In the years leading up to Hurricane Harvey, a wrinkle in the federal flood-mapping system helped a company build homes in an at-risk Houston suburb.
Source:
Builders Said Their Homes Were Out of a Flood Zone. Then Harvey Came.
This recently posted New York Times article (12/2/17) shows that many of the homes and businesses that were damaged in Houston, TX, had been “lifted out of” the flood plain by filling in low-lying areas with dirt.
While the damages from the 2013 Longmont flood didn’t result from infilling, this article does raise questions about whether “taking an area out of the flood plain” is truly possible.
Many Longmont homes that were flooded in 2013 were not in the flood plain. When the river jumped its banks east of Lyons and screamed down the RR tracks, parts of Longmont Estates went under water. None of those homes was ever suspected to be in the flood plain.
It is fool-hearty hubris to think that we can “contain” the river by developing the crap out of it!