Long Beach, Miss. – Standing on the slab that was once her Gulf Coast retirement home, Jocelyn Turnbough has a clear vision of her own personal Hurricane Katrina counterpunch: a new seaside estate, with a wraparound veranda, a sunroom and a small wading pool out front.
Central to this rebuilding plan is the intention to ignore a plea from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that her new home be elevated on stilts.
“At my age, I don’t want to have to go up steps,” said Turnbough, 69, a retired middle- school teacher. “I want to be able to walk in at ground level.”
The conflict between FEMA’s request and Turnbough’s desires demonstrates a much broader clash here along the Gulf Coast over whether to cede large swaths of land to nature, to rebuild much as it was or to rebuild homes, at a higher price, with more robust foundations and on a structures that raise them above ground.
The debate is playing out all along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, featuring a cast that includes disaster victims, coastal engineers, mortgage lenders, the insurance industry and local, state and federal government officials.
FEMA ignited the discussion by issuing late last month a jigsaw puzzle of 228 new maps that, when pieced together, make up the entire 80 miles of Mississippi coast and reach as much as 22 miles inland. These maps represent the biggest simultaneous proposed expansion of federally defined flood zones in the history of the 37-year-old National Flood Insurance Program. The maps for the Louisiana coast will be published early next year.
The maps for both states, based on damage caused by Katrina and other hurricanes in the past 20 years, are advisory for now because it will take FEMA at least a year to confirm their accuracy. During this critical rebuilding period, it is up to the local governments to decide if they will honor FEMA’s request to adopt the more conservative and more costly standards.
But when the maps become final, FEMA will have the power to force the hands of local governments, because it can ban cities and their residents from the FEMA-run flood-insurance program if they do not respect the official maps.
“These are very hard decisions,” said Todd Davison, FEMA’s regional director of mitigation. “There is no denying that.”