Burlington, Vermont - October 24, 2011
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making changes to flood plain maps across Vermont. It's a move that could cost homeowners thousands dollars.
FEMA wants Vermont homeowners to know that spring flooding and summer storms did not spark changes to flood plain maps across the state. "The flood mapping program and the modernization upgrading of the maps started long before Hurricane Irene and spring flooding," said David Mendelsohn with FEMA.
FEMA began the process of modernizing flood maps with surveys by air and ground in 2003. Windsor, Windham and Rutland counties were done by 2008. Chittenden County's flood maps were finished this past summer. "The flood zone that we map, that Congress has tasked us with mapping has a one percent, annual chance of flood," Mendelsohn said.
Revisions in South Burlington mean Leslie Parker and some of her neighbors in the Tree Top condo complex now live in a flood plain. "A one percent chance of this occurring seems a little extreme, especial since we just went through a storm that was considered a storm of the century," she said.
Tree Top made it through spring flooding and Irene without any trouble. "The building was not in a flood zone when it was built in 1979, it was not built in a flood zone when I purchased it in 2000, it was not built in a flood zone when I refinanced it, so for it to be in a flood zone now seems a bit arbitrary," Parker said.
Parker and a number of others in her complex are now being forced to pick up flood insurance by their mortgage companies--It's coverage they say they don't need. "It also strikes me as not a very effective use of consumer dollars considering our economy. The amount of money that this is going to cost me over the life of my mortgage would be better spent putting it back into the community," Parker said.
FEMA says homeowners can challenge changes to the maps, but redrawing lines will take more than proof of a dry basement. "If they have scientific or technical information to show that they are outside the special flood hazard area or above the base flood elevation, then FEMA will work with them to remove their structure from the federal flood hazard area," Mendelsohn said.
The insurance agent for Tree Top says coverage for individual condo owners could cost about 15-hundred dollars. If the complex bought it together it would run close to 80-thousand dollars.
