So a landowner who has a residence near (a few hundred feet) a stream was pushed into the flood plain with the new flood maps recently issued, the house is now in Zone A with no BFE. I kinda thought this one was possible as he sits in a fairly flat valley.
Do the cross sections, send them to the engineer and she sends back the BFE and it's 8 feet lower than the LAG, 8 FEET!!!!!
like the landowner said, there was never water any where near here........
8 feet really? unreal!!!
If we measure out 8' of rope, how many GIS guys can we hang with it!?
Just kidding... sort of....
It's getting out of hand here, don't even know what to say to people now.
All we can do for them is go to the expense to get a BFE and get them out, very sad.
I'm doing one just upstream from an old ranch. The upstream one and the old ranch house are both in the new plotted flood way, but no doubt both are out of the real flood way.
Trouble is the old ranch probably doesn't have a mortgage and the problem won't show up until a sale is attempted, then........
Does the lower BFE end up being lower than the stream channel???
Eight feet is a lot of water in this part of the world.
What would it take to map the county by aerial and map all the flood zones correctly? Perhaps someone in the county government can be convinced that this would be beneficial to their political career?
Have to check, think house is probably 18 feet higher. the stream is dropping fast cross sections had about 2-3 feet of change at the stream.
I wish they would, or just get rid of any map with Zone A. The ones done with topo look really good, at least they make sense to the ground.
A lot of the strange things related to SFHA zones really have a good foundation. I have yet to figure out what that might be for a Flood Hazard with no BFE or depth. If you don't know what the water will do how do you identify it as a risk?
Looking at the new Zone A's, I have made a guess, a very BIG guess that someone was paying as much attention to vegetation patterns as "contour" data, wherever they got "contour" data from. And if you realize that this is semi-arid country, and people water their yards and plant trees around their houses, it seems the zones wandered around to capture the trees and green landscaped areas. The odd thing is a lot of the lowlands are hay meadows and are not included cause there are no bushes or trees.
Anyway that is my theory, it could be that, or maybe they just wanted to put a many structures in that they could manage, thereby getting insurance money and then make the owners pay for all the engineering work to exclude themselves, but that would be an awful cynical way to look at it.
What do youi expect when the original cross sections were done with hand levels?
What do youi expect when the original cross sections were done with hand levels?
lol, how I wish they would have done some cross sections, hand levels would have been great!!!;-)
For the latest FEMA job our cross section at the LAG for the the house (600' right of stream) hits at 4091, stream at 4069, right edge of new flood plain at 4199, and left edge of new flood plain at 4083. Haven't got the results back from the engineer, but my guess is about 4084 for BFE, we will see how close I am. 4085 hits in the vally 900' left of the stream, then you bump into the break going up a strong hill at about 1100' still lower than the 4091 house elevation.
AS you can tell, in the field there is an 16' drop across the flood plain right to left.
