Flood Planes: subject to government whims?

This comes from when I was a little munchkin growing up near Houston. The town in which I lived, called The Woodlands, was a great place to live; I had a forest at the end of the street (essential for all young boys, as far as I'm concerned) and still lived close enough to regular urban development to have everything I needed. The forest area was originally intended to remain as it was, as it was officially in the Flood Plane. This was certainly appropriate, as we had severe floods on several occasions while I lived there.

About a year before my family moved from Texas, the forest was torn down and replaced with homes. Somehow, the planners found a government employee who would declare the area as "not in the flood plane". This is the Houston area, so the property didn't need to be rezoned; it was just arbitrarily declared safe from floods.

Anybody who had lived there longer than a year could have told them that they were morons for creating developments there, but they were after the money and weren't interested in the well-being of the community.

A couple of related links: This link actually uses Bear Creek in The Woodlands as an example of how things should be done, but the information they cite predates the flood I mentioned above. The same problem applies to this site, which praises the design of The Woodlands and its success in a 1979 flood, but ignores more recent (and less cautious) developments. (The last paragraph in the article sums it all up rather nicely).