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SoCalDem

(103,856 posts)
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 08:34 AM Aug 2012

FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (time for Jindal to take a look at this)

Louisiana has lost so much wetland/marsh land, that it's probably time to start looking into just moving people to safer areas.. It makes NO sense to have people continuing to live in areas that are definitely going to be in harm's way with every storm. the money spent to keep building levees and to rebuild over and over and over has to be more costly than just declaring some areas as off limits for building/rebuilding.



http://www.usatoday.com/weather/floods/2008-06-19-flood-town_N.htm

Ill. town finds life does go on after floods

Updated 6/20/2008 1:53 AM



By Marisol Bello and Peter Eisler, USA TODAY
VALMEYER, Ill. — Toni Heusohn never thought she would move from her house by the Mississippi River. Then a flood in 1993 wiped out the town. Now, as images of watery devastation play out on TV, she says she has peace of mind knowing she is safe in her new home atop a 400-foot bluff. "I was so thankful the town moved everybody up," said Heusohn, 58, whose double-wide mobile home right off Main Street was among 350 properties destroyed 15 years ago. She and many of the townspeople now live in new homes in a new town that has the old name but looks more like a suburban subdivision with manicured lawns and cul-de-sacs.

Valmeyer's rebirth a mile away was funded through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, a FEMA project to help communities in flood-prone areas relocate to higher ground. The program, born in 1988 and expanded after the floods of 1993, pays 75% of the cost of moving structures or buying them for demolition. The other 25% must come from matching state and local funding. Since the floods of 1993, FEMA has distributed more than $1 billion in grants to fund the removal or relocation of about 12,000 structures in flood-prone areas across the Midwest, most of them along the Mississippi and its tributaries. Yet that's a small percentage of the number of homes and businesses in flood plains that have been swamped in recent days. Many communities have passed up the grants because they are unable to match federal funding. Under the voluntary program, property owners agree to be bought out so they can use the money to build elsewhere. Then the community must allow the land to revert to its natural state as a park or open space. It cannot be redeveloped.

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FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (time for Jindal to take a look at this) (Original Post) SoCalDem Aug 2012 OP
Louisiana has all that off-shore oil, all those refineries. JDPriestly Aug 2012 #1

JDPriestly

(57,936 posts)
1. Louisiana has all that off-shore oil, all those refineries.
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 09:51 AM
Aug 2012

They should be able to keep their infrastructure in shape. These hurricanes happen regularly. There is nothing new about this year's hurricane. It's no surprise.

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