History

Federal Emergency Management Agency

government · active attested 1981–2015

Also known as FEMA

The federal agency whose flood maps decide what Ocean City may build and what its owners pay to insure. It enters this record as a pricing force rather than a rescuer: its V-zone rules had begun repricing the town by 1981, and the quarter-million dollars of additional cover bought in the same 1986 budget amendment as Hurricane Gloria's cleanup is the market following it. Its most consequential appearance is September 1990, when Dave Thomas of FEMA told the council that the replenished beach and its new dune "could have an influence on that V Zone designation" and the agency waived its own waiting period — the moment the beach the town had bought began converting oceanfront land out of the V Zone into ordinary floodplain. The Letter of Map Revision was still "being pursued" in December 1991 and resolves in the wholly new flood map adopted in 2015, twenty-nine years after the one it replaced.