As you see from the first exhibit in our report, it's not only the most costly. You'll see that the cost to the federal government for flood relief has been escalating quite rapidly over the last few decades.
In order to try to get a handle on that, why not plan better for the future and try to avoid the construction of new infrastructure, new housing and so on in areas that may well, with climate change, become hazard areas? The whole point of this is really about being safe rather than sorry with respect to new infrastructure.
We have a lot of infrastructure that's already prone to flooding, and there are different programs in place to deal with that, but this, really, is about investing the resources now in preventing future disasters resulting from the construction of infrastructure in areas that we should have avoided.
If flood mapping produces good, high-quality maps that are usable for all users—whether that's a new homebuyer, a housing developer or a public infrastructure planner—what we would see is newer information that doesn't just look at the past in determining where we shouldn't build but also does scenario planning into the future to try to predict as much as possible—there's a lot of uncertainty—which areas to avoid in order to be safe rather than sorry.
