Your Flood Risk

Everyone is in a flood zone.

Common sense would seem to suggest that the closer you are to a body of water, the higher your risk of flooding. But did you know that regardless of where you live you run the risk of flooding?

In fact, according to FEMA, properties in a high-risk flood zone have a 26% chance of flooding over the course of a 30-year mortgage, compared to a 9% chance of fire. (Source: FEMA Mandatory Purchase of Flood Insurance Guidelines September 1999)

And flooding is in no way limited to coastal areas. For example, Pennsylvania, which has no ocean coastline, paid out more than $49 million in flood insurance claim payments in 2005.

(Source: www.fema.gov - NFIP Statistics, Total Claims Paid by State)

When you think of flooding, you think of severe weather such as hurricanes and tropical storms, or rivers overflowing their banks. But some of the lesser-known, localized causes of flooding that can catch a typical homeowner off-guard include:

• blocked sewer drain on a neighborhood street
• improper landscaping drainage on a property, which can lead to accumulated water that seeps into your home
• heavy, accumulated snowmelt in areas such as the Midwest
• mudflow caused by excess rain
• flash floods in the middle of a desert
• increased "impervious cover," such as asphalt, due to construction and development that leaves less open space for the water to run off, thus creating new flood risks in urban areas
• overflow from storm drains hundreds of miles from the coast

A 100-year flood is not a flood that occurs every 100 years.

You may have been told that your property is in a "100-year-floodplain." This does not mean that your house will flood only once every one hundred years. It means that in any given year, there is actually a 1% chance or greater that this high-risk flood zone will experience flooding that equals or exceeds its boundaries.

There are, in fact, geographic areas that have sustained multiple "100-year" floods for several years in a row.