proofmg committee--to try to figure out how to motivate these people to do it themselves.
Well, made some suggestions to them about what the Corps really needed to do if they
were serious about flood
and that would be to modify the planning procedures
so that they could really attack the problem. They have all the authority to do it, it's just
that it's not politically or traditionally the thing the Corps does. They haven't really
geared themselves up so they could go in and do a lot of assistance in flood proofing.
What they should do is have a
that has a lot of buildings in the floodplain, and
[they] get this community to agree, or get all these people to agree, that they're interested
in flood proofing. Then [they] go to the Corps in the traditional manner and say, "Hey,
we've got a flood problem, we can't handle it. We're not in a position to handle it. We
need a Federal project here. But the Federal project that we perceive being here is flood
proofing, is mass flood proofing.
Then the Corps would come in and do a
study along with them. But if you go
through the traditional process, it's going to take you at least 10 years, maybe
years
before anything happens. By that time the people that signed up for the thing are probably
not even going to be there anymore. You need to have some sort of a process that will
move quickly. They do have authority for that. They have their small flood control
project authority, if it was funded adequately they could actually do a community under
the small flood control project, and do it rather quickly. It wouldn't take so long.
The way I looked at it anyway, you don't have to analyze each one of these houses on the
same basis, by giving them all the same degree of flood protection. As far as I can see,
all you need to do is make sure that what each individual house does is economically
justified by some means. I don't think you really need to do a full bl
in-depth
financial feasibility study. There are ways you can look at it very quickly and
inexpensively to find out wh you can do there and how much money you can afford to
spend and still be justified.
If they [the Corps] had a more simplified method of looking at the economics of each one
of these, they could go in and, with the help of the city, of course, which is contributing
percent of the cost on this study, they could look at each house and say, "We'll protect
this one for two feet, this one for five feet, this one for three feet. We'll raise this one
above the floodplain because all these, when analyzed individually, are economically
sound. It's a good thing to do.
The Corps could actually have all this stuff built. The Corps could manage the thing
because private individuals really don't know enough about it to know when they're
getting a good job done. Besides that, if the Corps has many houses flood proofed all at
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