Vernon
the same time, there is a big economic advantage to it. If you're doing things on a
scale, the contractors will go in there and do a whole bunch of jobs a lot cheaper than they
would do them individually. So there would be a lot of advantages of working that out.
But here I think the Corps is traditionally dragging their feet because it's not the kind of
thing they've been doing. They say, "Well, we'd have a hard time proving the Federal
interest" or "You're not coming up with the same kind of levels of protection" or "If you
exceed the level of protection, the people are going to get damaged more than they would
have otherwise and things like that.
Well, those are all legitimate concerns all right, but I still think that overall you could
reduce the future flood damages tremendously and reduce the amount of money FEMA
has to pay out for flood insurance and so forth. It just seems like an area where they have
to be more aggressive than they have been.
Q ..
Is this part of the
of the Corps that is so much into the big project that they can't
see these little things as being part of it's mission?
A
Well, the sad part of it is, too, that in flood proofing, generally speaking, that people that
have money are the ones that are going to be benefitted by it rather than the poor people.
Because what happens is that if you've got a real expensive house located in the floodplain
and you can show that damages to it are going to be pretty extensive, then you could
afford to spend a lot more money fixing it up, protecting it.
Whereas, if you're living in a disadvantaged area and nobody has any money, the houses
are not very expensive to begin with, so you can't afford to spend too much money on
them. Then, if you do spend money on them, the homeowner can`t afford to put up
anything. But anyway, all the authorities are there, if they could get enough support for
doing it? I think, traditionally, they've found out that they don't get enough, really
enough, support for doing flood proofing to make it a thing to push.
But, from a practical standpoint, I just see it as one of the best ways to reduce flood
damages. It's better than just keep paying insurance claims to these people year after year.
Even if you cut out the payments to them to every five years, once every five years,
instead of every other year or something, you've gained a lot.
Well, anyway, I was of the mind-set previously that you could go in and build a levee
project for a lot of people [and that] was much better than fooling around with flood
proofing. I still believe that. But there are so many places where you can't build a levee.
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