Vernon K. Hagen
The Flood Insurance Administration in getting their program, they did a lot of quickie
studies where they didn't have as good of accuracy as they would have liked to have had.
But they just didn't have the money or the time to do it in great detail, so they did all their
preliminary studies and a lot of those are being, have been revised now and they're getting
better information.
Not only that, but people who want to develop the floodplain, if they think that the water
surface isn't right, they'll go in there and study it and come up with better answers and
submit it to FEMA.
FEMA will review it and if they agree that it's a better answer than they have mapped,
why they'll remap it. That's a lot of the work that we do at Dewberry & Davis --
remapping areas, redoing the computations and making sure that the new data is really
better than the previous data. Because if it isn't better, why there is no sense in spending
all that money to remap the floodplains. So if it's pretty close to what it was before, they
don't remap it. But if there is a significant difference, why they will make a change.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Q ..
Let me ask you about the impact of the environmental movement in the late 60's and the
early 70's. Did that have any influence on what your hydrologists did or what you did in
the Corps?
A
Well, of course, the Corps got involved in--and actually they were the ones that carried
out the EPA rules and regulations. The people would come to the Corps to get a permit
to do things and then whenever they would build anything in the floodplain or in a stream,
wherever a stream was, if they put any fill in the wetlands, they had to get a permit from
the Corps. The Corps was primarily carrying out the mandate of the EPA. EPA didn't
have the mechanism to handle all these permits and stuff like that.
So EPA were trying to set up the guidance and get the Corps to enforce it, [trying to] keep
people from building certain things and using up the wetlands. There have been a lot of
rules and regulations and laws passed on just what you can do in terms of building in
wetlands. If you do build, you have to compensate by providing other wetlands.
If for some reason you needed to build, or it was very important to build some sort of a
development in the floodplain, those people that developed that, in order to get a permit
to do it, they have to provide mitigation measures of some sort that are equal or better than
what they've damaged by building in that area. Some times that is pretty hard to do.
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