Of hazards and mitigation

By Charles Sowell  

JANUARY 18, 2010 9:57 a.m. (0)

Think of Greenville County’s latest natural disaster plan as a lightening rod on the roof of your house.

It is put there on a sunny day in anticipation of the stormy one. When the storm does come and the bolt from above strikes, it is diverted harmlessly into the ground.

It is a simple explanation for a complex plan, said Robert Hall, the county’s floodplain administrator for codes enforcement and one of the officials charged with coming up with the document.

It is also an easy way to digest the wonkish name for the program: “Multi-jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan.”

The county puts the plan together, with input from as many sources as possible and in consultation with the cities and towns, to qualify for federal money to deal with natural disasters.

Therein is one of the plan’s many bottom lines.

There are others that touch chords closer to home with residents like protecting their health and safety and the safety of their property.

Working on the plan also opens up new vistas for county officials, said Keith E. Drummond, manager of codes enforcement and the man responsible for coming up with changes to the old five-year disaster plan.

And, in opening up those vistas, new perspectives are gained by the people most responsible for making sure homes don’t flood; the people who chart the streets first to be plowed during a winter storm.

“I learned a tremendous amount by taking a helicopter ride over the main power transmission line into downtown Greenville during the 2005 ice storm,” said Paula Gucker, assistant county administrator for public works. “You don’t get a feel for how much damage several inches of ice can do until you see the big picture.”

That storm occurred just as the old natural disaster plan was coming out, said Drummond. “We’ve learned a lot since then.”

The plans are done by federal decree to make sure local governments have done all they can to be ready in the event of natural disasters.

The lack of such plans can be seen by anyone with the time and inclination to drive along the banks of Brushy Creek between Howell and Hudson roads.

In the 1950s through the early 1970s, when many of the subdivisions that line Brushy Creek were built, there was no such thing as floodplain planning, Drummond said. Consequently, people who bought homes next to the babbling brook that was Brushy Creek then started getting flooded out of their homes on a regular basis in the 1980s.

“We tried everything we could think of,” said Gucker.

In the end it was deemed cheaper to buy home owners out and let the creek go back to its natural state, Drummond said.

Putting a number on how much the floodplain buyout program will cost overall would purely be a matter of speculation, said Gucker. Funding for the program comes from all property owners through the county’s stormwater assessment fee and from FEMA funds.

More than 100 homes are tentatively slated for buyout along Brushy Creek alone and estimates on the cost have run as high as $28 million, including federal money.

“People who live there now tell me how amazed they are to see all that water come coursing down Brushy,” said Gucker.

When the homes were there the rising water, and much of the damage, was hidden.

County officials think the county finally has a handle on the worst of the flooding problems, Hall said.

“Honestly though, I think the floodplain buyouts are going to continue for some time,” Drummond said.

There are so many things that can go wrong in an urban floodplain, Gucker said.     “Despite the fact that we have one of the most stringent floodplain management regulations in the country we still get floods.”

Something as simple as a neighbor who tosses a pile of limbs into the creek instead of hauling them off to the dump can clog a culvert and flood an entire neighborhood, Gucker said.

“And we do have that happen often,” she said.

The new disaster plan is far better than the first one, said Drummond.

“For one thing, we got as many people as we could with knowledge to give us input,” he said. “The National Weather Service played a big part.”

And in response to that the county plans to install a series of monitoring sites to measure things like rainfall and send the data back to the weather service and the appropriate county officials.

“When the big flood hit downtown Greenville back in 2004 we got a lot of rain in a short amount of time in West Greenville,” Gucker said.

That taught officials it is not always the 100-year flooding events that can cause problems in urban environments, Drummond said.

“Our floodplain policy is actually more stringent that FEMA’s (the Federal Emergency Management Agency),” he said.