"It was supposed to be OK; they told me it was in a 100-year flood plain"

The title quote of this post was taken from the this article in The Olympian.

I read this article because Crosscut linked to it saying that it implicated development as the reason for the intense flooding in Thurston County, WA (similar to this article for Lewis County, WA). And folks interviewed definitely do:

"They've got to stop building where the water is supposed to go," Judy McWhinney said. "They say don't blame Wal-Mart; I blame Wal-Mart." ... Others pointed to silt-filled creeks, clear-cutting of timber and ill-placed dikes as the culprits.

Everyone knows not to build in the floodplains, right?

"Flood plains are beautiful, rich, fertile land, good for agriculture," Snyder said. "Really, nothing much else works on the flood plain."

Well, not according to the title quote of this post... Apparently, some people think that being told that living in a 100-year floodplain means they are safe. Obviously, FEMA or the local government was successful in getting the word out that people were living in a 100-year floodplain. But this is a good reminder that communication is not just about transmission of words. Perhaps rather than telling people they are in a 100-year floodplain, we should show them a chart showing the number of significant floods in their area.

Be that as it may, it does sound like some people in Lewis County couldn't have known they were in the 100-year floodplain. Well, unless they moved there in 1982:

"The flood map Lewis County uses is a 1982 flood map," DePuis said. "Before anything else happens, Lewis County should adopt a 2007 flood map."

To what degree development has altered the floodplains in Thurston and Lewis Counties, I certainly don't know. But it does seem like floodplain delineation should be redone when there is major development in the existing floodplain. Maybe the delineation should be done before the development!