More than two years after the Federal Emergency Management Agency started pushing the idea of new flood insurance maps for the region, the agency still has not revealed any evidence to show which metro-east levees are deficient, and if so, to what degree.

FEMA's failure to show its cards on what it knows about local levees is fueling legal efforts of metro-east towns and levee districts to prevent or delay the flood maps' implementation planned for August.

The FEMA flood map controversy began in the late summer of 2007, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers indicated it would not certify that metro-east levees -- some of which date from the 1940s -- could contain a 100-year flood, which is a 1 percent chance of flood annually. From bnd.com.