An inflammatory report insinuating that the Federal Emergency Management Agency manipulated the National Flood Insurance Program to bilk money from the public has unleashed a torrent of responses from floodplain and emergency managers across the country.

The NBC Nightly News segment “FEMA Forcing Homeowners to Buy Unnecessary Flood Insurance,” aired as part of an ongoing series called, “The Fleecing of America.” The nearly three-minute piece—which, ironically, hit the airwaves during National Flood Safety Awareness Week—focuses on a South Los Angeles resident who felt his neighborhood was unfairly included in a floodplain when to FEMA updated its 30-year-old flood insurance rate maps. The resident, Isaac Robinson, successfully argued that his neighborhood should not be included and is not required to purchase flood insurance.

At issue isn’t whether FEMA sometimes erroneously designates rate areas, but the damage done by a national news agency perpetuating the myth that flood insurance is not only unnecessary, but used as a scam to fatten government coffers.

“The segment depicted homeowners as “victims” when they had to buy flood insurance because they live in an area where they had lived for 40 years but have not experienced a flood,” wrote Larry Larson, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. “In reality, those homeowners live in or near a mapped flood zone and face a very real risk of flooding. The impression left was that it is okay to ignore one’s flood risk.”

Larson’s letter is one of a collection of letters sent to NBC by flood officials angry at what they see as irresponsible and mendacious reporting.

“Just as there is a 26% chance that a home will flood over a typical 30-year mortgage, there is only a 9% chance that it will burn during that same timeframe. Surely NBC would not air a segment that advocates that people not carry fire insurance?” wrote Mississippi Emergency Management Agency NFIP Coordinator Al Goodman. “A national news organization should exist to educate its viewers concerning the facts and not as a 'got you' form of entertainment.”

The “got yous” of the piece include correspondent George Lewis ominously asking if FEMA is “trying to balance the books by soaking the public?” and claiming a local TV station “actually got a FEMA engineer to admit the maps were faulty.” In a particularly spurious display, Lewis stands a few feet from Robinson, with an insurance rate zone line purportedly between them.

“So the water is supposed to magically stop at some point here on this line?” Lewis asks.

“Of course floods do not magically stop at any line on a map,” Larson writes. “Please know this—updated flood hazard maps do not put people in the floodplain, nature and construction do that. Maps just show them that they are at risk.”

Although the Nightly News coverage might be sensational, the organization is far from the first to claim changes to NFIP designations are a response to budget cuts and the strain of responding to Hurricane Katrina.

“I think we’re paying for Katrina,” Cathy Vashey, whose home was designated in a floodplain in September, told the New York Times. “I think FEMA needs the money and they want us to pay for all the money they spent for the other emergency.”

The conclusion might seem logical to homeowners hard-pressed to find the extra cash for flood insurance, but the culprit is actually a $1 billion project aimed at remapping insurance rate zones based on better geographical information, changes to built environments, and new ground surveys, according to the Times article.

Sometimes risk areas are eliminated from the maps, which determine zones that have a one percent or more chance of serious flooding in any one year. Sometime areas are expanded or added—and that’s not always a bad thing, as some Massachusetts residents living in a newly designated floodplain learned after a severe storm last week.

“All of a sudden, I’m thinking, ‘How ironic,’’’ Cambridge resident Ellen Pridham told the Boston Globe. “Everything is destroyed.’’

The situation points to the flipside of the NBC story and one nearly every flood official pointed out—the NFIP exists to protect people. Not only homeowners who could loose everything in a catastrophe, but federal taxpayers as well.

The major reason federal taxpayers pay billions of dollars each year for disaster relief is because those who live at risk of natural hazards (earthquakes, wildfires, wind, and predominately floods) do not insure themselves against these natural hazards,” Larson writes. “In essence, encouraging homeowners who do not insure themselves against natural hazards results in development in high risk areas that must subsidized by all federal taxpayers. That is the real Fleecing of America!”