Doing the Limbo

This is a slightly technical entry, but it explains one of the most pressing issues in the county right now. The thought process behind this essay was a bit of a eurika moment for me. In fact, what I say here is a little speculative. No one else has made this argument.

Almost no redevelopment has happened in the county so far. Many people have gutted their homes (or more accurately many volunteers have gutted people’s homes), but very few have started re-wiring, hanging drywall or replacing damaged doors and windows. It is a weird limbo state. One of the main reasons people have not done anything is that vital information has not been released by the Federal Government. Meanwhile, the county continues to mold and molder.

Background paragraph:
The only way to get flood insurance in this country is to sign up with a program run and subsidized by the federal government (called the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)). To participate in federal flood insurance your house needs to be elevated high enough that it will not get wet in a (100 year) flood. The government might say, “In this area, all houses must be two feet off the ground, but in this other area, they must be three feet off the ground and in this third area they don’t need to be raised at all.”

Well, in Jefferson Davis County and the other hard hit counties, including Biloxi, the government has not issued the maps that tell you how high you have to raise your house. They were due in November, then December, then March, and now who knows.

The Feds say the maps are hard to produce, the levees make everything difficult. They have had 7 months to work on it, and I long ago concluded that it was not a technical question. I and everyone else assumed that it had something to do with politics, but what? For a long time, I concluded that the maps showed that all the houses needed to be raised very high, and the feds did not want to announce them. Still, that explanation did not make sense.

The answer is that the level of flooding is tied to the strengths of the levees. The Army Corps of Engineers believes that unless more money is spent, the levees will fail again in the next 100 years. If the levees fail, houses will need to be raised 10 or 20 feet off the ground to stay dry. This would be the death knell of a community and would unleash a political fire storm. Can you imagine an urban community with houses on stilts 20 feet high? You can’t.

So rather than saying the levees will fail, the government says nothing. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that it will cost almost $10 billion to fix the levees and they will not certify them as adequate until that money is likely to be spent.

Jefferson Davis is caught in limbo. No one wants to do anything because they don’t know the new rules. If someone starts to fix their house and Congress and the President will not commit the $10 billion, oh well, the home owner loses their investment. We have this community of 67,000 people (and many more outside the county) who want to get on with their lives, either rebuild their homes or start over somewhere new, but they have been in limbo for seven months, waiting for the feds to make a decision. It is not right and hard to watch.

At least, I feel like I understand the issue now.