Trump's rollback of flood protections risks further Houston-style calamity

History will remember that he immediately went on to “very quickly” deal with another issue , blaming parties on “both sides” for the fatal clashes during the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia.

However, although his infrastructure reforms were lost in that controversy, his regulatory slashing may yet have a long-term, and controversial, impact of its own.

As tropical storm Harvey spins slowly over the Gulf coast, catastrophic flooding has forced tens of thousands from their homes in and near Houston. And with the storm moving into Louisiana, officials only expect the number of people whose lives are upended by it to increase.

An executive order issued by Trump earlier this month revoked an Obama-era directive that had established flood-risk standards for federally funded infrastructure projects built in areas prone to flooding or subject to the effects of sea-level rise – like many of those now sinking in Texas.

Houston already has some of the laxest building regulations for structures in potential flood zones and the president wants to spread that policy across the US.

“It makes no sense,” said Steve Ellis, vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Taxpayers deserve to have the assurance that if they provide assistance to a community to build or rebuild, it’s done in a way that isn’t going to cost taxpayers money in the future.”

Storms and flooding are generally becoming costlier and more frequent and data suggests climate change is a leading culprit.

Many towns are located in coastal areas and riverine floodplains, where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says “building codes are often insufficient in reducing damage from extreme events”. The number of “billion-dollar events” – natural disasters ranging from flooding to wildfires that incur more than $1bn in damage – has risen over the past few decades, increasing in cost from a roughly $10bn five-year average in 1985 to more than $50bn in 2015.

Obama signed executive order 13690 in 2015 in response to rising sea levels and surface temperatures and more frequent storms, particularly tropical cyclones. The Obama order, with its references to sea-level rise and climate change, became an instant target for an administration eager to expunge those terms from the political lexicon.

“That executive order was meant to help Fema pressure communities to rebuild in a smarter, more resilient way,” said Ellis. “This removes that pressure.”

The regulations associated with 13690 had not yet gone into effect when it was revoked, but several federal agencies – including Fema (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which funds and oversees public housing projects – had already initiated the rule-making process.

The flood standard, which among other things would have required structures built within a 100-year floodplain – an area where a major flood statistically has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year – to be elevated by two feet to prevent flood damage, had its detractors.

Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd