"It’s Getting Harder to Figure Out Whether You Live in a Flood Zone or Not"

 

The article I chose to go with for my second blog is “It’s Getting Harder to Figure Out Whether You Live in a Flood Zone or Not.” from the Wall Street Journal. I thought this article relates perfectly to our class because it goes over the importance of having up to date weather data for forecasting future flood zones.

 

One of the main points of the article is trying to make is that outdated federal flood maps are leaving millions of U.S. homeowners unaware of their true flood risk. While FEMA’s maps list about 8 million properties as high-risk, the article includes a private model that estimates “another nearly 13 million properties outside the zones with the same level of flood risk.” Another thing they point out, which doesn’t help with forecasting flooding, is that the government’s maps are often 10 or more years old and rely on historical data.” In the article they detail this as significant because these outdated maps fail to reflect changing realities like heavier rainfall and urban drainage failure. An example they use in the article is from a Chicago homeowner who states, “’That is what they say: We are in a no-flood zone’” despite having repeated basement floods. Like we’ve discussed in class, and as they mention in the article, this makes it harder for homeowners to be insured when flooding happens, especially when they’re not considered to be in a flood zone. The article further points out that attempts to update or expand flood zones face resistance and that, according to a federal advisory council, “it can take six years for FEMA to nail down flood-zone boundaries when it should ideally take two.”

 

I ended up choosing this article because it perfectly relates with what we’ve been talking about in class. One of the ways I thought it related with our class is why we’re using tomorrow.io’s data. Like they said in the article, the current data we’re using to predict all of our weather data, not just for flooding, is outdated because it gather data from everywhere around the world and it isn’t as up to date as it is from tomorrow.io. If we were to update these models with this data today, it makes me question if the number of homeowners in flood zones would increase.

 

In class, we also went over how to graph these types of models. In relation to this article, it makes me wonder what categories these people would fall under for flood risk, like did for Ashville. For instance, would all of these people be at high risk? How many people are we missing that aren’t at high risk, but can be at risk in the future? All of these numbers can impact the lives of real people, and it’s sad to know that many of them aren’t even aware of it. Reading this article makes me wonder what other things American will be at risk to in the future once this forecasting data gets updated.

Jaiden Davey

Article: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/lood-zone-risk-maps-15da3709?mod=climate-environment_news_article_pos1