South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium – America's Hurricane Threat
287 Meeting Street, Charleston, SC 29401
phone: 843.727.2078 — fax: 843.727.2080

• Raising Up and Moving Out
• Poverty along the river
• Elevating to nowhere
• A failed proposal
• Better planning needed
• Sources

Raising Up and Moving Out:
Elevation and Buyout of Floodprone Buildings: Do they work?

By John H. Tibbetts

Along the banks of the Pungo River in eastern North Carolina, majestic, century-old houses stand guard over the water, while hidden away among tall pines in the swampy interior are modest bungalows and mobile homes that bear scars of recent hurricanes. This is the town of Belhaven, pop. 2,400, average elevation three feet above sea level. “I don't have a speck of dirt that's not in the 100-year floodplain," said Tim M. Johnson, town manager. Driving through the town's back lanes, he pointed out a small frame house resting on a new, tall foundation, the concrete blocks still raw and unpainted. Before it was hiked up, the house lacked a foundation, and recent floods had rotted bottom trusses and planks. “Fifty years ago, you built right on the ground," said Johnson. “Some of these houses are sturdy as they can be, but they really got damaged during the hurricanes."

If a record existed for the number of times that an American community got flooded by tropical cyclones over a few years, Belhaven would likely hold it. Although Belhaven is 70 miles inland from the coast, four giant storms since 1996 have crashed past coastal barrier islands and driven storm surges across Pamlico Sound and up the Pungo River into town. On July 12-13, 1996, Hurricane Bertha pushed floodwaters through Belhaven. Only two months later, September 5-6, Hurricane Fran swamped 60 percent of the town's homes. On October 10 that year, Tropical Storm Josephine arrived, flooding about one-third of the homes hit by Fran. And on August 27-28, 1998, Hurricane Bonnie battered the town. “Bertha was devastating to people here," said Johnson. “Fran demoralized them. And then came Josephine and Bonnie."

Intense rains during recent tropical cyclones have also swamped North Carolina communities as far inland as Raleigh, more than 200 miles from the coast, causing millions in property damage. Seventy North Carolina counties were declared disaster areas during Fran alone. But these storms were not rare occurrences. Numerous U.S. hurricanes in the 20th century—in 1903, 1927, 1938, 1940, 1955, 1969, 1972, and 1994—have roared into inland regions, causing killer floods and catastrophic damage.

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From 1989 to 1998, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent $11.4 billion nationwide on disaster assistance for hurricane- and storm-related floods. This sum does not include funds from other government agencies that pay for search and rescue, temporary housing, public infrastructure repair, home and business loans, debris removal, and unemployment and dislocated worker assistance.

To reduce disaster costs, state and federal agencies are funneling tens of millions of dollars into North Carolina communities. With these funds, localities can acquire and demolish floodprone buildings, relocate residents, and elevate structures. Belhaven, for example, has received $9 million in state and federal money to raise up 379 of Belhaven's 950 homes, an average of about $4,000 for every man, woman, and child in town.

Lenoir County and its county seat, the city of Kinston, also about 70 miles inland, received a total of $20 million in state and federal buyout and relocation funds from various agencies, after the Neuse River overflowed in Hurricane Fran's wake. The Kinston/Lenoir County project is the second largest buyout of homes that FEMA has ever attempted. For North Carolina communities, the grants are a remarkable deal since they do not require local matching funds.

The North Carolina initiatives are part of a larger effort to mitigate flood damage. Since the Midwest deluge of 1993, FEMA has helped buy out 20,000 floodprone properties in 34 states. In a famous case, the entire town of Valmeyer, Ill.—population 900—was moved to avoid repeated inundation from the Mississippi River. In Arnold, Missouri, a former trailer court is now a football field for the Jefferson County Youth Association; and in Jefferson City, much of the acquired property will be transferred to the local park system. FEMA has argued that buyouts are less expensive than allowing victims to receive repeated insurance settlements and disaster assistance. Every dollar spent on buyouts and elevations saves two to three dollars, FEMA noted.

Generations ago, if a home got wet again and again, the owner probably would have abandoned it and moved to higher ground. Or he would have built a new house on a taller foundation to let water flow under the first inhabited floor. In the old days, property owners paid the cost of raising their own structures or moving out of harm's way. And this worked. During recent hurricanes, most of Belhaven's 19th century homes were not inundated because they had been built on tall foundations, though the structures are located within a rock's throw of the river. But the tradition of elevating homes was lost in the first half of the 20th century.

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In the 1950s when a series of hurricanes hit North Carolina, storm surges and high waves undermined beachfront houses and knocked others off their shallow foundations. So North Carolina passed a coastal building code, establishing tougher standards for new homes near the oceanfront. New houses there had to be elevated, with pilings eight feet deep into the ground. (Decades later, the standard was changed to 16 feet.) Soon landowners on the back side of barrier islands, where the standards were not required, showed the sincerest form of flattery by elevating their homes as well. “Over time people changed their idea of how a beach house was supposed to look," said Spencer Rogers, North Carolina Sea Grant Extension Program coastal hazards specialist. “This change was driven not so much by regulation as by public perception."

Meanwhile, Americans were learning that they couldn't hold back swollen waterways with rocks and concrete. Until the 1960s, virtually all flood control projects in America were structural measures—seawalls, levees, floodwalls, and river diversions—that did not always prevent waterways from overflowing. After major studies recommended a new direction for flood control, Congress enacted the federal flood insurance program in 1968. The program required new and substantially remodeled homes in floodplains to be built on pilings or tall foundations, their first inhabited floors at or above the 100-year flood elevation. Over the past 30 years, these rules and other measures have protected countless newer homes, but many older structures remain vulnerable.

So now the federal government is paying to move or elevate some of these older homes. Still, there are questions about the cost of these programs. Why can't residents pay to move or elevate their own buildings? Why should U.S. taxpayers foot the bill? What are the federal government's responsibilities for reducing hazard vulnerabilities, and what are the private citizens' duties to prevent disaster damages next time? Apparently, one answer to these questions is that the federal government's role in protecting people from harm is growing, while the citizen's responsibilities seem to be shrinking.