By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 7, 2008

New flood zone maps proposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency could result in mandatory flood insurance and stricter building codes for a huge swath of downtown Washington, according to a presentation at a planning board meeting last week.

The maps show a proposed flood zone several blocks wide and extending in a broad crescent from the Lincoln Memorial to Fort McNair, in Southwest Washington.

The zone would include Federal Triangle, much of the Mall to the base of Capitol Hill and a large section of Southwest Washington.

The proposed changes were unveiled in the fall but have not been widely publicized, community planner Michelle Desiderio said at a National Capital Planning Commission meeting Thursday.

"The proposed flood plain map modifications . . . may have a potentially adverse impact on federal operations and private businesses within the nation's capital," Marcel C. Acosta, the commission's acting executive director, wrote in a letter to Tim Karikari, a D.C. Department of the Environment official, who is the city's designated contact on the issue.

The changes would dramatically expand what is called the 100-year flood zone, within which flood insurance often is required and more stringent building codes might exist. The flood maps haven't been updated since 1985, officials said, and the hazard zone then was far less extensive.

The proposed changes are the result of a five-year FEMA program to reexamine 90,000 flood hazard maps throughout the country, according to spokesman Butch Kinerney.

During Hurricane Katrina, levees around New Orleans either failed or proved to be inadequate, opening the city to vast destruction.

Kinerney said FEMA is telling city officials that if a community cannot prove that its levees work, a new FEMA map is drawn as if the levees didn't exist, Kinerney said.

That is the case in the District.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently found that a series of levees designed to protect downtown Washington was inadequate, according to Steve Garbarino, the Corps of Engineers' project manager for flood protection in the Washington area.

The chief problem, he said, is with the sandbag barrier periodically erected across 17th Street near the National World War II Memorial in times of high water from the Tidal Basin and Potomac River. He described the temporary barrier as unreliable. "We need to make that permanent," he said Friday. He said the Corps of Engineers wants to install a "post and panel" levee across 17th Street.

Holes would be cut in the street and then covered with plates. If a flood occurred, the plates would be removed, he said. Poles would be inserted in the holes and panels secured between the poles. The panels could form a barrier up to six feet in height.

He said nothing had been designed, and he did not know what a levee would cost. Congress would have to fund it.

Kinerney, of FEMA, said that if the levees are fixed, the maps would reflect that. If the levees are not fixed, the proposed map changes would take effect, he said, and could affect property and development because of increased insurance and code requirements.

The planning commission, which by law reviews all flood-control projects by the federal government or on federal property, agreed. Acosta, the commission's acting executive director, complained that the proposals had not been extensively publicized.

"Federal property managers, private sector property owners and the public are likely to be unaware of the new flood risks to their businesses, residences and properties -- and more importantly, unaware of the new insurance and building code requirements imposed because of the proposed map changes," he wrote, urging FEMA and the city to make further notifications and extend a public comment period that ended Thursday.

He noted that such projects as the expansion of the Department of Commerce building and the construction of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture would have to be reviewed if the map changes are adopted because they would be partly in the new hazard zone.

Several commission members expressed dismay when the map proposals were shown at Thursday's meeting.

The proposals are "ridiculous," said John Parsons, the National Park Service's associate regional director for land resources and planning, whose last day on the commission was Thursday.

"I suppose if the city was annihilated, and there was no one to fill sandbags, I guess they'd have a point," he said.