Does anyone know where I can read the actual regulations that were passed by city council today? None of the news outlets I've read so far link to the document.
I thought there might be enough councilman raising objections to put the brakes on this. The Chronicle did a little hitjob suggesting that councilmen were only raising objections because homebuilders make campaign donations, I hope that didn't affect the vote. This could have some serious unintended consequences in lower-end neighborhoods.Diggity said:
agreed. which is another reason why they didn't need to rush into this.
jayelbee said:
I couldn't quickly find something with 100 year elevations vs 500 year at different points, but here's a good map to see how much more area gets added when you go from 100-500. Generally speaking, the larger the area of 500 year vs 100 year, the bigger change in flood elevation.
White Oak through GOOF and buffalo bayou from downtown out to about Voss only add a few houses on each street. Probably less than 6" difference.
http://www.harriscountyfemt.org
Looks like it's not just the city. The last three years we've had flooding in the 500 year flood plain. Every year I find myself tearing out dry wall in homes that have never flooded before. I don't see how anyone can think those maps are accurate but who knows when they will be revised. We can't wait any longer. You can always change the law again if they ever update the 100 year flood to where the 500 is today. Either way the homes need to be raised. If we are being honest, we did this to ourselves.Quote:
Mayor Turner proposed the changes to the city code, known as chapter 19, a few weeks after Harris County officials approved similar changes that stiffen the rules for building in areas that flood.
Diggity said:
This is for new construction.
The silly thing is you can still rebuild below the 100 year as long as you don't spend more than 50% of pre-flood value. That's a much bigger issue to me.
#YESSIR! said:
Is flood insurance mandatory in Harris for new mortgages regardless of BFE level after Harvey?
26.2 said:
Maybe we should kill development in the places that flooded each of the last three years.
94chem said:#YESSIR! said:
Is flood insurance mandatory in Harris for new mortgages regardless of BFE level after Harvey?
No, but part of FIP's debt is that they haven't marketed policies to low risk homeowners. Realtors and builders could be incentivized to sell the policies.
#YESSIR! said:26.2 said:
Maybe we should kill development in the places that flooded each of the last three years.
Good thing you aren't on the city council.
Diggity said:
This is for new construction.
The silly thing is you can still rebuild below the 100 year as long as you don't spend more than 50% of pre-flood value. That's a much bigger issue to me.
jayelbee said:
NFIP won't have to do anything about these homes. They'll get remapped into the 100 year when we come back around to update the maps.
I suspect that there will be several thousand structures added to the flood plain when it's remapped. Harvey will probably also shake out to be a 300-400 year event in the new scale.
It's minimal with new construction, because it's easy to import fill or otherwise alter subgrade to meet elevation requirements.jayelbee said:#YESSIR! said:
So what's going to happen in 100? Someone will figure out where a hypothetical 500 is and you have to be 2ft above that?
The 500 year BFE is the same at any given distance down a creek/river/bayou. What changes is the boundary of what's considered floodway, 100 year floodplain, and 500 year floodplain.
For example (this is all made up for simplicity sake) if you're 1 mile west of beltway 8 on buffalo bayou. The 100 year BFE is 68' and the 500 year is 70'. It doesn't matter if your 50 feet from the edge of the bayou or 5000 feet, the 500 year flood elevation is still 70'. Now if you go 2 miles up buffalo bayou west from the beltway, it might be 71' and 74'.
To set the boundaries, they basically connect all of the dots where the ground elevation matches the 100 year or 500 year BFE and everything with a lower elevation is considered flood plain.
As far as the impact of building to 500 year vs 100 year, for the most part it's pretty minimal unless you're in one of the reservoirs. Because the amount of rain doesn't linearly translate to the frequency of the storm (500 year storm isn't 5x as much rain as 100 year) and because it takes more and more water to fill up the next incremental inch of depth in a watershed, the difference in a lot of places is only a few inches.