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california Water Today 105 Under federal law, homes in these areas are not required to have flood insur- ance, and land use is not regulated. Levees protect many homes that would otherwise be located in the 100-year floodplain. Flood insurance subscription in California is low. In 2006, just over 30 percent of the households in the 100-year floodplain had flood insurance and just 7 percent of those within the 101 to 500-year floodplain had insurance.31 Overall, this system protects most of California’s Central Valley from the most frequent floods, with the exception of parts of the Delta. Parts of Southern California, the California coast, and local streams in Northern California have recurrent localized flooding problems, as evidenced by the number of federally declared flood disaster events since the late 1970s (Figure 2.14). For large floods, which occur only a few times per century on average, many parts of the state face much greater challenges. The Sacramento area, in particular, has been singled out as having some of the weakest flood defenses of any major metropolitan area in the country, well below New Orleans—a fact not missed by California’s media and policy community following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans.32 A large flood in the Sacramento area would put thousands of lives at risk and lay waste to tens of billions of dollars in property damage.33 Hurricane Katrina brought renewed attention to flood risks and flood infra- structure in California, the poor state of many levees, the growing numbers of residents living in areas with high flood risk, and the potential for increasing flood risk with climate change (Chapter 1).34 In 2005, federal authorities began requiring testing and recertification of all levees in communities that wish to maintain access to federal flood insurance, resulting in the downgrading of 31. Authors’ calculations using estimates of households in floodplains (see the preceding footnote) and data on insurance by zone for California’s communities from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In contrast, over 80 percent of U.S. homes have fire insurance, a hazard that strikes about 0.3 percent of homes per year (a 1-in-330 chance per year) (authors’ calculations using data from the National Fire Protection Association (www.nfpa.org), the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (www.naic.org), and the U.S. Census). California fire insurance coverage and fire frequency rates appear roughly similar to these national averages. 32. On August 31, 2005, a Sacramento Bee article titled “New Orleans flooding ‘wake-up call’ for capital” gave an early diagnosis: “Levee failures . . . [are] a chilling reminder that the two cities have a lot in common” (Weiser 2005). The website of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency (SAFCA) depicts a graphic comparing the flood risk of Sacramento with that of a number of other major cities, including New Orleans (www.safca.org/floodRisk/floodThreat.html). 33. In the area managed by SAFCA (the City of Sacramento and part of Sacramento County), property losses from flooding are projected to be close to $20 billion in 2019 (Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency 2008), and many other communities are at high risk of flooding at the same time, including West Sacramento, Yuba City, Marysville, and surrounding areas. Ongoing efforts to upgrade SAFCA levees are likely to reduce the likelihood of flooding from about 1.5 percent per year to about 0.5 percent per year (www.safca.org). But Sacramento will still face large residual risks (defined as damage times likelihood) of more than $90 million per year. Moreover, in some low-lying areas such as Natomas, levee failures could still put many lives at risk. 34. The California Department of Water Resources (2005a) issued a white paper on the coming flood crisis in January 2005, months before Katrina, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued its order for levee recertification a week before Katrina. But both state and federal policy attention was clearly galvanized by the devastation caused by the hurricane.