Principal Investigator: Eugene A. Laurent (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Principal Investigator: George Roy Elmore, Jr. (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Principal Investigator: L. Douglas James (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Principal Investigator: Guy J. Kelnhofer (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Sponsor: GWRI
Start Date: 1969-10-01; Completion Date: 1971-09-30;
Keywords:
Description:
Successful implementation of a program to alleviate the consequences of flooding by restricting urban development in flood plains requires a good understanding of the pressures causing urban development to locate in hazard areas. Some of the needed insight must come from analysis of the history of flood plain settlement. The Peachtree Creek flood plain in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, occupies a very small portion of a large surrounding and rapidly expanding metropolitan area. Still, many homes and businesses have located in areas subject to flooding every few years. This report is a case study of how this development pattern came to be.
The case study is contained in three sections. The first presents the historical sequences and causes and the role of government officials in influencing development in the watershed from the time of earliest settlement and stresses flood plain development. The second presents an analysis of the relative values of undeveloped lots on and off the flood plain and discusses the extent to which observed differences are caused by expected flood damage as opposed to differences in other residential choice factors. The third presents the changes in stream water quality associated with urbanization as an example of the magnitude of the problem created by storm water washing of urban areas even if no sanitary sewer effluent is directly discharged into the creek. A concluding section presents the implications of the findings for planned flood plain management. Management programs deal with people, and multiple management approaches are needed so that at least one approach will communicate with each kind of individual involved.