Deborah Cassidy’s letter from the city of Austell came Nov. 1.
Officially, her home is in a floodplain.
She had thought as much for years, since rains from Hurricane Dennis in 2005 flooded some homes in her subdivision. She was proved right two years ago when floodwaters reached 14 feet in her home.
Cassidy’s new designation is part of a remapping project of flood maps in counties and cities across the state and the metro area. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency are reassessing flood risk along a 107-mile area of the Upper Chattahoochee River Basin. Along with Cobb County and its affected cities, the mapping update includes Forsyth, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Fulton, Douglas and Coweta counties in the metro area.
Residents in those areas are getting their first looks during open houses around the metro area of the maps that show, on a property-by-property basis, to what extent which areas of the county are at risk for flooding, and what flood insurance requirements come with the risks. Once the maps are rolled out to residents and after an appeal period, counties and communities have six months to adopt the new maps. The new maps and flood insurance requirements are scheduled to take effect next fall.
Cassidy is relieved to finally have the high-risk flood area designation, but the distinction is also upsetting.
“I’m disappointed because if I ever try to sell the house the value goes down because now it’s considered in a high-risk area,” she said. “I wouldn’t have ever bought the house if I had known it was in a floodplain.”
The updated maps are especially important for Cobb, where seven days of rainfall two years ago led to historic flooding not seen in hundreds of years. Eleven people died in the flood that dumped between 18 and 22 inches of rain on west Cobb, Paulding and Douglas counties, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Austell, Cobb’s hardest-hit city, lost more than 700 homes and businesses in the aftermath.
After the flood, Bill Higgins, Cobb’s division manager for stormwater management, was approached by angry residents whose homes were shown to be outside the floodplain but still got flooded. Homes not included in the then-current flood zone were ineligible for federal buyouts, leaving many homeowners stuck with severely damaged homes and unable to afford the restoration.
The new risk assessment maps will show that even areas outside the 100-year floodplain have a risk of flooding, Higgins said. “It’s like FEMA says, everybody lives in a floodplain, it’s just a matter of how much flooding it takes to get to you.”
Cobb’s proposed new maps add 180 homes to the floodplain around Sweetwater Creek, which was responsible for much of the flooding in west Cobb in 2009. But in other parts of the county — such as around Nickajack Creek, where 150 homes were removed from floodplain — the flood risk was reduced. Overall, 52 acres in the county were removed from the updated 100-year floodplain.
Diane Eley’s home in the Austell area was placed in a low-risk flood area of the new flood maps. Her two-story home has flooded three times in the almost 20 years her family has lived in the home, including in 2009 when water engulfed the first level and reached 4 feet on the second level.
The family didn’t have flood insurance because they were told they were not in a flood zone, said Eley, a cancer survivor who lived in a hotel and a friend’s condominium with her husband months after the flood. The couple continue to pay an almost $1,000 monthly mortgage on the uninhabitable home and hope they eventually can receive federal buyout money. “Now if we tried to go back in it would cost about $115,000 to get the house refurbished, and we would need some level of flood insurance,” she said. “It’s disappointing.”
Whether in Cobb or any other county, homeowners should be aware of the map changes because of the implications for their flood insurance coverage, said Rod Hall, a Cobb resident and flood insurance specialist. Depending on the severity of an area’s flood risk, flood insurance could be mandatory for some homeowners, while a downgraded flood risk could result in a cheaper flood insurance policy, and discounted rates can apply for a limited time during the map updating process. FEMA encourages homeowners to buy flood insurance even in low-risk areas.
“People just don’t know the issues, which was the problem for a lot of them after the [2009] flood,” Hall said following Cobb’s open house on the new maps this month that drew about 50 homeowners. “That meeting should have been packed to the gills and it wasn’t.”
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