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Release of new flood plain maps nears

The release of new flood maps for Minot and Ward County remains on schedule for early June, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency representatives who were in Minot Thursday.

Ryan Pietramali, branch chief of FEMA’s mitigation division in Denver, and Jeff Herd, flood plain manager and insurance branch chief in FEMA’s Denver office, visited with local government officials and staff, engineers and media on the mapping process.

Once new maps are released in June, the maps will be posted at www.msc.fema.gov and are to be linked to the Minot city website at minotnd.org. The city has begun posting information about the mapping process on its website.

During the week of July 17, FEMA will be holding public open houses in Sawyer, Burlington and Minot.

Pietramali said about 4,000 parcels with 3,600 structures are expected to move to a higher flood-risk zone, which has implications for flood insurance premiums.

“We are seeing just about a doubling of the 100-year discharge,” he said, noting the one-in-100 year flood, or 1 percent annual flood risk, will be based on a discharge of 10,000 cubic feet a second rather than 5,000 cfs. The 2011 flood of record was about 27,000 cfs.

Pietramali said not every structure flooded in 2011 might be rezoned into a high-risk flood plain, but most of those property owners are likely to be affected. The difference between 10,000 and 27,000 cfs is largely water depth, so the newly defined 100-year flood will be nearly as expansive but not as deep as residents experienced in 2011.

Property owners are being advised that purchasing flood insurance now and maintaining it going forward can cushion the premium increases they see. Due to the flood insurance program’s “grandfathering” policy, premiums would go up but currently those increases would be limited to no more than 18 percent a year.

Herd said there are many variables involved in determining premiums beyond one’s flood-risk zone. He said people can visit with their insurance agents to get more details about how their properties might be specifically affected based on property characteristics.

At the end of February, there were about 10,000 flood insurance policies in place statewide. In Ward County, there were 2,571 policies, which breaks down: Minot, 2,249; Burlington, 93, Burlington Township, 27; Sawyer, 15; Carpio, 4; Donnybrook, 1; and rural Ward County, 182.

Pietramali said science and technology have vastly improved understanding of the terrain, amount of water in the system and how that water flows. This improved data allows for a better assessment of flood risk and more precise mapping, he said. Working with area cities and the county on the flood mapping in Ward County, FEMA has a high degree of confidence in the accuracy of the new maps it is developing, based on that improved data, he said.

Once the new flood maps complete the public review process this summer, FEMA will make any additional revisions, and final adoption is expected in the summer of 2018.

Pietramali said as features of the Mouse River Enhanced Flood Protection Project are completed and flood risk changes, FEMA will be reviewing those changes and updating those portions of the map. FEMA previously announced that updates typically take three years, but Pietramali said FEMA is already following the proposed impact of the Mouse River project so should be able to make the flood map updates much more quickly.

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