The legislation also authorizes the creation of a national reserve fund to help the program handle major flood catastrophes, and urges Congress to appropriate $400 million a year to update the thousands of out-of-date flood control maps.
With climate change, one of the anticipated impacts is an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme rainfall which further increase the region's flood catastrophes, human casualties and economic loss.
Critics say both the Indian and Pakistani governments have repeatedly failed to act on lessons from the past on how to manage their yearly monsoon drenching, even as flood catastrophes become more frequent.
In Vermont, Gov. Peter Shumlin said the state had "a full-blown flooding catastrophe on our hands," and the state police were urging residents in some particularly hard-hit communities to climb as high as they could in their homes.
"There are many structural solutions on offer which can prevent flooding catastrophes, but they simply haven't proceeded," said Thomas Bauer, the president of the Federation of the German Construction Industry.
Who ever decided to sell a revolutionary scientific discovery, global warming, when they knew that most people would experience not warming, but extreme weather, floods, catastrophes, but not warming?
Maybe you have experienced some event in your own life, some flood or catastrophe that shook you to your core.
A key issue was whether the nearby Deer Creek Debris Basin is deep enough to handle a 100-year flood, a catastrophe that has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year.
As I gazed at the broken ruins of the dam, destroyed around 570AD by flooding, a catastrophe which marked the end of a civilisation, little children dressed in brightly coloured clothes appeared from nowhere, clutching treasures in their tiny hands.
