It’s mostly going to be more than 50 years ago, but we did it a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in_the_United_States
I don’t want to discount the people who lost land and homes due to the creation of dams and reservoirs (My great grandpa purportedly lost his home due to some of this), but that feels really different than losing a coastal town due to rising sea levels.
Obviously from an American perspective, FEMA is very imperfect, but that we have structures and systems like FEMA makes it feel like people in coastal towns that get “washed away” will have some form of safety net to fall back on.
Am I missing something in that assessment?
FEMA doesn’t compensate lost land, and shouldn’t. Towns and cities who want to remain in environmentally unstable places are gonna have to figure that out.
States, towns, and cities could probably use eminent domain to take land that is going to flood too often. That way the owners would get some value and have to move. The problem is that then the rest of us are paying for land that’s going to vanish, and it’s a harder sell than paying for a reservoir.
FEMA doesn’t do that? I def agree they shouldn’t, but I thought that was one of the things they did.
The eminent domain bit feels like its probably too big for anything smaller than a large city to handle, so seems like states handling that is a good move. Don’t suppose you know of any states with any active lines of effort in that direction?