PLANT CITY - Hillsborough County says most of the Walden Lake community sits in a 100-year flood plain. The city, through modeling studies performed by its engineering department, says that conclusion is not accurate.

Hillsborough performed its studies of the eastern portions of the county and submitted the results last year to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The county study revealed that about 1,400 parcels - most of them within Walden Lake, which contains 2,000 homes - would be included in the revised FEMA flood maps. The purpose of the flood insurance rate maps is to record the areas that have a 1 percent or greater chance of flooding in any given year.

Residents living in a designated flood zone must purchase flood insurance.

City Manager David Sollenberger told commissioners at a recent meeting that the city’s engineering department has completed an analysis that showed that the 1,400 parcels in Walden Lake and about 25 properties in the Summer Creek subdivision should be excluded from the flood plain designation and has submitted the results to FEMA for review.

Engineers are optimistic that FEMA will approve the city’s revised results, Sollenberger said.

Ray Reyes

By Neil Johnson
The Tampa Tribune

NEW ORLEANS - A dramatic increase in coastal property values is the force behind increasing insurance rates, an insurance official said Friday.

“The rise in the value of coastal properties is driving the rise in insurance rates, not an increase in the number of storms,” Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute based in New York City, said during the closing session of the annual National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans.

Still, hurricane losses in 2004 and 2005 played a role in the industry’s ratcheting up of rates.

From 1986 through 2005, hurricanes made up half of the nation’s insurance claims. In the previous 20 years, tornadoes were the largest source of insurance losses.

Seven of the nation’s10 most costly hurricanes occurred between August 2004 and October of 2005 with hurricane’s Katrina, Wilma, Rita and Dennis adding 3.3 million insurance claims to the 2.25 million filed in 2004, Hartwig said.

The value of coastal homes and businesses is $7 trillion from Texas to Maine, the states vulnerable to hurricanes.

In Florida, coastal property values are $2 trillion, making up 79 percent of the state’s insured value and are expected to double by 2014, he said.

Hartwig said the return on equity, a measure of profit, for insurance companies covering Florida have ranged from the middle teens to low single digits.

The week-long annual national conference ended on Friday. It drew more than 1,700 delegates, mostly from emergency management, law enforcement, federal and state agencies and hurricane experts.

By Neil Johnson
The Tampa Tribune

NEW ORLEANS - The nation needs to spend more money, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars, on additional research into hurricanes, the new head of the National Hurricane Center said at a press conference Wednesday.

Talking to reporters before the start of the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans, Bill Proenza said expanded research to improve forecasting models is the only way to better predict a storm’s track and strength.

“The nation is in a particularly vulnerable position for hurricanes and tropical storms,” he said.

As in past years, the research focus should be on forecasting rapid changes in a storm’s intensity that has lagged behind improvements in predicting a hurricane’s track, he said.

“Improvements have been essentially flat since 1992. There has not been significant improvement,” Proenza said.

He said there was no real increase in this year’s budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that oversees the hurricane center operations. 

By Neil Johnson
The Tampa Tribune

NEW ORLEANS - The federal government used a calm 2006 hurricane season to make major changes to better handle a disaster this year, the head of the nation’s relief organization said on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters before the opening of the National Hurricane Conference, Federal Emergency Management Agency Director David Paulison said his agency will be more nimble, proactive and better staffed this year than in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the northern Gulf coast.

The old system of waiting for a disaster to overwhelm local agencies before states stepped in, then waiting for states to need help before FEMA arrived did not work, Paulison said.

Now, FEMA will have personnel at emergency operation centers and supplies on the way before a hurricane strikes, he said.

“But FEMA is not there to take over. We’re there to help,” Paulison said.

Some of the improvements for 2007 over 2005 include:

* Improved victim registration that can handle 250,000 people a day and conduct 20,000 house inspections each day after a storm strikes

* A field command system that can quickly communicate with different local, state and federal agencies responding to the disaster

* 20,000 Global Positioning Satellite tracking devices on FEMA trucks to pinpoint their location down to the street corner

* Satellite communication to get real-time video of conditions and situations because after Katrina the agency got much of its information from television broadcasts

* Bringing the agency’s staffing up to 95 percent by the June 1 start of hurricane season

Some of these changes were tested during the February tornadoes that hit Florida, but Paulison said those were not the same as a large hurricane such as Katrina.

“The real test will come when we have a major disaster,” he said. 

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