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Army Corps: Daytona Beach flooding driven by low slope, not tides; most federal options fail economic test
Summary
U.S. Army Corps engineers told the Daytona Beach City Commission their hydraulics and economic models show the city likely fails Corps criteria (an 800 CFS conveyance rule and benefit‑cost thresholds); buyouts (about 40 structures in the modeled buyout area) produced the best cost‑benefit results but still hover below full federal justification.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on May 6 presented a multi‑year flood risk study for Daytona Beach and warned that the city’s interior flooding is driven mainly by low topographic slope rather than tidal influence — a finding that sharply limits the chances of a large federally funded Corps project. "You're unfortunately, the topography that we're dealing with here is extremely low lying," said Jason Lavecchia, the Corps’ engineering technical lead, describing a HEC‑RAS hydraulics model calibrated to local flood events.
Corps staff said two technical limits are especially difficult for Daytona Beach to meet. First, many alternatives have low benefit‑to‑cost ratios (BCRs) once the team overlays flooding outputs with an economic damage model. Corps economists said the most promising buyout analysis produced a BCR near 0.8 — below the 1.0 threshold the Corps and many federal funders use to prioritize projects. "Many of them look very poor to the point where we are not…
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