Valley Streamers blast FEMA — again

Updated: 10/13/2010, 9:10 a.m.

Given another chance to express their outrage over the new federal flood maps, Valley Stream residents came out in full force to do just that last week at Central High School. Nearly 300 people attended an Oct. 7 meeting organized by Hempstead Town Councilman Jim Darcy.

In a second town hall meeting with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, area homeowners expressed their anger over being included in the high-risk flood zone, leaving them with premiums of $2,000 a year or more. Several people accused FEMA of creating the new flood zone in Valley Stream simply to collect money to pay off its debts from Hurricane Katrina. Others said that FEMA is wrong to assume that the community is even at risk for coastal flooding.

Roy Wright, a deputy director in FEMA’s Risk Analysis Division, said that historical data was used to determine the high-risk zones. When pressed several times to name a storm that flooded Valley Stream, however, FEMA officials could not.

Cochran Place resident Joe Margolin said he would like to sit down with FEMA officials to discuss past coastal floods. “It would be a very brief meeting,” Margolin said, “because there are none.”

He said that the huge premiums people are paying will never make their way back to Valley Stream. “I have a feeling deep down,” Margolin said of the money, “that it’s on its way to New Orleans.”

Dena Biondo, a Gibson resident, said she wanted to see the data on which FEMA was basing the maps. Wright noted that storms that hit eastern Long Island were used as a predictor for flooding in the event that a storm hit land farther west.

“We don’t care about projections,” Biondo said. “We care about actualities.”

FEMA officials noted that if a coastal flood were to hit homes that didn’t have insurance, the most help homeowners could get from the federal government would be $30,000. Many in the audience responded, “I’ll take it.”