FLOOD06680

• County: Statewide
• Basin: Statewide
• Title: Flood Damage in the United States, 1926-2000
• Date: 6/1/2000
• Prepared By: NOAA
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Flood Documentation Report

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Articles on flash flood damage in 1978 and 1979, published in the journal Weatherwise
(Marrero 1979, 1980), were written by Jose Marrero who had been responsible for collecting the
flood damage data formerly published in Climatological Data, National Summary. These
articles provide many of our state damage estimates for those years,

E. Summary
The NWS effort to collect flood damage estimates has been remarkably consistent across
the nation and over long time periods, resulting in the only source of long-term national flood
damage information available in the United States, Similar procedures have been used to obtain
estimates from field offices throughout the country, at least since 1950 and perhaps longer,
Annual summaries were compiled using consistent methodologies and published in uniform
formats during two extended periods, from 1933 through 1975, and from 1983 up to the present,

To create continuous time series of state and national damage estimates requires obtaining
compatible estimates for the missing years, 1976-1982, It would also be desirable to base all the
data on the same calendar, either fiscal years or calendar years, These tasks are addressed in
Section 3,

The accuracy of the damage estimates is uncertain, Methods used to obtain the estimates
suggest that they are often educated guesses, For many years they came primarily from
newspaper reports, Today, short cuts are often used to extrapolate from a few good sources to
make an estimate for an entire community, Evaluation of the accuracy of the estimates is
undertaken in Sections 4 and 5,