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Short abstract:

Flood maps are the authoritative source of flood risk information in the United States. How public officials read them reflects the sometimes-conflicting imperatives of bureaucracy and politics. Because what they deem to be the risk object shapes the social construction of disaster protection.

Long abstract:

This paper argues Flood Insurance Rate Maps are the backbone and bane of the U.S. government’s trillion-dollar National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). While flood maps are crucial to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) administration of the NFIP, updating the nation’s 22,000 flood maps is an impossible task. Ample research on the social consequences of risk mapping demonstrates that flood maps are highly contentious and often outdated, inaccurate, and unreliable. However, scholarship analyzing how flood risk mapping processes unfold in practice is scarce. To address this gap, I chart the risk mapping process in New Orleans. Drawing on rich ethnographic, interview, and documentary data, I investigate the case of New Orleans’ new flood map. As this new map went into effect in September 2016, controversy erupted. Champions of the new map suggested the below-sea-level city was safe from flooding. Critics charged it was an outline for disaster. The contention masked FEMA’s decade long process to redraw the city’s urban floodplain. At the outset, FEMA’s modernization drive promised to streamline the mapping process and improve accuracy. By the end, the local government had thrice questioned the accuracy of the new flood map. How local officials, federal bureaucrats, and elected representatives read flood maps reflects the sometimes-conflicting imperatives of bureaucracy and politics. Because what these actors deem to be the risk object intimately shapes the social construction of disaster protection.