More than half of Texas counties, all of them rural, don't have floodplain maps

More than half of Texas counties, all of them rural, don't have floodplain maps, Moss Buchele reports for State Impact. David Maidment, a hydrologist at the University of Texas, told Buchele, “It’s been done in all the populated areas where most of the people live. But about six percent of the population live in half the counties in Texas that have no floodplain mapping. I think that’s an issue of economic justice. Why should people who live in rural areas have no floodplain maps just because they live in rural areas?”

While Texas has been in a drought, there is fear that when the rain comes, many rural counties without floodplain maps will be unprepared, and many of them are in the wetter, eastern third of the state.

"Maidment advised the Federal Emergency Management Agency on a project to update floodplain maps nationwide. He says the project ran short of money, forcing the feds to pick and choose where to map," Buchele writes. While some think the state should partner with counties and local governments to create the maps, "Maidment is not hopeful that those funds will be forthcoming. He thinks that property owners could even try to pool their funds themselves, to finance mapping. As long as those maps don’t exist, he says, there will be a blind spot in flood planning in many rural parts of the state."

To read the story and/or listen to a radio interview with Maidment, click here. FEMA map from 2011 shows that they didn't finish mapping the entire state before ending the project: