Value vs. Risk with Flood Plan

Today's print column

Complexity is the mother of shorthand.

That's how we, especially we in the media, boil stuff down. It's natural and understandable. But in many cases, it's also wrong, or at least misleading.

You've probably read or heard many times that the Army Corps of Engineers isn't recommending the city of Cedar Rapids' preferred, whole-enchilada, both-banks flood protection plan. And that's because the Corps can't pick a plan that costs more than the value of the property it protects. So the Corps picked a cheaper plan that protects only the east side of the Cedar River because the west side isn't worth enough to protect.

But that isn't exactly so.

Understanding what the Corps is saying is important, because its recommendation looms large in the local debate over whether we need a $375 million protection system, or can live with less. Some argue that if the feds don't think it's worth much, why protect it?

I dug, again, through the 200-plus page report. And I called up Dennis Hamilton, chief of the Corps' project branch. And it turns out shorthand comes up short.

Hamilton said the report's core concept is “average annual damage.” Myriad factors go into figuring it, but it's basically how much damage the Corps thinks, based on its models, that flooding will cause here in the future, divided into annual chunks.

The value of existing property is figured in, but only in terms of how much flood damage the Corps believes that property is at risk of sustaining. If you have a $1 million piece of property, the Corps really only cares about the fraction of its value that it concludes might get soaked.

And, in reality, the biggest factor that kept the Corps from recommending the whole enchilada is not property value. It's that Cedar Rapids just doesn't flood much. It takes a big flood to do serious damage here. And looking at 106 years of records, river flow rates, etc., big floods are very rare in the Corps' view.

So if the risk is low, the Corps believes it only makes financial sense to protect stuff that would be the most costly to replace if that tiny risk pans out. That's downtown and east bank industry, but even they barely make the cost/benefit cut.

On the west side, the Corps is simply playing the odds that protection costs more than the damage those neighborhoods would sustain in a flood - a flood  the Corps thinks probably won't happen.

So, really, the local debate should be less about property value and more about whether we're willing to roll the dice and accept the Corps' optimistic assessment of our risk. We'll dig into that on Tuesday.

Comments: (319) 398-8452; todd.dorman@sourcemedia.net