![]() ![]() The term "100-year flood" is a little confusing. Such areas are classified as Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHA), and are located in a 100-year flood zone. The inland high-risk zones will be labeled “A” or “AE”, and coastal high-risk zones that have additional risk from storm surge will be labeled “VE”.Ī floodplain is the part of the land where water collects, pools, and flows during the course of natural events. effective February 19, 2014, September 29, 2017, and August 7, 2018įlood hazard maps, also called “Flood Insurance Rate Maps” or “FIRMs,” are used to determine the flood risk to your home or business. “There’s a bill that the House passed earlier this year that tries to shore up the mapping effort, but it really doesn’t do a whole lot in that regard.The current Flood Risk products are below. “There is a lot of people calling for reforms in the National Flood Insurance Program,” Collette says. The study makes clear how outdated the FEMA mapping process is and indicates things that should be kept when the necessary changes to the National Flood Insurance Program take place. “But if an appeal is successful, it affects everybody in the community, not just the people who are protesting.” “The appeals are only successful if they can prove than they are technically correct,” Collette says. ![]() The process is still going on, five years later, which means that by the time those maps come out, they will already be several years old. That’s the case in Galveston County, where new maps were proposed in 2013, but a part of the community appealed. “It’s limited by budgets, and there are provisions in the law that allow people to challenge the process, so if the community get a set of proposed flood maps from FEMA and they don’t like it because their insurance rate are going to go up, they have an opportunity to appeal that map.” “The real problem here is that with other things that involve huge government agencies, the process for creating and updating these maps is really bureaucratic,” Collette says. And one of the reasons for that is bureaucracy. That is why the University of Bristol, in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations, tried to use better data to capture the flood plains across the entire country in their study, which shows the lack of more accurate and widely available flood maps. As an example, Collette says that in Harris County, there are about 23,000 miles of rivers and creeks, while FEMA only mapped around half of them. In addition, FEMA maps don’t cover all waterways. “And really think they actually look backwards, because a lot of times they use old rainfall data.” “They are based on what they know about streams, and rivers, and lakes, and rainfall, and development when the map is published,” Collette says. Mark Collette, an investigative reporter with the Houston Chronicle, says the maps that FEMA uses to set insurance rates represent just one point in time. Now a peer-reviewed study in the journal, Environmental Research Letters suggests one possible answer: because the federal flood maps people have been relying on are wrong. Since Hurricane Harvey, questions have been raised about why so many homes and businesses flooded in the first place. ![]()
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