City's top designation for flood-mitigation efforts boosts flood insurance discounts for Tulsans

Flood mitigation and stormwater management are the types of dry subjects that can lull a community to sleep, only to have residents wake up the next morning to find their basements drenched in water.

Tulsans know all about that. Floods have been a persistent and painful part of the city's history since it was incorporated in 1898.

That's why city officials were especially proud to announce last week that Tulsa is one of only two communities in the country to receive a Class 1 rating in the National Flood Insurance Program's Community Rating System.

The designation means an even bigger cost savings for Tulsans who purchase National Flood Insurance Program policies. Under the city's previous Class 2 rating, Tulsans living in special flood hazard areas or in a FEMA flood zone A received a 40% reduction in their premiums. With the Class 1 designation - the highest possible ranking - eligible property owners will receive a 45% discount on their premiums.

"It is a huge deal," said Paul Zachary, director of the city's Engineering Services Department.

It's also been a long time coming. The city has been dealing with flooding from the Arkansas River and multiple creeks throughout its history, Zachary said, but the turning point came in 1984, when the Memorial Day flood left 14 people dead, injured 288 and flooded approximately 7,000 buildings.

In fact, in the 15 years from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, Tulsa was No. 1 in federally declared disasters, with nine, Zachary said.

"In the '60s and '70s, we were getting flooded every two to four years," he said. "Citizens across the city, from repetitively flooded areas, came to City Hall and said that was enough."

The federal government created the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968, and the city joined it just a couple of years later. The program helped provide a uniform definition of a floodplain as well as strategies and standards, emphasizing the 100-year flood level that could be implemented to help keep communities from encroaching on floodplains.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the city began developing new drainage criteria and adopted the use of master plans, Zachary said, but nothing was more important than the city's decision to plan for fully urbanized watersheds.

"The NFIP just looked at existing conditions, so basically what that created is somebody could develop, and then somebody else could develop and they could increase that base flooding (level)," Zachary said.

He stressed that a host of individuals and entities have been working on the city's flooding issues for decades.

"They gave their best efforts for the citizens of Tulsa," Zachary said. "Their legacy efforts established the foundation of the city's comprehensive stormwater management program."

The city has been part of NFIP's voluntary Community Rating System since 1991. The program requires communities to go above and beyond the NFIP's minimum standards in mitigating flooding if they want to qualify for insurance premium discounts.

"The reality was our flooding problems were so severe, that is what created us being a No. 1," Zachary said.

Zachary said a key factor in elevating the city's ranking from No. 2 to No. 1 was the local levee system.

"We have a levee system on portions of the Arkansas River, and the emergency measures established by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with the Tulsa County Drainage District helped propel us into a Class 1 facility," Zachary said.

For all the progress the city has made in flood mitigation, Zachary acknowledged that more work remains.

"We have just continued to aggressively address the flooding issues in the city of Tulsa and reducing flood loss, but the reason we joined in (the Community Rating System) and the reason we have scored so much is that is just how broken we were," Zachary said. "There was a lot of development that were thought to be lesser risk, but they turned out, as the basins urbanized and the base flood elevations rose, those poor people flooded."

The only other city in the nation to receive a Class 1 CRS designation is Roseville, California. The CRS ranking scale ranges from Class 10, whose recipients receive no insurance premium discount, to Class 1 designees, whose recipients receive a 45% discount.

National Flood Insurance Program policies issued or renewed in the city limits are eligible for the 45% discount in their premiums starting in April 2022.

"I am grateful for all Tulsa voters and leaders over the past several decades who turned us from a city that flooded regularly into one of the two best cities in America for flood protection!" Mayor G.T. Bynum wrote on his Facebook page.

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