We're dealing with a strikingly similar situation in my town. Note the phrase "...the agency conducted a public hearing regarding the new maps -- and local councils approved them...." Folks are busy and rarely show up for these hearings, the ads for which are buried way in the back of local print media. Local "councils" are often busy volunteers, and even if they are paid, they likely lack the expertise to properly review such documents. Everyone assumes the agency producing these technologically impressive maps knows what they're doing and, perhaps more pertinent, has all the necessary data.
Same around here. All I hear about is how FEMA are screwing them. I then inform them that the maps were sent to the town to comment on before becoming final, that surprises them and they stop hollering a bit. Every agency seems to be doing the best they can with the info they have, if there were no FIRM's produced people would complain about why no one told them they were in a flood zone. I understand the frustration that the homeowner has, they get the short end of the stick and end up paying the fees for us to come do the work to remove them from the SFHA.
Now I know your eye can fool you..but I don't see 25 feet of vertical anywhere in that photo (maybe it's not his place). But I think I see a drag line in the background (left of the road)...and maybe a pond to the right of the road.
I'm just sayin'....
There's a long and sordid history with flood maps and how dicey they can be, I've had to research them for a few projects, and got microfilms of the original green bar HEC-2 runs from the '70s and '80s, and tried to re-create what they did, and invariably found really poor quality, low-resolution model data that was entered, typically scaled off of USGS quads, and then worse yet, when the flood maps were created, the boundaries were often misregistered or had scaling issues, et cetera. Probably the kind of low-tech solutions used back then, trying to scale things on the photocopier and then overlay them on another map and trace the result to create the flood map. And then, worse yet, in many cases those bad maps were simply digitized and distributed as digital GIS product. The best solution would be to have seamless national LIDAR or other high-resolution terrain data, and then apply consistent modeling and mapping approaches, combined with ground truthing. With all of the money that went into manual labor and crap that was done over the last decade, this probably could have been done.
We've made a lot of money off of FEMA's idiot maps.
The top of the flood gates at Kentucky Dam are at elevation 375. TVA has a flowage easement, or owns the property outright, on everything upstream from the dam below the 375. TVA patrols their shore, so if you build on their land, they will get you. One fellow built a $1.5 million home 1 foot too low (in a special area with a building restriction below the 381). Now he has to pay $3500 rent to TVA every year.
Anyway, the point of this all that is the flood maps show the BFE at the lake to be 375. No problem there. However, the shaded area on the map encroaches onto land that is above that. So every tract around the lake, which is one of the largest man made lakes in the country, is in the flood zone. I've had to do a LOMA on houses 100 feet above the BFE. There is no telling how much money FEMA is sucking out of the average homeowner.
