Flood predictions considered a wash

We all know the story of Noah’s Ark, of how one cold raindrop landed on a goatherd’s balding head, followed by another and another. Of how Noah took the raindrops as prophecy and began manically ripping boat wood from his picket fence.

His wet goats huddled on the back porch and pawed frantically to be let inside. Noah’s neighbors, convinced the 500-year-old geezer no longer knew his burro from a burrow, rolled through the puddles laughing until their clothes were wet with mud.

Only two goats survived; only two of anything survived, save for Noah’s family unit. There have been numerous reports throughout history of people who sighted Noah’s boat or pieces of the Costco-sized barge anyway, in the Ararat Mountains of Turkey. There have been numerous reports of the Great Flood and floods great but not Biblical. What there haven’t been are reports of Noah’s descendents or the neighbors who were uninvited to the ark’s maiden voyage, no pop-up reunion invitations on the Internet for classmates from the washed-up world.

There’s a good chance, however, that some of descendants of the first disaster forecaster wound up at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

There’s an even greater likelihood that the descendants of Noah’s snickering neighbors settled in Spokane Valley, where FEMA has prophesied another great flood.

“FEMA says when the flood comes, the water will be moving through here at 722 cubic feet per second,” said Steve Goeden, a Spokane Valley resident who lives in the path of the government’s hypothesized destruction. “There’ll be five feet of water coming through my living room. They’re either smoking some damn good stuff or somebody sold someone a con job.”

The humor drained out of flood prognostications several years ago when banks began deferring to FEMA on whether mortgaged homes needed flood insurance. The insurance can cost upwards of $1,000. Goeden pays roughly $500 a year to insure a modest manufactured home. Hundreds of homeowners in his area have made such payments since 1993.

The flood plain in which Goeden’s home on Dishman Road is located stems from Chester Creek, an almost seasonal stream that begins north of Mica eight miles from Goeden’s home and meanders into Spokane Valley by way of the Painted Hills Golf Course and Dishman-Mica Road. At the golf course, the creek swells with runoff fairly easily and even crosses low-lying Thorpe Road on occasion. Within a mile, though, the creek peters out in a large gravel basin feeding the local aquifer.

FEMA’s disaster forecast is based on the assumption that someday the ground will freeze so hard it won’t be able to suck down Chester Creek. This will happen precisely when Spokane Valley receives enough snow to bury a typical third-grader and is then clobbered by a historic heat wave. The heat wave will melt all the snow within 24 hours, washing the smirk off Goeden’s face as he frantically tries to build a boat. Statistically, this flood could take place once every 100 years.

By its own admission, the government’s theory is not perfect. FEMA vowed 13 years ago to reconsider its flood plain and now expects to rectify the situation by June 2008. Exit 289 tried to discuss this matter with FEMA last week to no avail. Over three days we placed calls to two people, only to have them returned by a third person who suggested that a fourth person would be able to discuss the matter sometime after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

There is reason to believe the flood plain theory is somewhat flawed. Spokane County has gouged, below the Chester Creek terminus, a swale to trap the epic runoff that is deep enough to bury an ark. Also, FEMA records indicate at least 42 homeowners have hired their own surveyors and successfully proven their houses do not have a 1 percent chance of being inundated by flood during any given year. Those homeowners have been amended out of the danger area.

Newspaper snippets dating back 13 years outline these do-it-yourself alterations. In one yellowed article, a Kokomo resident peers though a surveyor’s transit instrument searching for proof that his castle is 2,000 feet above sea level instead of 1,999, because that’s the difference, at least in his neighborhood, between who carries flood insurance and who does not. That one foot, in the span of a decade, can be the difference between one family socking enough cash away for the first two years of their child’s tuition at Washington State University and another family paying an additional $500 to $1,000 a year on their mortgage for a catastrophe that has raffle-ticket odds of occurring.

Granted, Noah had big help with his forecasts. His descendants at FEMA, especially lately, could use some divine intervention.