A Levee Policy for the National Flood Insurance Program (1982)

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY This appendix defines many terms used in the text of this report. The definitions are generally simplified and applicability may be limited to understanding of usage in the context of this report. ACTUARIAL INSURANCE RATES—insurance rates that fulfill the financial need in risk transfer, are responsive to competitive market conditions, improve the availability and reliability of insurance, and result in insurance premium charges that are not excessive, inadequate, unfairly discriminatory, or otherwise unreasonable. AVERAGE ANNUAL FLOOD DAMAGE—the average flood damage one could expect over a period of many years should neither flood hazard nor floodplain occupancy change nor inflation occur. BERM—a horizontal strip or shelf of material built contiguous to the base of either side of a levee embankment for the purposes of providing protection against underseepage, erosion, increasing stability of the embankment, or reducing seepage. Can be located on either side of a levee, depending upon the berm's purpose. CLOSURE DEVICE—any movable and essentially watertight barrier, used in flood periods to close an opening in a levee, securing but not increasing the levee's design level of protection. COMMUNITY—any state or area or political subdivision thereof, or any Indian tribe or authorized tribal organization, or Alaska native village or authorized native organization that has authority to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations for the areas within its jurisdictions. COMPACTION—the placement in layers and densifying of fill materials in an earthen levee or dam structure, ordinarily by rolling or vibration. CRITICAL FACILITY—a structure housing a community service of such a nature that the loss associated with discontinuity of service from even extremely remote (less than 0.2 percent chance per year) -75-