03/12/08 Flood Updating

Flood Updating. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. The Department of Ecology and FEMA have been working on a project to help Washington residents and officials determine flood prone areas. Jerry Franklin, Department of Ecology's Flood Mapping Coordinator says it's really about updating. FRANKLIN: The effort is focused on modernizing flood maps. If you are familiar with FEMA flood maps, they're in the paper world. They're called flood insurance rate maps and they're typically done community by community. The modernization part of this program is to take those paper maps, put them into the digital environment and reorganize them into a countywide format. Most of the project is utilizing existing flood areas but Franklin says there is some work being done to update. FRANKLIN: They are well defined by FEMA. There are very few in the state of Washington that are going to be re-engineered you might say. There are some cases where we've had riverine systems that have had such a dramatic changes that we have to do some re-engineering. The maps are used mostly for defining the regulatory environment for the national flood insurance program. Franklin says the update will make a lot more information available to the public. FRANKLIN: They are definitely intended to be used by the public. There are only a few that are available now through the map service center. So anyone can go online, www.fema.gov and you can search for map service center. If it is available digitally then you can download that information. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.