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Cherokee
County, North Carolina, gets a FIRM grip on planning for
future floods
The recreational vehicle in Vengeance Creek at a 45-degree
angle and up to the tire in mud
A blow to
the pride of the Tennessee Valley Authority
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Murphy, N.C., Jan. 29, 2008
–The program now underway by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency to draw accurate U.S. floodplain maps
places this state in the forefront of better planning for
deadly and destructive flooding.
“North Carolina is the only state that has assumed
responsibility from FEMA for updating floodplain maps,”
according to Mark Stafford of the North Carolina Floodplain
Mapping Program.
Callie Moore, executive director of the Hiwassee River
Watershed Coalition explains: “FEMA is only able to produce
2-3 new floodplain maps per state per year and their
schedule often gets redirected after large storm events in
order to prioritize more flood-prone areas across the
nation. But, floodplain boundaries change (get wider and
narrower) based on development and other human activities
that alter the hydrology of a drainage area and it’s
critically important that we know where the most susceptible
areas in our communities are.”
“After Hurricane Katrina inundated most of the eastern
half of the state, much of which wasn’t shown on existing
maps to be located in the 100-year floodplain, North
Carolina adopted legislation to re-map the whole state.”
Ms. Moore added that the state was working its way east to
west with the new floodplain maps but prior to the remnants
of Hurricane Ivan reaching into western North Carolina in
2004; it wasn’t looking good for communities here to receive
their fair share of that funding.
Silas Allen, as floodplain and watershed administrator
in Cherokee County, is one of the leading proponents of
smarter land development in this county. He also serves on
the coalition’s board of directors. Allen is a middle-aged
man of military bearing who appears to have been born into
this world wearing a pair of blue jeans and a friendly yet
cautious smile. He has waited a long time, since starting
to work for the county in 1992, to have the tools he’s been
given by FEMA’s partner in this work, the N.C. Floodplain
Mapping Program.
“This is a dream for me, to have it all digitized to
where I can go in and look at it and use it to deal with the
persons in each community,” Allen told me this morning.
Eighty-six new Flood Insurance Rate Maps, or FIRMs,
have been drafted for the 497 square miles of Cherokee
County. They’re digital and you can pull them up on a
computer screen. They have a lot more science in them than
the old maps, which you had to fold out on a table. The
FIRMs are undergoing review by engineers, and you. If you
have (a) a lot of patience, (b) a high-speed Internet
connection and (c) enough technical know-how to be like the
professionals and click around on a web site more complex
than most, you can study these 86 maps at
www.ncfloodmaps.com
A FIRM is a snapshot of each of the rivers and creeks,
their size, extent of drainage area, and their potential for
flooding and causing havoc. The Special Flood Hazard Area
of each waterway is important. Once it has been agreed on
by Washington, Raleigh, the insurance industry and you,
there’s no further option; minimum standards of quality
must be maintained if a county, city or Indian reservation
is to qualify in this federal program.
At his computer in the little storefront office on
Valley River Avenue here that used to be Richard Howell’s
Market, and on the laptop he takes with him as he moves
around to building sites in Cherokee County, Silas Allen has
downloading speed and the acumen to pull up an address and
know immediately what flood control “zone” it lies in, and
therefore what the homeowner’s likely annual insurance
premium will be.
A “Zone X” structure high above the water might incur a
premium of $720. Or a blessed footnote at the bottom of one
slide in Mark Stafford’s PowerPoint show has better news. A
structure that has not had previous flood claims or received
previous federal disaster assistance payments might qualify
for a premium as low as $233. A “Zone AE” dwelling nearer
the water could incur an annual premium of $991. These
premiums will be six to 10 percent higher in U.S. counties
that don’t quality for the FEMA program.
I asked, “Should homeowners want to have flood
insurance?”
“Smart people have insurance, especially if they’re down
on the river,” Silas Allen said. “Lenders will not consider
[making a loan for] a property without flood insurance.”
Another point he made is that prior to completion of the
updated maps: “If you had six acres down on the river and
you wanted to sell it, you would have to hire a floodplain
engineer. There have been 36 cases where this has happened
in Cherokee County. Those persons have paid from $6,000 to
$40,000 [to have the floodplain boundaries determined for
them].”
The updated FIRMs aren’t maps that could “change the
floodplain,” as a local newspaper headline attested.
“I’ll have someone come up and tell me, ‘I used to not be
in the floodplain, and now you’re telling me I am,’” Silas
Allen said. “I answer them by saying, ‘No, it hasn’t
changed. I’ve just gone in and drawn the line. It was
always there.’ ”
Once it is FIRMed up, Cherokee County will be one of
the few U.S. areas so far to qualify for lower insurance
rates. The VA, FHA, HUD, EPA and Small Business
Administration now could approve loans and grants. In
addition, state and federal disaster assistance would become
available for flood-damaged structures.
The worst Cherokee County flooding in Silas Allen’s
memory occurred sometime during the storms of 2004,
including Hurricane Ivan that rejuvenated the state’s
interest in completing the state-wide floodplain re-mapping.
These storms had great power and tore all the way from the
Gulf of Mexico to the Appalachians and beyond.
“There were nine inches of rain in a 12-hour period,”
Allen recalled. “It produced flooding in the Valley,
Nottely and Hiwassee rivers. Bridges were washed out,
cattle and farm equipment [was] destroyed.”
A CORK BULLETIN BOARD on the wall outside Allen’s
office seems innocuous enough. Pinned to it is a 1993
photo of a recreation vehicle that met a cruel fate. It is
down in the creek-bed where Vengeance Creek flows into the
Valley River, along U.S. 74 in the great valley lying
between the towns of Murphy and Andrews. This RV that once
rolled happily along the roadways of this vacationland is,
in the photograph, canted rakishly at a 45-degree angle and
buried up to the tires in mud.
“I was new in this position and I couldn’t push my weight
around,” Allen recalled. “I told that man ‘No.’ but he went
ahead anyway and parked his RV where he did by Vengeance
Creek. It had to be hauled out of the river later. As a
result of that happening, I can control what happens now on
that site.”
AS WE WRAPPED UP our interview, Allen was preparing to
drive to a meeting in Asheville about floodplains. There
he was going to take issue with a surprising sentence about
Cherokee County that is in the official document guiding the
flood insurance work here.
Murphy is in the Hiwassee River watershed. The Hiwassee
is a tributary of the Tennessee River. Here the federal
Tennessee Valley Authority carried out enthusiastic damming
seven decades ago. Why? Well, to get an answer to that
question you can go to the 1936-40 Hiwassee dam, 1941-42
Nottely and Chatuge dams, and 1941-43 Apalachia dam. Atop
them all have been erected, with no small effort, great iron
plaques weighing perhaps a ton apiece. These have
inscriptions on them. They solemnly describe how the dams
were built to bring jobs, electricity, and a better way of
life to the Tennessee Valley, and most importantly – to
achieve flood control. This is an abiding tenet of Southern
history. It also in intoned in a thousand press releases,
in hardcover books, and on the TVA web site.
Additionally, on February 2, 1989, Cherokee County
adopted the Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance that Silas
Allen has worked these many years to uphold. It can be
downloaded from the county’s web page:
http://www.cherokeecounty-nc.gov/residents/
However, it appears certain that federal and state
bureaucrats now updating flood insurance rate maps have
never traveled to view the great iron plaques, never read
those press releases, and never gone to those websites.
“If you look at the flood insurance report from North
Carolina, they indicate that to their knowledge there is no
flood protection in place in Cherokee County,” Silas Allen
told me. “We should get credit for that.”
UNTIL CONGRESS PASSED and President Johnson signed the
Flood Insurance Act of 1968, disaster relief in the U.S. was
both inadequate and expensive. “The private insurance
industry could not sell affordable flood insurance because
only those at high risk would buy it,” according to the
online course of the National Flood Insurance Program.
The cities of Andrews and Murphy joined the
flood-control program in 1975; the Eastern Band of Cherokee
Indians in 1977; and Cherokee County joined in 1979,
according to Mark Stafford of the North Carolina Floodplain
Mapping Program. Silas Allen chaired four 2005 “scoping
meetings” at which 28 miles of streams here in the counties
were targeted for detailed studies. “Limited Detail”
studies were conducted on another 126 miles of stream. The
western part of the county was chosen for most of the
studies, he told me, because “streams there are susceptible
to flooding, and there has been a lot of development.”
Although the effective date for the new maps has not yet
been set, they are accessible in the county mapping office
and online at
http://www.ncfloodmaps.com. Mark Stafford, Outreach
Planner for the NC Floodplain Mapping Program can be reached
at
mstafford@ncem.org or (919) 715-5711x117.
* * *
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community west
of Murphy is a board member and a volunteer for Hiwassee River
Watershed Coalition.
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