Yesterday news sources were announcing that the Army Corps of Engineers had made available, online, findings from its post-Katrina risk and reliability reports on New Orleans. The site is well worth a look, in part because the technology is cool. They have made flood map data available in a format that can be read by google earth, so “citizens” can choose a neighborhood in New Orleans, and then view flood maps for 50, 100, and 500 year events pre- and post-Katrina (the latter taking into account improved flood control installed since the hurricane).
These kinds of flood maps have been produced by the Army Corps for a long time, and they are crucial to contingency planning for agencies like FEMA (now part of DHS). Part of what is interesting here, however, is the explicit emphasis on making such maps publicly available so that “citizens”, as the report notes, “can make risk-informed decisions.” There is, as I have written in the past, a long history of efforts to make individual citizens take greater account of natural catastrophe risk in their decisions about where to build or buy houses. The 1968 Federal Flood Insurance Act was intended precisely to create a technology through which insurance companies would “price” the risk of flood, so that this risk would be built into housing costs through insurance premiums. The new technology, however, has afforded an apparently more direct way to communicate this information. One wonders, however, about the conflicting incentives created by federal programs aimed at New Orleans. One of the conditions for receiving federal aid is that one must live in your house (previously damaged by floods) for a period of time. The political pressure to promote reconstruction may come into conflict with the desire to govern citizens through their calculative decisions about flood risk.
Very interesting stuff. One thing to note is that if you click on a specific zone you can download “Consequence Data relative to all scenarios (100-yr where available)”. So this is the use of imaginative enactment to generate knowledge of consequences – which dates at least back to civil defense vulnerability mapping.
Meanwhile, there is another ‘migration’ of the vulnerability-mapping technique to track, within insurance, from the late 1960s work on catastrophe modeling Stephen describes (in the effort to develop a private insurance market for natural disasters) to recent efforts to develop a market in terrorism risk. This migration moves in the other direction, not from nuclear attack to natural disaster, but from natural disaster to terrorism attack. For example, RAND and Risk Management Solutions teamed up soon after 9/11 to combine catastrophe modeling with data on terrorism, both to advise policy-makers on where to focus terrorism-mitigation resources, and to help insurers price terrorism risk. This is from an article on the collaboration (http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=3713):
“RMS is in the business of advising insurance companies on the likely scale of risks from natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes to help the insurance companies know how to price their policies. RMS staffer Gordon Woo, a London-based computer programmer and game theorist, has devised a modeling program that attempts to calculate the potential values of property in a given area correlated to the potential scale of damage for such natural disasters and how likely very high damage events may be.
“While people do not regard deliberate destruction in the same way they look on the impersonal destructive forces of nature, the property values are the same in both cases. RAND has been working with RMS to adapt the modeling program to cover terrorist attacks, using a database of some 3,339 terrorist attacks that involved U.S. citizens or property between 1968 and 1998 to provide a rough graph of frequency and scale of damage — modified by some hypothetical assumptions in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, which were the largest to date.”
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title Flood Risk and Technologies of the Self. Thanks for informative article