• Share your travel plans with a family member, neighbor or friend

• Listen to area radio and television stations and a NOAA Weather Radio for possible flood warnings and reports of flooding in progress or other critical information from the National Weather Service.

• Be prepared to evacuate at a moment’s notice.

• When a flood or flash flood warning is issued for your area, head for higher ground and stay there.

• Stay away from floodwaters. If you come upon a flowing stream where water is above your ankles, stop, turn around and go another way — 6 inches of swiftly moving water can sweep you off of your feet.

• If you come upon a flooded road while driving, turn around and go another way.

• If you are caught on a flooded road and waters are rising rapidly around you, get out of the car quickly and move to higher ground. Most cars can be swept away by less than 2 feet of moving water.

• Keep children out of the water, as their curiosity could cause them to get too close to fast-moving flood waters.

• Be especially cautious at night when it is harder to recognize flood danger.

Download our Flood Safety checklist, visit redcross.org or contact your local Red Cross for additional information on how to prepare for emergencies and to get trained.

The nightmarish flash floods in southwestern Arkansas early Friday morning that swept away dozens of campers — with some 20 dead and many more still missing — resulted from a horrible confluence of a late-night burst of extreme rains over a region of steep-sided, isolated river valleys long popular with folks eager for a taste of wild nature.

The image above, from the Little Rock, Ark., Web site of the National Weather Service, shows the progression of the downpours Thursday night. The weather service, according to news reports, issued a flash flood warning at 2 a.m. Friday, but it was of little help to the sleeping campers in the hilly region with scant cell-phone service. The news article in The Times includes wrenching firsthand descriptions of the nightmare scenario as the Caddo and Little Missouri rivers rose yards in minutes. There is a chart at the weather service site showing just how swiftly the waters rose. Jeff Masters has an excellent summary of the meteorological backdrop.

Earlier this spring, the weather service reviewed flood risks and safety tips — with a focus on the devastating debris flows that can swiftly develop in flash floods….Around the United States, a network of thousands of streamflow gauges that can help generate flash flood warnings is steadily eroding under tightening budgets. In the wake of epic flooding around Nashville, Tenn., earlier this spring, Joe Romm pointed out that neglecting this gauge network is a bad idea given that climate change is increasing the odds of rain falling in dangerous downpours.

Revkin’s full post can be found here.

While disaster news coverage is often characterized as opportunistic, provocative, and careless, the Tennessee situation begs the question: is it preferable to no coverage at all?

One positive is that the veritable national news blackout may have been a result of a successful local response:

Locals, in a sort of sour—or perhaps, sweet—grapes idealism, have interpreted that to mean their behavior was essentially too good for the news.

“It was not a PR nightmare,” writes Jan Morrison on the marketing blog Lovell Links. “It was handled with relative calm, an organized response and a lack of sensationalism.”

And, the article raises a great — and not usually asked — question: when national media ‘floods the zone’ so to speak on a disaster is that always good thing for the locals?:

Regardless of the emotion invoked by the cold media shoulder, one might wonder, why do they care so much? According to many disaster experts, the media do little more than muck up an emergency: spreading myths and misinformation, getting in the way instead of helping, and capitalizing on sorrow. Maybe the folks down in Tennessee should count their blessings.

I think it is a very fair to ask whether flood victims (or survivors as FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate like to say) should care. The article reports that there was a lot of hurt feelings in Tennessee about the lack of attention. But the most tangible negative may be less financial support from other parts of the nation:

Nothing whips up a donation frenzy like a solicitous news story and no national coverage equals no national sympathy.

In this case, social media seemed to help fill the void both in generating interest and support.

Like most questions, the answer is probably a mixed bag, but just the fact that Disaster Research raised the issue of the value of press coverage is interesting. And it should lead the national media, particularly all news television outlets, to think about how their coverage — when they cover a disaster round the clock — impacts the community and the response.

Congress reinstated the National Flood Insurance Program Monday. But the beleaguered plan is more than $18 billion in debt, and a strategy to put the program back on an even keel seems nearly unreachable. According to a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday, the NFIP is not “actuarially sound” and suffers from operational issues as well. The program, which was created in 1968 to fill gaps in private sector flood insurance, is poorly structured for providing coverage, the report stated.

“NFIP cannot do some of the things that private insurers do to manage their risks,” according to the report summary. “For example, NFIP is not structured to build a capital surplus, is likely unable to purchase reinsurance to cover catastrophic losses, cannot reject high-risk applicants, and is subject to statutory limits on rate increases. In addition, its premium rates do not reflect actual flood risk.”

Even so, a recent 18-day funding lapse that closed NFIP offices, leaving hundreds in home-buying limbo, highlighted the need for some sort of stopgap flood coverage. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota estimated that 1,400 prospective homeowners a day couldn’t close on mortgages without access to the NFIP, according the Associated Press.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates the program, has made improvements, according to congressional testimony given by FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate Wednesday. Among the advances he cited were the creation of an NFIP Reform Working Group, an extensive update of the nation’s flood insurance rate maps, and a push for community awareness and participation.

We learned two very valuable things from the [NFIP Reform Group] listening sessions,” Fugate stated in the testimony. “First and foremost, we learned that the NFIP still provides an essential service to the American people that would be otherwise unavailable or unaffordable. Second, we confirmed that the NFIP requires meaningful reform.”

The GAO recommends that those reforms include stepping up rates to reflect risks and providing more oversight of companies that sell flood policies. The current NFIP funding extension is set to expire again on May 31.

…the great lesson of floods past on the Red River, and especially from the devastating flood of 1997 in Grand Forks, an hour north of Fargo, is that big federal money for permanent flood abatement, and the local political will to support such disruptive projects, flows only where disaster goes. Grand Forks lost its fight with the river in 1997 – $1.5 billion in damages, hundreds of homes and businesses lost – but is now sitting tight and dry behind a $409 million floodwall and water-diversion system.

Fargo escaped the river’s wrath last time, and for most of the intervening 12 years was unable to muster local or federal support to get the sort of relief Grand Forks received. Now some fear that Fargo’s angst and struggle will be forgotten once more – until the next crisis. ”If we would have lost, we would have had the $800 million we need right away,” Tim Mahoney, the vice mayor of Fargo, said as he raced into a flood briefing on Sunday afternoon. “We would have had that done tomorrow. But this way, in two weeks, this will be off the national news and people will forget this happened.” Mr. Mahoney added: “In a way, it’s bad to win.”

The problems for Fargo in landing big federal financing – almost half of the money for Grand Forks’ project came from Washington – were compounded by local ambivalence too, city and state officials said. Plans had been in the works for better flood control measures, but they have been snagged and stalled, said Mayor Dennis Walaker, by residents who complained about “how the project might block their views, might change the way their backyards looked.”

“They don’t want a fence in their backyard,” Mr. Walaker said. Fargo was also perhaps partly lulled into a sense of security because it was credited in 1997 with saving itself through strenuous volunteer efforts and ad hoc floodwalls – measures that many worried would be insufficient this time. Standing on the edge of an ever-rising earthen dike on Friday as workers added still more sandbags to top it off, Mr. Walaker was left looking wistfully downriver. ”We’re jealous,” he said of Grand Forks, “absolutely jealous.”

For the last two and a half years, Mr. Walaker said, Fargo has been considering a new flood system, known as the Southside Project, that would offer permanent protection on the city’s south side at a cost of more than $150 million. And some officials have pressed for a separate project of $500 million or $600 million to help protect other portions of Fargo and Moorhead, Minn., just across the river. The Southside Project has made slow progress, the mayor said, but the more ambitious efforts could be a decade or more away. ”We haven’t had a big cheerleader pushing for this, at least so far,” Mr. Walaker said. 

The complications of flood defense go beyond just writing checks or building unsightly protection barriers. Grand Forks had to demolish or move more than 850 homes and businesses considered vulnerable to flooding. And Fargo, which has been growing rapidly in recent years, has seen much of the growth occur in unincorporated areas where zoning laws and city flood mitigation plans are harder to enforce. About 200,000 people live in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area, about double the population of the Grand Forks area.

Land-use experts say that human nature and earth science simply move on different cycles – making it easy to think that a bullet dodged is a battle won. ”If you have a 100-year flood, people will say, ‘We had a 100-year flood in ‘97, so we shouldn’t have one for another 100 years,’” said Prof. Bernhardt Saini-Eidukat, the chairman of the department of geosciences at North Dakota State University in Fargo. But statistically that is wrong, Mr. Saini-Eidukat said. Fargo could have a 100-year flood every year for 20 years; only over the great stretch of geological time does it average out. ”Geologists think in geological time,” he said. “But most people don’t.”

This morning, it offers a post, “Flood season starts strong,” with a good roundup of North Dakota/Minnesota Red River flooding news and efforts by authorities and residents to prepare and respond.

To follow news on the preparations and response to the floods I recommend the American Red Cross’ Online Newsroom as a resource.

Jackson Leier helps shovel sand. He and his family spent yesterday filling sandbags along the Red River (credit: Claire Sale/ARC).

Most Americans ignore the risks of flooding, assuming they aren’t in a flood zone. The reality is, floods are America’s #1 natural disaster and can happen anytime, anywhere. In fact, 90% of all natural disasters in the U.S. involve flooding. Educate yourself on the risks and impacts of flooding during National Flood Awareness Week so you can protect your family and your property.

 

 

The National Weather Service has a special day-by-day Awareness Week page. Flood Smart is the official website of the National Flood Insurance Program.