House Passes Flood Insurance Relief Bill with Amendments – Now Senates Turn
Floridians at risk with the most subsidized policies facing sharp rate hikes due to previously passed Biggert-Waters bill.
Palm Coast, FL – March 7, 2014 – On March 4, 2014, the House voted 306-91 to approve the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act (H.R. 3370) with amendments. The House amendments further rein in and hold the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) accountable for the Biggert-Waters implementation issues. As passed, the bill would repeal FEMA’s authority to increase premium rates at time of sale or new flood map, and refunds the excessive premium to those who bought a property before FEMA warned them of the rate increase. It also limits any premium increase to 18% annually and adds a small assessment on policies until everyone is paying full cost for flood insurance. The Senate must now pass the amended version before the bill can become law.
Learn more about flood insurance premiums at a glance
Recommended reading: U.S. House overwhelmingly passes flood insurance relief bill by Alex Leary and Jeff Harrington – Tampa Bay Times
Palm Coasts’ Designed and Engineered
Perhaps a great selling point for Realtors:
‘ …Palm Coast has been designed to withstand what is termed ‘the 100 year Flood..’.
From: Richard Vaughan, director of environmental affairs for the ITT Community Development Corporation
The PalmCoaster, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter/Spring, 1982, Front Cover Page, p 1., p 13.
Hurricane in Palm Coast? Not Likely
Like reports of Mark Twains’ death, reports of Florida hurricanes too have been greatly exaggerated.
Over the years people have become accustomed to thinking of hurricanes as the exclusive property of Florida. One reason might be that the National Hurricane Center is headquartered in Miami. Almost every hurricane news report originates in Miami, regardless of where the storm is located, be it 50 miles or 2,000 miles from Florida.
What is a hurricane? it’s a large tropical cyclone with winds of at least 74 miles per hour, generally accompanied by heavy rains and high tides. The great spiral clouds of an average hurricane cover an area several hundred miles in diameter, although the area hit by the highest winds- those over 74 miles per hour-may only be 30 to 100 miles in diameter.
Hurricanes form over warm , tropical ocean areas and move to higher altitudes like great spinning tops. Their movement is quite erratic. They can suddenly change directions, make loops, slow up or stop-and later move at 10 to 20 miles per hour. This forward speed of the hurricane system increases the fury of the circular winds flowing around the hurricane’s eye, or center.
The north American hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, with most storms occurring in August, September and October.
The North Florida area isn’t immune to direct hits by hurricanes-no part of the United States’ gulf coast or eastern coastline is. But weather bureau records show that chances of a hurricane striking the Palm Coast region are considerably less than in most other coastal areas of the state and nation. Meteorologist Fred Crosby of the National Weather Service says,”the configuration of the coastline and the region’s latitude help explain the area’s relatively hurricane free record, which is based on the tracks of previous storms.”
“During the early stages of a tropical storm,” says Crosby, ‘The movement is generally from the east to the west. The direction gradually changes…this movement pattern would reduce the probability of one of them directly hitting the northeast Florida coast.”
Looking at the past 100 years, Flagler and Volusia counties hold an envious distinction neither county ever received a direct hit from a full hurricane moving directly in from the ocean.
Although a total of 19 hurricane’s occurring during the 100-year period have posed serious threats and five have actually passed over the area, in each case those storms had already been over land for a number of hours and were greatly weakened in force and without the beach damage caused by ocean storms.
The last hurricane to affect Palm Coast was Hurricane David, which brushed the area in early September, 1979. David’s highest wind gust recorded in Palm Coast was 59 miles per hour, and though it did drop 4.16 inches of rain over a 48 -hour period, no flood-related water damage occurred. One of the main reasons damage did not occur is because Palm Coast has been designed to withstand, what is termed, “the 100-year flood.” That, says Richard Vaughan, director of environmental affairs for ITT Community Development Corporation, means a flood that statistically could occur once in a hundred years could hit Palm Coast and no flood water would enter the houses.
AND:
…and ‘..density of 2.7 per acre…less than that of Beverly Hills…’
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shows in a very limited way how one environmental problem can lead to or cause another problem in a different but related sphere of influence. This is true whether one traverses radially or concentrically on the chart. Superimpose on this two dimensional scheme a third plane of flora-fauna and the complexity increases geometrically. Perhaps that is why lasting solutions to existing ills have been prohibitively expensive or virtually imossible. Prevention, therefore, appears to be the only viable approach. Solutions to the effects of man’s actions must be ascertained in the planning stage and must be given priority in the decision-making process.
Psychosocial Pollution
At Palm Coast we persist in a design that is almost a fiat: 2.7 dwelling unite per acre. Thus, as was earlier stated, we will have a city larger than Detroit or Philadelphia, with the density of , sa, a Beverly Hislls, California, rather thatn the malignant densities characteristic of the asphalt and concrete hungle. Why? Because ultra high density is cancerous. We are sure that many will quarrel with this statement, citing locales here and there where satisfaction exists in spite of ostensible crowding. Mabye it is as Deeevy points out, ‘the mass of man, although increasingly affected with mental discomfort, do not see themselves as overcrowded.’ It is better to state that we deal with probability of sociopathic behavior. ( It is similar to the tnedentious arguments about the facts of cigarette smoking induced cancer–there is always that irritation ‘Oh, my Uncle Louie has been smoking for ninety years and is as healthy as a horse.”) In any case, the preponderance of psychological , statistical, research and lay observations leaves us with the same funereal conclusion’ crowding is an excrescense that society can ill-afford.
The psychological results of density–how does one begin analyzing them? The senior author is now engaged in a monograph on the subject. ( Stochastic Processes and Density-Induced Deviant Behavior), and therefore is aware that the subject is broad and that he can present in this medium only a few of the references. It has been in the literature a long. time. For example, shall we begin the disquisition with Sir R. W. Rawson’s 1839 (circa) seminal paper6 published by the Journal of the Statistical Society of London? Or, jump about a century to R.D. McKenzies’ “The ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community” 7 published in 1925 , which formed the basis of the Elliott and Merrill chapter
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called “Ecological Aspects of Community Disorganization” (1941). 8 In that span of a hundred years, the observations consistently led to what is still a fundamental inference–that there is correlation between socially undesirable behavior and urban concentration. This “ancient history’ has much to recomment it, for these authors’ tocsins about the intensity of compression in the city served as prolegomena to recent much quoted experiments on the same eubject.
First, we take the physiological side. We have Dr. Hans Delye’s 9 pioneer findings on the stress of crowding leading to endocrine system changes and enlargement of the adrenal glands. The findings of Ratcliffe and Snyder 11 are pertinent, too, inasmuch as in their mamalian studies they discovered that stress from overcrowding could subject the individual to high blood pressure and heart and circulatory diseases. No doube the symptoms on both studies are related. In any case, the organic sequelae of crowding have a firm experimental base. Of course, under not so controlled conditions, observations are made by physicians in vivo , where they readily connect physical breakdown with urban -complex pressures.
If crowding pressures are pathogonomonic in the physiological sense, what are they in the psychological or, better said, psycholocial sense? Here again lay observations are buttressed by science. For those of us who grew up in slums, there were always to many people in the hallway; to many people in tenement apartment, too many people bumping each other running down the steps; too many people in the sidewalks, jostling each other, even crossing the street; too many children playing ball in the gutter; playgrounds so crowded…that your team might wait hours to play. Or worse. Four overlapping baseball diamonds, with outfielders from each running into each other. a world of fighting for turf! A world of open air shut-ins! When we were later schooled in the well-known psychological theories of frustration-aggression and frustration-regression, 11 we learned only what we knew already; that if you frustrate the expansion of a person’s space world, it will lead either to a form of attack behavior or to patterns appropriate to infantile character. Under attack behavior we often noticed family fights, gang wars, irrational arguments in retail stores, overt purposeful subway harassment , taxi harangues, etc. Infantile behavior was worse, if at times less identifiable: start insulation, unintelligible silences, easy crying, furtive hiding, almost catatonic responses. A world of the depersonalized. Lonely crowds
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FR:
An Approach to a New City: Palm Coast,
Dr. Norman Young and Dr. Stanley Dea.
( Reprinted from Environmental Affairs, Volume2, Number 1, Spring, 1972.)
ITT Levitt Ad 6904A P-B102-292
Dr. Young received his PhD from Columbia University, Master of Education at the University of Illinois; MA from Columbia University; BS from City College of New York, and a Ciploma in Engineering from the University of Dayton. He is President and Chairman of the Board of ITT Community Development Corporation. Dr. Dea received his PhD; MS in Engineering and BSCE all from the University of Arizona. He is Director of Environmental Engineering,, Levitt and Sons, Incorporated and is Staff Consultant for Ecology and Environmental Control to International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation.