Carolinas Encouraged Building in Flooded Areas

Monitor Wire Services

Flooding reached four miles inland, destroying coastal homes and farms. Worst hit were the factory animal farms in North Carolina, where an estimated 500,000 hogs and 10 million chickens and turkeys were drowned.

"Hurricane Floyd has produced one of the biggest agriculture-related environmental disasters we've ever seen in North Carolina," Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman said at the end of the month. "Water contamination caused by decomposing livestock carcasses poses one of the most immediate threats to public health, and we will do all we can to help communities and farmers eliminate this hazard as quickly as possible."

Glickman announced a $5 million in emergency aid to fund disposal of decaying hog and poultry carcasses contaminating water and drawing flies. FEMA and the Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration (EDA) also announced an unusual joint project. EDA, which promotes job creation and industry, is charged with guiding the area to rebuild using disaster-resistant construction and to encourage businesses to stay in the communities.

But a new study and a South Carolina politician have said that the problems were caused by earlier government programs of exactly this type, which brought homeowners and companies to build in flood plains and other areas prone to natural disaster.

Leventis and a coalition of environmental groups passed laws in South Carolina in 1996 that set limits on help for rebuilding farms in their state. "It is in large part because of this law, areas of our coast are not in the same tragic situation that communities in the North Carolina coastal plain find themselves today," he wrote in a statement last week. AP also reported that Leventis said that the flooding has worsened in recent years because more development has made it harder for water to drain. "It would be foolish indeed for us to provide federal money to rebuild in areas that aren't adequate," he said.

But South Carolina has its own problems. According to researchers at Clemson University, a dramatic boom in the sale of land along their coast began in 1972, when South Carolina adopted the federal flood insurance program.

Researcher Jeffery Allen, director of the South Carolina Water Resource Center, tracked the number of permits granted for development of parcels of land in Murrells Inlet from 1935-1995 as part of a NASA study into the effects of growth on coast lands. What he found was a huge increase in the sale of land beginning in the mid-1970s.

"We didn't intend to investigate the effect of the flood insurance program," Allen said. "But when we saw how the numbers changed after 1972, we said, 'Wow!' And then we asked what was causing the change."

According to Robert Becker, director of the Thurmond Institute at the University, the flood insurance program is a major reason the South Carolina coast has been developed.

"The federal flood insurance program fueled a speculative coastal land market by taking the risk out of building on the coast," he said. "Before 1972, few banks would lend money without a significant down payment to build a house or a hotel that might get blown off the marsh.

"The growth on South Carolina's coast over the past two decades has been driven by a federal program."

The Thurmond Institute researchers were drawn to that conclusion when they looked closely at the data from 1992, the year a coastal landowner sued the South Carolina Coastal Council when he was refused permission to rebuild in an area where Hurricane Hugo blew away the sand dunes. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state could prevent him from rebuilding but must also compensate the landowner for the loss.

While that lawsuit was being fought by the state, which argued that it should not have to compensate landowners for coastal property losses, development permits in Murrells Inlet dropped by 65 percent. Once the lawsuit was resolved, the number of permits rose by 378 percent in 1993.

"That clinched it for us," said Allen. "As long as the risk was taken away, people would build on the coast. When the personal risk returned, they built elsewhere."