Thinking about dropping your flood insurance? Here’s what to know.

It’s a call that Shari Mendrick, the town of Hilton Head’s floodplain manager, gets almost every day: A Hilton Head resident wants to know if they should drop their flood insurance.

The town adopted new Flood Insurance Rate Maps in 2021, a much-needed update to older maps that the town had used since 1986, Mendrick said.

They were also pretty disappointing.

The new maps substantially reduced the areas of the island that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) considers high-risk, and also reduced the number of people who are required to purchase flood insurance in order to get a federally-backed mortgage.

About half of households on Hilton Head could have dropped their flood insurance under the updated maps, Mendrick said. In 2020, before the new maps went into effect, there were over 26,300 federal flood insurance policies in the town, including about 22,000 in high-risk areas.

Fast forward to 2024, there are now around 23,700 policies on the island, a drop of around 2,600.

“Our geography didn’t change, hydrology didn’t change,” Mendrick said.

More severe storms, increasingly heavy rainfall and sprawling development are increasing the risk of flooding in the already flood-prone Lowcountry region. Tragic flood events in North Carolina and Texas in the last year have reignited questions and debate about how communities use flood maps to prepare for and determine the risk of catastrophes.

Living on a coastal barrier island in a hurricane prone area is risky, and the 1986 maps communicated that message, Mendrick said. Under those maps, around 75% of the properties on Hilton Head were considered high risk. On updated maps, that dropped to 25%. What does flood insurance cover?

Homeowners insurance policies don’t cover damages to a home or belongings from flooding events, according to FEMA. The town of Hilton Head participates in the National Flood Insurance Program, allowing residents to access federal flood insurance by enacting flood plain management policies. Flood insurance from the federal government covers up to $250,000 of damage to a home.

While most flood insurance policy holders have coverage through the federal government, the private flood insurance market is also an option, Mendrick said.

The town’s efforts to maintain green space, support low impact development and enact higher building standards than required by FEMA get Hilton Head homeowners a 25% discount on their flood insurance premiums, Mendrick said. What are flood insurance maps, and what do they tell homeowners?

Flood insurance rate maps developed by FEMA serve as a main method for determining the flood risk of a property. Residents of Hilton Head often refer to the maps as a methods of determining their flood risk and potential insurance costs.

But the modeling for Hilton Head’s flood map uses data collected before some of the most significant storms hit the island in the last decade. Mendrick said she’s concerned that the data collection and modeling for the 2021 maps was completed in 2014, before Hurricane Matthew and Tropical Storm Irma hit the island.

FEMA’s maps are largely based on historic meteorological data, and without including recent severe hurricanes and flooding events, the maps can’t include an accurate picture of the risk.

On FEMA’s maps, flood zones are categorized by a letter code. Zones that start with X are low to moderate risk zones whereas zones that start with an A or V have a higher risk of flooding. The area considered high risk dropped significantly under the new flood maps.

According to climate and financial modeling firm First Street, a climate risk modeling firm, 21,084 Beaufort County properties would be affected by a “100 year flood event,” or a catastrophic flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in a given year. In 30 years, an event of the same likelihood would impact 24,584 properties because of the changing climate. How and where to build

FEMA’s flood maps also include the “base flood elevation,” or the elevation water would reach in the case of a statistically unlikely 100-year flood. According to the Association of State Floodplain Managers, FEMA settled on using that metric to compromise between government decision makers and the public, though it was not considered optimal.

The previous map had a higher base flood elevation with an average of about 14 feet across the town, Mendrick said, causing homes, especially those closer to the ocean, to be built higher off the ground. The new maps lowered the base flood elevation across much of the island, to an average of about eight feet, creating a situation where a house built high off the ground could theoretically be destroyed by a storm and be rebuilt at ground level afterwards, Mendrick said.

The town adopted additional building codes to prevent that situation from occurring; today, homes must be built at higher elevations despite the map change. But the town didn’t have the resources in place to challenge the revised maps within FEMA’s response period, Mendrick said.

Even if updated with data collected from more recent storms, FEMA’s flood insurance rate maps can’t reflect every possible source of risk. During Matthew, a stormwater pump on the island failed, resulting in a number of homes in Hilton Head Plantation flooding. Those homes were not in a high risk zone, Mendrick said. In fact, about a third of all flood insurance claims nationally come from outside of high-risk areas.

Even so, Mendrick gets calls every day from people who are thinking of dropping their flood insurance. But Hilton Head is an island, a low lying one at that. People need to drive over a bridge to get here.

She’ll provide the flood map information, talking through island spots that have flooded repeatedly so callers can make an informed decision. She never recommends they drop their flood insurance outright.

“People are like, ‘Well, I’ve never flooded. This has never happened.’” Mendrick said. “But look at all the stuff that’s happened this year so far.”

© 2025 The Island Packet (Hilton Head, S.C.). Visit www.islandpacket.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.