This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina.
Earlier this year, elected officials from 18 towns and counties devastated by Hurricane Helene gathered outside the Madison County courthouse in Marshall, North Carolina. Standing in a street still stained with the mud left behind when the French River overran its banks, they called for swifter state and federal help rebuilding their communities.
Everyone stood in the chill of a late January day because the first floor of the courthouse, built in 1907, remains empty, everything inside having been washed away in the flood. The county’s judicial affairs are conducted in temporary offices as local leaders wrangle state and federal funding to rebuild. Local officials hope to restore the historic downtown, and its most critical public buildings, without changing too much about it. They, like most of the people impacted by Hurricane Helene’s rampage in September, don’t doubt another flood is coming. But they are also hesitant to move out of its way.
“When you talk about what was flooded and moving it, it would be everything, and that’s just not realistic,” said Forrest Gillium, the town administrator. “We’re not going to give up on our town.”
They may not have to. FEMA is no longer enforcing rules, first adopted during the Obama administration, that required many federally funded construction projects to adopt strict siting and building standards to reduce the risk of future flooding. The rules were withdrawn by the first Trump administration and then re-implemented by executive order under Biden. Now, they’ve been withdrawn by Trump for the second time.
The change eases regulations dictating things like the elevation and floodproofing of water systems, fire stations, and other critical buildings and infrastructure built with federal dollars. Ultimately, the rules were intended to save taxpayers money in the long run. Many other federal, state, and local guidelines still apply to the programs that help homeowners and businesses rebuild. Still, FEMA said rolling back the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will speed up recovery.
“Stopping implementation will reduce the total timeline to rebuild in disaster-impacted communities and eliminate additional costs previously required to adhere to these strict requirements,” the agency said in a statement released March 25.
President Trump rescinded the standard through an executive order on Jan 20. It required federal agencies to evaluate the impact of climate change on future flood risk and weather patterns to determine whether 500- and 100-year floodplains could shift and, if so, consider that before committing taxpayer money to rebuilding. The guideline required building critical facilities like fire stations and hospitals 3 feet above the floodplain elevation, and all other projects receiving federal funding at least 2 feet above it, said Chad Berginnis, who leads the Association of State Floodplain Managers. The idea was to locate these projects so they were beyond areas vulnerable to flooding or design them to withstand it if they could not be moved.
Easing the standard comes even as communities across the United States experience unprecedented, and often repeated, flooding. Homeowners and businesses in Florida, along the Mississippi River, and throughout central Appalachia have endured the exhausting cycle of losing everything and rebuilding it, only to see it wash away again. The Federal Flood Risk Management Standard was meant to break that cycle and ensure everything rebuilt with taxpayer money isn’t destroyed when the next inundation hits.
“Why on Earth would the federal government want it to be rebuilt to a lower standard and waste our money so that when the flood hits if it gets destroyed again, we’re spending yet more money to rebuild it?” Berginnis said.
Last fall, federal climate scientists found that climate change increases the likelihood of extreme and dangerous rainfall of the sort Helene brought to the southeast. Such events will be as much as 15 to 25 percent more likely if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. With more extreme rainfall come challenges for infrastructure that was designed for a less extreme climate.
“You’re going to have storm sewers overwhelmed. You’re going to have basins that were designed to hold a certain kind of flood that don’t do it anymore,” Berginnis said. “You’re going to have bridges that no longer can pass through that water like it used to. You have all of this infrastructure that’s designed for an older event.”
The National Resources Defense Council said the Obama-era standard was developed “because it is no longer safe or adequate to build for the flood risks of the past” and with the rollback, “the federal government is setting up public infrastructure to be damaged by flooding and wasting taxpayer dollars.”
Officials across western North Carolina have expressed frustration with the pace of rebuilding while acknowledging that they don’t want to endure the same problems over and over again.
Canton, North Carolina continues recovering from its third major flood in 20 years. “Everything that flooded in 2004, flooded in ’21. Everything that flooded in ‘21, flooded in 2024,” Mayor Zeb Smathers said. Stategies like new river gauges and emergency warning systems, coupled with land buyouts, have helped mitigate the threat. However, mitigation brings its own risk. The town has seen its tax base dwindle as people who lost their homes moved on after accepting buyouts or deciding that rebuilding was too much effort. When it comes to public buildings, Smathers struggles with the idea of moving something like the school, which has seen its football field flooded in each storm. He feels it is more cost-effective to rebuild than to move, and saves energy and hassle, too.
“I don’t think it’s a one size fits all situation,” he said. “But in the mountains, we’re limited on land and where we can go.”
Much of downtown Canton lies in a floodplain next to the Pigeon River. Smathers wants more flexibility from FEMA and greater trust in local decisions rather than more rules about where and how to build.
Though local governments fronted some of the cost of rebuilding according to FFRMS standards, much of that required work has been federally subsidized.
Josh Harrold, the town manager of Black Mountain, said the Obama-era rules weren’t onerous. Helene decimated the town’s water system, municipal building, and numerous buildings and homes. “We know this is going to happen again,” he said. “No one knows what that’s going to be like, but we are taking the approach of, we just don’t want to build it back exactly like it was. We want to build it back differently.”
Harrold and other officials said they don’t yet know how Trump’s order rescinding the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will impact reconstruction. And it comes as some municipalities adopt and refine stricter floodplain rebuilding rules of their own. In January, Asheville adopted city ordinance amendments to comply with the rebuilding requirements set forth by the National Flood Insurance Program. It is not clear what Trump’s order might mean for that. City officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Berginnis said communities may not see immediate results from this change – but the effects will be felt in the future if leaders bypass the added protection it required: “Everything that gets rebuilt using federal funds will be less safe when the next flood comes.”
