County to host meeting on FEMA flood maps

Nov. 23--Frederick County will host a meeting next week for residents to get information on new flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The meeting will be held from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, in the third floor meeting room of Winchester Hall.

FEMA officials will give a presentation on the new flood maps, followed by a chance for residents to ask questions about the newly-revised maps.

The updated Flood Insurance Rate Maps eliminate unmapped zones of the county where property owners previously had to hire surveyors and take other costly steps to resolve questions about their properties, said Zoning Administrator Tolson DeSa.

The new maps will help property owners if they have a question about the flood plain on their property, and remove areas that have previously been shown as flood plains, he said.

"It's a good thing all around," he said.

The new maps use airborne Light Detecting and Ranging technology to map elevations, increasing the accuracy of flood studies from within four to five feet to within half a foot, a FEMA spokesman said in an email Tuesday.

The new maps also include more than 1,500 bridge and culvert field study measurements that were used to improve the accuracy of floodplain measurements in areas where measurements had previously been approximated.

They also use a version of flood-modeling software from the Army Corps of Engineers that is considered an industry standard.

"The use of countywide [Light Detecting and Ranging technology] also means that areas of heavy development are reflected in the elevation data including areas of recent fill and disturbance, making FEMA's flood models match current conditions on the ground instead of using lesser quality photogrammetric topographic data from the 1970s through early 2000s," the email said.

The maps chart elevation to determine the flood plains of a 100-year flood event, a flood that has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring in any given year.

At the Nov. 27 meeting, officials will look at new study areas, and talk about how the analysis and mapping have changed since previous maps.

The county and FEMA are encouraging residents to take time to review the maps, which can be found at www.tinyurl.com/FEMApreliminaryfloodhazarddata.

Some parts of Frederick County suffered flooding after powerful storms in May.

The storms led to more than $31.2 million in structural damage and close to $7 million in property loss, as well as more than $6 million in damage to infrastructure, roads, and bridges.

For more information, contact DeSa at 301-600-1491 or at tdesa@frederickcountymd.gov.

Follow Ryan Marshall on Twitter: @RMarshallFNP

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