Urban flooding has the potential to exacerbate the racial inequality that is an undercurrent of the nationwide protests over the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a black man in custody by Minneapolis police. “When you look at the entire urban community, there are profound impacts due to urban flooding that go beyond physical property damage the risk of injury and loss of life.” “The reality is that you typically find in our floodplains many of society’s vulnerable populations,” Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said at the conference yesterday. “Socially vulnerable populations add to the complexity.”Ī major concern about flooding in cities is that the residents who are most vulnerable-those who live in the lowest-lying areas or in neighborhoods without green space to absorb water-are often poor and members of minority groups. “The risk to the nation is concentrated in the metro areas,” flood expert Doug Plasencia said yesterday at a national conference on flooding. At the same time, urban development is creating more impervious surfaces in cities, and aging municipal sewer systems are overwhelmed by the increasing water. The concentration of flood damage in urban areas with large Black populations may contrast to images of hurricanes hitting affluent coastal areas and riverine floods swamping rural, largely white communities.īut urban flooding and its disproportionate impact on minorities and low-income residents are becoming a growing concern as climate change intensifies floods. disproportionately harms African American neighborhoods, an E&E News analysis of federal flood insurance payments shows. ![]() Of the seven ZIP codes that suffered the costliest flood damage from Katrina, four of them had populations that were at least 75% Black, government records show.įlooding in the U.S. When Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana in 2005, the damage was the most extensive in the region’s African American neighborhoods. When Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas in 2017, the neighborhood that suffered the worst flood damage was a section of southwest Houston where 49% of the residents are nonwhite.
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