chiliedogg

You should watch Jon Stewart's monologue from yesterday.

Stormwater management is very complicated, important work nobody thinks about. It's like backend software - if you aren't thinking about it that means it's working.

Usually, when you see a building being built, what you see as the beginning is actually the result of years of work by engineers and planners designing and reviewing drainage, transportation, utilities, emergency access, environmental impacts, and more before anyone even talks about any structures. Lots of the time, this work is performed via subdivision improvements that will incorporate a storm sewer system going to a big detention facility (e.g. that lake that's in the middle of every suburban neighborhood) that accounts for a certain amount of impervious cover on every lot in the development and is built before the land is developed.

I work in a small enclave for the mega-rich where every residential home is essentially its own subdivision, and homeowners are shocked that the drainage design and review takes months or even years of work and requires individual drainage ponds or ranwater collection vaults, while the building itself takes a day or 2 for approval.

Innocent Latinos are the worst of the worst in their eyes.

There's some nuance on whether it's floodplain or floodway.

It gets technical, but the easy answer is that floodplain us where the waters will rise, while floodway is the path along which water is intended to travel. Lots of the time, the floodplain and the floodway are the same thing, but not always.

Development in the floodplain can sometimes be achieved through a floodplain development permit with a no-rise certification (there will be no net rise of water level in event of a flood caused by the development in the floodplain)

Development in the floodway is generally a hard no, because the floodway is where you want the water to go, and you want water flowing fast in the floodway to clear space for the water coming in behind it. Putting structures on stilts increases friction and slows water down, causing it to back up more upstream.

I have a separate cell phone for city business, so I don't have ANY cross-contamination between personal and city data.

And it's been handy in Open Records requests where reporters have asked for my phone and text logs. With the personal and city info being separate, I don't have to worry about needing the state AG to authorize reductions.

I black out sensitive data (there's a list of what kinds of data should be redacted without an AG opinion), and I hand it over.

To what end?

We can't just kick people out of their existing homes or shut down businesses because the maps changed around them. We allow existing structures to remain, but if they're wiped out in a flood we don't allow them to be rebuilt.

The tricky part is when you get outside of cities into counties, where there's generally no permits required for building structures. It's the utilities and subdivision improvements that get attention because they require government involvement.

And strictly speaking, development in the floodplain is prohibited by FEMA, not the county. So the county will tell you "no" if you ask, but they aren't actively hunting for it.

In cities with code enforcement and building permits in a smaller area of land it's a little easier, but even then in my tiny city it's hard to find everything that gets done illegally. It's usually spotted when the neighbors complain, or if our inspectors happen to see it while looking at a neighbor's property.

Just last week we found someone that had filled in a detention pond, scraped all the trees out of the back of their lot (trees provide erosion control and friction to slow down and spread water), and added about 1500 square feet of concrete (speeds up water flow and reduces amount absorbed into ground) when the neighbor asked our arborist to identify which trees needed to come down for fire safety.

I'm published in watershed analysis - specifically stormwater discharge. I work in a municipal development office in Texas and specialize in drainage plans.

That's simply not accurate.

You generally can't build in the 100-year floodplain. What happened here, from a drainage engineering standpoint, is a combination of 3 factors:

1. Many of the buildings in question were built prior to the flood plain being defined in that location, and existing non-conforming structures are generally allowed to remain.

2. New buildings were built a few years back, but out of the 100-year floodplain. Part of that was a floodplain map revision. These can be obtained through FEMA if an engineer provides an analysis showing either that mitigation techniques will change the floodplain area or that the flood maps are incorrect. Many flood plain maps are decades old, and the actual flood areas are different for a variety of reasons.

Unfortunately, there are also engineers who will stamp whatever you put in front of them if you pay them, and there are in fact engineers who specialize in saying "yes" and providing bad analysis to get around drainage, detention, and floodplain requirements. Lots of them are foreign-based, which is why most Texas jurisdictions have started requiring engineers licensed in Texas so we can go after their credentials when their bad engineering leads to failure. The reality is FEMA doesn't have the resources to double-check the analysis of every project, and they must rely on the engineer's stamp as evidence that best practices have been used.

3. This wasn't a 100-yr flood event. If all the cabins had been located outside of the 100-yr it likely wouldn't have changed anything.

They skipped the phase where all the doctors were replaced by NPs and PAs.

A stable alliance with the Trump administration isn't possible, as has been made abundantly clear. There's no reason to give concessions to preserve one.

They need to stop pussy-footing around with Trump.

He says 30, they need to reciprocate with 60 percent, and will back down to 20 when he cancels the 30.

Make it permanently harmful to threaten this bullshit.

What we need to do is start a campaign talking about how he's not smart enough or brave enough to try and revoke her citizenship.

Dude is easily manipulated.

The original spaceship Enterprise was a test orbiter without engines.