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-3- . being preferable to the illusory and all too often partial protection against it. Secondly, through the mechanism of an insurance program, the National Flood Insurance Program will ensure that some of the costs associated with floods will be borne by those who choose to occupy these hazardous areas, and less by the nation's taxpayers in the form of disaster relief. Many of the problems and implications of this program have been dis- cussed by Platt (1970). They concern (1) the constitutionality of re- stricting the use of privately owned land in floodplains; (2) the complex legal and administrative questions surrounding the application of subsi- dized and actuarial insurance rates to new construction; (3) the enormous technical obstacles to the "accurate" delineation of all flood hazard areas in the United States; and (4) the many difficulties of basing land use regulation on sound and defensible hydrologic criteria. His major conclusion is that floodplain delineation should proceed expeditiously with the best, readily available information in the interests of public safety and welfare, rather than be delayed in expectation of some costly and arbitrary degree of "accuracy". Both floodplain delineation and longterm regulation are of primary interest in this study because most current approaches implicitly assume that floodplains are fixed in areal extent. Different recurrence inter- vals have been advocated as a rational planning and engineering standard, but any design frequency is a compromise between public safety and the analytical limitations of accurately estimating rare events. The 100- year flood is currently favored by federal agencies and is also the stan- dard prescribed by the National Flood Insurance Act. Regardless of the particular level of risk judged to be acceptable, however, an important