Blog action day

The state of the environment is a very important issue. However, Julie had a meeting two hours away last night, didn't get home until 9:30, and I had the kids solo. So actually blogging on the environment took a back seat. Maybe she can pick up the slack today. As environmental leader in charge of cleaning up Lake Champlain she might have something to say.

For my part, I spent the day at a conference on flood hazards at the Vermont Law School in South Royalton. I was a great mix of listening to scientists and lawyers. Most development along streams and rivers in the US is regulated to FEMA's flood maps, which in Vermont are generally about 30 years old, based on science with incredible error rates, based on inundation of flood waters when our hilly terrain in much more susceptible to erosion losses, only map a small portion of our streams, and allow rampant development in the floodplain anyway(as long as the home is elevated). By the way, helping townships regulate development based on these maps is what I currently get paid to do (not that I'm cynical). The FEMA program, while good intentioned and a decent base framework, is sorely lacking.

The River Management Program at the DEC (which pays part of my wages), has been trying to find a standard that works for Vermont. The output of this program has been the Fluvial Erosion Hazard program. For several years they've been using geomorphology to categorize our streams and determine the corridor size that would allow the stream/river to return to it's natural sinuosity in the landscape. The effort then is to create maps of these corridors for each stream, and work with the towns to use the maps in their zoning ordinances as a regulatory tool (and to actually keep development OUT of the floodplain). The effect is to return the river to a more natural and healthy state, where it is connected to it's floodplain and restores it's ecosystem services. It also protects Vermonters from the millions of dollars of flood losses due to erosion and flooding each year. Coincidentally, a side benenfit of letting the stream un-straighten is self (reducing slope and power) is that it should keep streams on the left side of state from dumping so much sediment and nutrients into Julie's lake. Bonus!

That's my blog topic, and was the subject of the conference I attended. I hear and think about this stuff on a more daily basis; the interesting part was to hear law professionals talk to state and municipal officials about the issue of whether or not regulating development out of the floodplain is a "taking" of property rights from a homeowner (the answer seems to be usually no, based largely on the fact that your property rights don't allow for you to bring harm to other people, in this case an increase in flood damages downstream). If you want to find out more about the program, you can visit the VT DEC River Managment Program website: http://www.anr.state.vt.us/dec/waterq/rivers.htm