FLOOD04820

• County: Statewide
• Basin: Statewide
• Title: Evaluation and Implementation of Urban Drainage and Flood Control Projects Completion Report
• Date: 6/1/1974
• Prepared By: CSU Environmental Resources Center,
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Educational/Technical/Reference Information

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1. Lack of systematic procedures for isolating problems,

2. Difficulty in identifying objectives and measures of

effectiveness for particular situations,

3. Specifying possible consequences of alternative courses

of action, (concerns flow of costs and benefits over time

and their incidence on particular groups).

4. Difficulty in considering the relative judgment and pre-

ferences of the decisionmaking group and the group who

will be affected by the decisions made.

For urban drainage and flood control projects it is relatively

simple to estimate ~ome benefits as compared to other public services

shown on Table I-I. Hirsch states that evaluation studies of urban

programs are plagued by ",..difficulties in estimating indirect benefits

and in handling intangible and incommensurate costs and benefits [11].

Estimation of benefits is really an approximate approach for the esti-

mation of public demand for services, assuming the analyst can estimate

accurately and the public behaves ~onatty. The emphasis should be on

the estimation of the benefit-cost conditions for incremental project

implementation according to the interest of different groups [11].

There is a pressing need for a definition of the term "benefit"

in the legal sense so that determinations can be made of project bene-

ficiaries for evaluation purposes. This is a problem which transcends

the drainage problem and is extremely important [20].

When flooding occurs in urban areas the category of damage normally

reported in the press and therefore receiving most attention. is direct

damage to property. This is, however, only one of five empirical cate-

gories of flood damages. Benefits would be associated with reduction of

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