You can now review new preliminary flood maps for Terrebonne and Lafourche

Jun. 28—FEMA has released preliminary flood zone maps for Terrebonne and Lafourche.

The maps show projected risk of flooding throughout the two parishes and are used to help determine who needs flood insurance and how much it will cost.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is encouraging residents to review the new maps, released about a week ago, to learn about local flood risks and potential future flood insurance requirements. Residents can use the maps to make informed decisions about building, development and flood insurance, federal officials said.

Home and business owners can review the preliminary flood maps at msc.fema.gov/portal.

There will be a review and appeals process before the new flood zone maps will go into effect, officials said.

The current flood insurance maps for Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes hadn't been updated since 1985 and don't account for how factors like sinking land, eroding wetlands and sea level rise have affected the elevation of properties and their risk of flooding.

The new preliminary maps come after Terrebonne and Lafourche officials pushed FEMA to revise its information, North Lafourche Levee District Executive Director Dwayne Bourgeois said.

"This goes back to 2008 when we got the preliminary maps," he said. "We looked at those and saw all kinds of things that were wrong. They were overstating the risk in some areas and understating it in others. So we pressed back on it."

Officials said back then that they were concerned the maps exaggerated the flood risk and could make flood insurance unaffordable for many local home and business owners.

Bourgeois said the older maps were scientifically and technically inaccurate because they disregarded flood protection from parish levee systems. Because none of the levees are federally certified against 100-year floods, they weren't taken into consideration.

"The old procedure said that a levee had to be accredited to regulations," Bourgeois said. "If you didn't meet that accreditation, they basically acted like the levee didn't exist. By 2011, with help from our delegation, we got FEMA to agree to come up with a process to analyze the impacts of non-accredited levees to the flood insurance study."

The feds eventually created a process in 2013 called the Levee Analysis Mapping Procedure to help redraw the flood maps, Bourgeois said. Terrebonne and Lafourche were two of 25 communities that were part of this new approach to factor in non-accredited levees.

"LAMP, by and large, seems to be working pretty good, albeit slowly," he said. "In the end, we wound up getting the contractors that FEMA had to develop these flood insurance studies to physically stand on the levees. We felt like we were getting better results on what the actual flood insurance zones should be. That's all now coming to fruition with these new preliminary set of maps."

Bourgeois said parish officials will meet next week to study the new maps and determine what may need to be revised and the next steps.

"We're just getting these maps and will look at them next week," he said. "We will go through them and see if they make sense and if they capture all that data. It's going to be interesting to see what the maps say. It may not all be good news, but if it makes sense we're going to have to deal with it."

Terrebonne Parish President Gordy Dove said he is hopeful the revised maps will benefit the parish.

"What we saw in the older flood maps we objected to a lot of the base flood elevations were off," Dove said. "We thought some of them were a little too much. With the Morganza levee system and all the pump stations we've added, I don't see any reason for all the elevations they were requiring. We're going to keep fighting to get the best deal for Terrebonne Parish. But it's the federal government and their word is final."

— Staff Writer Dan Copp can be reached at 448-7639 or at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @DanVCopp.

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