are marshes leading to Barataria Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Property along Route 45 rests only inches above water level, on natural levees and recent fill which slope quickly into bogs, ditches, and wet palmetto sloughs. The earth sinks of its own weight. Two miles before Route 45 reaches Bayou Lafitte, a cluster of live oak trees stands on tangled root systems several feet above the ground, living testimony to where the land surface was once, and is now. On this doubtful terrain—wetland, sinking, and wide open to the Gulf of Mexico—are new subdivisions with such visionary names as ‘Oak Ridge,’ ‘Highland Street,’ and ‘Mount Rushmore Drive.’ These same names in the California Desert would indicate the prevailing sense of humor. In South Louisiana they indicate an attitude about flood control that has had more sober consequences.
Flooding is the most frequent and the most costly natural catastrophe in the United States, if not the world. Nine of every ten natural disasters in this country are flood-related. Some seven percent of the nation's lands lies within floodplains, yet a disproportionately large amount of our population and development has located there. As the investment has increased, so have the losses from rising waters.
No state in America is more familiar with flood losses than Louisiana, which sits on the Gulf of Mexico at the receiving end of waters draining the entire Central United States. In an average year, one-quarter of the surface area of Louisiana is covered by meandering rivers, bayous, sloughs, swamps, lakes, and fresh-water, brackish, intermediate, and salt marsh. Every spring these waters rise. Strong rises can cause flooding for miles around, for the adjacent land is often no more than inches above the water table. Fifty miles from the Gulf lies the City of New Orleans, in places only two feet above mean sea level. The development of New Orleans and much of South Louisiana is a study in the very defiance of water. As long as development was restricted to the natural levee ridges, which tended to be higher than the outlying lands, flood losses could at least be limited by levees, raised buildings, and the limited scope of the development itself. With more intensive development, however, investments of every kind have moved onto the floodplain. Consequently, in spite of more than half a century of continuing federal construction of levees and flood control projects and three centuries of local and private works, Louisiana's flood damages continue to lead the nation. For these reasons Louisiana provides an acid test of the nation's newest program to address flooding in a comprehensive way.
The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) responds to flood losses in two fashions. First, the program makes affordable insurance available to individuals and businesses in flood hazard areas. Second, the program requires participating local governments to regulate future development of their high-hazard areas in order to reduce future damages when the waters next rise. This Study first describes the evolution of the NFIP and Louisiana's particular stake in its success. The next sections present research on the execution of the program in specific Louisiana regions and communities, illustrating modest successes and more-than-modest problems in its implementation. For a separate indication of the program's performance, the Paper examines its impact on federal disaster relief. The Study then considers the emerging problem of enforcement and the extent to which floodplain ordinances give rise to duties and liabilities. The resolution of this latter issue, which, by no coincidence, has first arisen in Louisiana, may determine the success of the program nationwide. The conclusion offers suggestions for improving the NFIP that appear necessary if it is to remain economically and politically viable.
About the Author
Oliver A. Houck. David Boies Chair in Public Interest Law, Tulane University School of Law.
Citation
60 Tul. L. Rev. 61 (1985)