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Ryan Ike:00:03I'm Ryan Ike and this is the FEMA podcast. Ryan Ike:00:11FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program turned 50 this month and, just like us, the program has seen its fair share of growing pains and noteworthy achievements to become what it is today. I spent more than a decade working in the program and was privileged to spend much of that time with a handful of people who were there during the early years. Their stories and, honestly, their passion for the program is something you just don't see or hear about very often in government. In this episode, we'll explore the early history of the flood insurance program as experienced by a couple of guys who I've come to think about as evangelists for floodplain management. All Participants:00:49I started at FEMA in 2000 and I joined the flood insurance program in 2001. I was gone in 1999. You were working with Ecology with the state. No, not until 2001. 2001, and how long were you at Ecology? Nine years. But I worked for him as a contractor for a couple of years. You did? And I think; didn’t Carl work for you too? Oh yea, in the beginning, till ’99 and then he stopped in what; 2006 or 7? Hmm? What? 6 or 7; you don’t even know. I’m supposed to remember that? And how many times did you quit working for Chuck? Three. Three? Three or four. And every time you came back to work for him? I came back with my hat in my hand…I always had to eat a little humble pie. I always came back and we always got along great. It was a good time. Ryan Ike:01:34Before we talk to them it’s important to understand the context of what led to them being part of this story.Catastrophic hurricanes and devastating storms are a mainstay in our history from the Galveston hurricane in 1900 that caused an estimated 8,000 deaths to the 1965 hurricane Betsy that wrought destruction across the Gulf coast totaling 1.4 billion dollars. These and other events severely impacted communities nationwide demonstrating a significant need for protection programs to aid recovery.Congress responded by passing the National Flood Insurance Act in 1968 to create the Federal Insurance Administration. By 1969 The National Flood Insurance Program rolled out offering communities federally backed flood insurance for their residents if these jurisdictions agreed to maintain minimum floodplain management standards, but there was a hitch, insurance was optional and nobody was buying. By 1973 Congress would pass the Flood Disaster Protection Act, which would, among other things, require flood insurance to be purchased for structures located in the flood plain. This was a big deal and would require the right people. It's where we'll pick up with Chuck Steel and Carl Cook. Carl and Chuck:02:48I’m Carl Cook, retired FEMA Region 10 Mitigation Director. I’m Chuck Steele, retired FEMA Mitigation Director between 1979 and 1999. Carl Cook:03:01I started in 1973. It was with HUD then, yes. Jimmy Carter was the one who created FEMA and that was a few years afterwards.Ryan Ike:03:13So how did you get involved in the flood insurance program?Carl Cook:03:16 I was directed to the program by my master professor getting a Masters in environmental science from the College of Forestry at Syracuse. He said, you know, the federal land use legislation that just got shot down; this is about the closest thing to a federal land use program. And so I went to DC and looked him up and got the job. Chuck Steele:03:42My start was totally different. I was with HUD in Portland, the Portland area office, which is a sub office of the Seattle regional office at the time. And the big thing that happened was, Hurricane Agnes in 1972 and the Great Lakes flooding in 1972 and 73. And what that spurred was George Bernstein was the head of the program at the time and he was at a restaurant one night and writing on his Napkin, basically the flood disaster protection act and which was on his Napkin. And they knew back in Washington DC that that act was going to be passed. They had the votes for it in the summer of 1973. So what they did was they made a call to every regional office to send as many people as you could to be trained in the National Flood Insurance Program because it had been in effect for five years, but nobody was buying the insurance and they knew that the flood disaster protection act was going to change that because the insurance is going to become mandatory. And so myself and a fellow by the name of George Harrin from the Seattle regional office went back to DC and it was in the Alexandria area and we met people from every region. There are many, many people. There was a week-long intensive training course. We all learned to do that to, you know, what the program was about. And uh, we were told to go out and enroll as many communities as you possibly can and try to get it done as quick as possible because that law was going to be passed on the last day of 1973, which it was.Ryan Ike:05:11What were the early days like?Chuck Steele:05:13It was a very exciting time. It was like a movement or a mission. Everybody knew everybody, especially after that Great Lakes thing. You got to know everybody throughout the whole country, after those meetings back in Washington in DC. We were spirited believers in what we actually thought we were going to accomplish. It was a great time. I've never been able to match that time in any other kind of program since that time, but it was a great time to be in the program.Ryan Ike:05:40Well, it’s that enthusiasm. I mean, I've met over my career here a handful of folks that kind of overlapping timeframe. As I was coming into the agency and you guys were leaving. There is not just a couple of you and there's a quite a few that I've met over the period that were involved in Wisconsin or Minnesota or back east or the gulf that were really passionate about this and I'm just curious where that came from because I don't think people think of federal employees as particularly passionate about something. Carl Cook:06:08It was easier back then. The federal government wasn't seen as this big, bad evil thing. It was a small cadre of people. Dick Krim handpicked everybody. Ryan Ike:06:23Richard Krim was the assistant administrator of the Flood Insurance Department within the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Carl Cook:06:31I remember when I was working in D.C., he had trouble staffing Region 9 because they wanted to put somebody in who was left over from the Region and he wouldn't allow it, so it just went unfilled, so I would fly to the west coast, work for two weeks, fly back to DC, and work for two weeks and just keep going back and forth like that…because he would not allow anybody that he had not handpicked to be in the flood insurance program. And he was a smart guy. He liked the environment. He knew insurance.Ryan Ike:07:11The goal was enroll communities, but how many of you were there? Chuck Steele:07:15Well, for me, I was, I stayed down in Portland with the area office down there and I handled Oregon and George Harrin handled Washington and we didn't do too much in Idaho and Alaska in the early years. But we went out, and everyday we went to meetings, Every day we covered so many communities. I can't tell you how many. I don't have a number. I couldn't rack up a number. I just know that one day I did 12 communities in one day starting at 7:30 in the morning and ending at about 11:00 at night, so it was very intensive, but it was fun. I mean, we were driving just through counties and every community we went to, we stopped and gave them the spiel. We all had an outline. Everybody had their own outline. We all approached it a little bit differently, cause there really was no direction at that point. It was kind of up to us. We went through the program. We gave them a one page form to fill out and we gave them a sample resolution which was easy to pass. They didn’t pass it when we were there. They had to have a council there, but the one page form we actually helped them to fill out and that was all there was to it. Ryan Ike:08:16What did you say at those meetings? When did they make of you guys just showing up? Carl Cook:08:20The communities often times didn't quite know how to deal with this. These guys breezed into town saying, look, you know, you need to do this. Them saying, well, what happens if we don't? And the hammers were pretty heavy. We'd say, well, you won't get mortgage insurance. Well, why do we need that? Well, all federally backed lending institutions require it. So you pretty much dry up the mortgage money. When you tell a community that they say okay, okay, we'll do it.We got to know every road, every backwoods community. Met with commissioners in rural communities. You learned a lot about where you lived.Ryan Ike:09:04So, is the story of you actually having a van and driving out into the rural communities with a suit and a tent and just setting up meetings and driving? Is that….?Carl Cook:09:18Some of that happened. I did have a van and I would sleep in the van. I remember the meeting in Conconully. I had the meeting and then retired to the van after hitting the local pub for a couple of beers. Looking at how the flood program would be applied to Indian reservations, did get me a camper for a month to drive around and hit as many Indian reservations in the Northwest as I could to look at their land use patterns and see how the flood insurance program could be applied there. And that was just a real hoot. You know, it was a real education and it did end up with a policy that stayed for, it lasted for, several decades. Chuck Steele:10:16A real positive part of what we were doing was we had something to offer. We had the insurance. We didn't know anything about the insurance frankly, but we had insurance to say their citizens could get insurance and therefore continue to make loans on the condition that you adopted a minimal measure that deals with just the floodplain part of your community. So there was kind of a carrot and a stick and it was a real incentive for them to get in because that meant that their citizens would be able to buy flood insurance. Ryan Ike:10:42And so the whole program, the original idea was based on that kind of three legged stool, right? There's a resolution, there's an ordinance and there's a map. Since people can’t see what that map looks like, you're explaining the contour intervals. So maybe, I mean how accurate or how precise were these maps? Chuck Steele:10:59Very inaccurate. They were 2000 scale maps. USGS flood-prone quads. We've all used them when going hiking or camping or whatever. And the line on the map, the way the map was drawn, the line itself was like 125 feet. And the contour interval, generally if you've got something close to a 20 foot contour interval, you werej lucky.So when they put it on the maps it was difficult because the original maps, they blocked out, they made sure that the lines followed roads so the insurance people could read the maps. They later changed every rectilinear map to a curvilinear map because water doesn't do that. It doesn't follow the roads. Uh, so the maps were not a good thing at all. And in many cases they didn't have maps, but they still knew they were going to be getting maps and we wanted them to adopt the resolution. The resolution in the beginning only said one basic thing that we could tell them as to how to regulate with regard to the maps. And that was you have to make sure that new construction is reasonably safe from flooding.Carl Cook:12:00I would say the maps weren't inaccurate; they were imprecise. Ryan Ike:12:06So, what do you mean by that?Carl Cook:12:08Well, the boundary lines weren't right down to where you could pace them off. They were wider than that due to the scale of the map. And the boundary line itself could cover 100 or 200 feet. And when you're making a decision about whether you have to buy flood insurance or don't have to buy flood insurance, you're concerned about that. And that's why these cases of imprecision drove the flood insurance program to try and refine the line, make it more and more precise. And of course, as we did that, it meant more and more engineering and more and more mapping, and more and more money.The maps were frequently overestimations of the flood plain and it wasn't because anybody was mean spirited or said, you know, let's really get these communities. It was engineers making judgments in the study and they'd say, well, it might be here, but we want to be safe, so let's add a little more. And if you do that in a dozen different places in the study, pretty soon you've built up quite a layer of icing on the cake there. And so you end up with a pretty high flood elevation and the locals would frequently say, God, you know, we've seen some really bad floods here and has never gotten up that high. Well then it would be our mission to try and argue with them. And that was, that was difficult, particularly in cases where you felt in your heart they were right.Chuck Steele:13:50The importance of those early maps is that was HUD’s official notice to the community that you have flood hazards per the law. The law said they had to be officially notified. What was the official notification? It was the map.So the map started a process. They had one year to join the program before the sanctions went into effect or they would go into effect after that year. So the map was extremely important even though it was extremely imprecise.Ryan Ike:14:17How well did communities do with regulating building and maintaining compliance?Chuck Steele:14:21First of all, the emphasis on compliance and enforcement. That was started in the mid-80s I think it was with the Community Assistance Program and the Community Compliance Program where we agreed to do CAVs (Community Assistance Visit) in every community; three to five years. There was a three to five year cycle or 20 percent of the communities in one year. And that was the first time that they emphasized the enforcement that much because they were seeing that there was not good enforcement.Carl Cook:14:51Some communities were doing okay, they’d have some local staff who was a zealot / hard charger or they'd have an elected official that said, “we're not going to mess with that, we can build the way we want.” And then we’d have structures that were not compliant and then we'd have to threaten them with suspension and probation, all that. And that was more a punitive, confrontational set of set of meetings. It wasn't much fun. Chuck Steele:15:22Yeah. That was not as much fun. The interesting thing as you mentioned, probation, because the original law simply says suspension and suspension is done in Washington DC. It's not done in the region. It's done by the Federal Insurance Administrator, but they introduced this probation at that time and that put the regions into it because the regions put a community on probation and probation, it was just the next step before suspension, but they were given a year to fix things. In the meantime, in that year, every person had to pay. Every person who had flood insurance, had to pay 50 bucks extra as a surcharge and they didn't like that, so they would get on their community to fix the problem, so I don't have to pay 50 bucks every year because you're not doing your job. I think probation was a big step in terms of getting better enforcement. Ryan Ike:16:09Was the original plan to systematically remove flood-prone buildings? Carl Cook:16:13Originally that was not the case. The idea was that we would take care of providing insurance for those structures that got hit in return for communities requiring new structures to be built so they were safe. Ryan Ike:16:31At this point, Chuck's going to refer to the 1362 program 1362 is a shorthand way of referring to Section 1362 of the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968. Basically it authorized the government to purchase flood damaged properties. Chuck Steele:16:48Well actually it wasn't the initial law that never was used, the 1362 program. It was used for the first time on the Toutle River after Mount St Helens. Those were the first buyouts that occurred in the United States of America. They were not the typical buyout because the homes are obliterated as you probably could guess. But that was the first time it was used. Between 1980 and 1993, a thousand structures had been bought through section 1362 which is good mitigation; getting rid of the structures, getting them out of the flood plain, but that's not many structures for 13 years. That's when the Vulker Amendment was passed, the amendment to the Stafford Act that created the buyout program in the disaster programs. Four years after that was not 1,000, there was 25,000 homes bought out after that and it continues to this day.Ryan Ike:17:40As the program kind of matures and you've got the first map out there. You've had that first visit with the community. You're circling back few years later, what had changed?Chuck Steele:17:52One of the things is we became institutionalized. We're not the free willing people that we were in the beginning. In the beginning it was a totally different thing. It was just, every day was fun and it was interacting with other people who did the same thing, but later on this it really became institutionalized and we had to become institutionalized.The good part of that, was the fact that it got us involved real closely with the emergency management community, which we hadn't been in the past. Getting involved with emergency management was good because that's where the money was, particularly after a disaster and working with those people after a disaster, hundreds and hundreds of homes that had been moved and elevated and other kinds of mitigation actions that we could not have done absent the emergency management folks. So that was a positive thing. Ryan Ike:18:50Fifty years later, the National Flood Insurance Program is a sophisticated federal program that is relevant across the nation and has deep connections to emergency management and the insurance industry, but its roots are still visible. The conversations and partnerships that Carl and Chuck started with communities and tribes nearly 50 years ago continue today. The maps and processes may look different, but their legacy of passion and commitment to the vision of a prepared and resilient nation remains stronger than. Ryan Ike:19:24We've linked to this episode on our Fema Facebook page and we invite you to join in the conversation in the comments. If you have ideas for a future topic, send us an email at fema-podcast@fema.. If you would like to learn more about this episode or other topics visit podcast. ................
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