Flooding from Hurricane Beryl swamps a highway running through Houston, July 8, 2024. Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/ZUMA
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When the Federal Emergency Management Agency spends millions of dollars to help rebuild schools and hospitals after a hurricane, it tries to make the community more resilient than it was before the storm. If the agency pays to rebuild a school or a town hall, for example, it might elevate the building above the floodplain, lowering the odds that it will get submerged again.
That sounds simple enough, but the policy hinges on a deceptively simple question: How do you define “floodplain”? FEMA and the rest of the federal government long defined it as an area that has a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year. That so-called 100-year floodplain standard,…