Hacker News Reader

Comment by docsuser3 | Hacker News Reader

Here in Germany we have open maps like the following that were created by the government to inform of potential flood areas: https://umweltatlas.bayern.de/mapapps/resources/apps/umwelta...

Everyone that buys a house or land knows these maps and checks them since the last deadly flood happened a few years ago. I cannot believe that the US decided to defund the offices that help to gather these kind of information.

View on HN

Those flood maps are common across the first world, sometimes called a "flood overlay" and there is usually also a "bushfire overlay" if you live in Australia. They help describe risk, in the insurance sense, and are presumably used for both insurance and risk management.

In the US, the canonical flood map is maintained by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

https://www.fema.gov/flood-maps

of course there are flood maps here in the USA. The Federal government does some survey work, but in the US system, it is the county that is responsible for maintaining basic property and land use maps. Every State in the US is composed of county (or parish or some New England thing to be complete). The US Federal government is not defunding "everything". Also note that some parts of the US do not cooperate very much with the Federal government (mostly near Idaho area, others?). Texas regularly discusses becoming their own country, so of course Texas has its own mapping.

Crucially, the thing they was recently de-funded was not mapping but the federal agency that does hydrology. Hydrology being the science of how water flows in the environment around us.

For example, using GIS data combined with meteorological forecasts, a hydrological model may predict water levels of rivers or flood plains. If nobody is around to run the hydrological model on today’s data, you’re not getting your flood warning today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com