Flood insurance rates could drop for some Allen County residents, with newly drawn maps removing 85 properties from the floodplain. Eight will be added.
Local residents can attend an open house from 2 to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Community Building in Riverside Park to learn about the new maps and the flooding risks to homes, even if not in a floodplain.
Terry Call, county zoning director, said the meeting is a good opportunity to learn about the new floodplain maps, ask questions and voice concerns. He mailed 237 letters to affected addresses with an invitation to the open house.
Understanding the floodplain is important, Call said. Flood insurance is required for mortgages on properties in high-risk flood areas, but standard homeowners insurance policies don’t cover flooding.
At the meeting, you can learn how and why the maps have changed, why flood insurance is important and how to get an insurance quote.
The Kansas Department of Agriculture and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently unveiled updated online versions of the flood plain map.
The maps show areas with a 1% chance of flood occurring in any given year. You can experience a so-called “100-year-flood” in back-to-back years, according to a report from FEMA.
FEMA monitors 13,000 streams and rivers in the U.S. Statistically, a greater flood event will happen on 130 of those streams every year.
If you have a 30-year mortgage and you live in the floodplain, you have a 26% chance of being flooded at least once during that time frame, according to FEMA.
That’s a much higher risk than the combined risk of house fire and theft, which is about 9%.
But floods can happen anywhere. FEMA reports that from 2014 to 2018, policyholders outside of high-risk flood areas filed over 40 percent of all national flood insurance claims and required one-third of federal disaster assistance for flooding.
A LINK to the map can be found on the county’s website, allencounty.org. You can search by address or zoom in and out on the map to see how the floodplain has increased, decreased or stayed the same.
The map shows several areas in the City of Iola that have decreased, specifically areas near the Neosho River.
Most of the increases are to the south and east of Humboldt.
More information about flooding and flood insurance can be found at floodsmart.gov.
