Decade of data shows FEMA flood maps missed 3-in-4 claims

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Jade Boyd
713-348-6778
jadeboyd@rice.edu

Decade of data shows FEMA flood maps missed 3-in-4 claims

Rice, Texas A&M-Galveston study focused on 100-year maps for some Houston suburbs

HOUSTON — (Sept. 11, 2017) — An analysis of flood claims in several southeast Houston suburbs from 1999 to 2009 found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 100-year flood plain maps — the tool that U.S. officials use to determine both flood risk and insurance premiums — failed to capture 75 percent of flood damages from five serious floods, none of which reached the threshold of a 100-year event.

An aerial view shows extensive flooding from Harvey in a residential area in Southeast Texas, Aug. 31, 2017. (Air National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Daniel J. Martinez)

The research by hydrologists and land-use experts at Rice University and Texas A&M University at Galveston was published in the journal Natural Hazards Review just days before Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey inundated the Houston region and caused some of the most catastrophic flooding in U.S. history.

“The takeaway from this study, which was borne out in Harvey, is that many losses occur in areas outside FEMA’s 100-year flood plain,” said study co-author Antonia Sebastian, a research associate at Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center and a postdoctoral researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

“What we’ve tried to show, both with this study and several others, is that it is possible to do better,” said lead author Russell Blessing, a Texas A&M-Galveston graduate student with joint appointments at the SSPEED Center and Texas A&M-Galveston’s Center for Texas Beaches and Shores. “There are innovative computational and hydrological tools available to build more predictive maps.”

Hurricane Harvey caused some of the most catastrophic flooding in U.S. history last month. A new study of flooding between 1999-2009 in several southeast Houston suburbs found that FEMA’s 100-year floodplain maps failed to capture 75 percent of flood damages from five storms, none of which reached the threshold of a 100-year event. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

In the new study, Blessing, Sebastian and co-author Sam Brody, a professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M-Galveston, director of the Center for Texas Beaches and Shores and a SSPEED Center investigator, examined the Armand Bayou watershed in southeast Harris County. Armand Bayou’s 60-square-mile watershed includes portions of Houston, Pasadena, Deer Park, La Porte and Taylor Lake Village, as well as unincorporated portions of Harris County.

Five major rain events occurred in the study area between 1999-2009. They were Hurricane Ike (2008), Tropical Storms Erin (2007) and Allison (2001, and two rainstorms that caused flooding in 2006 and 2009.

Hydrologists often characterize rain events and flooding events with a statistic known as “return interval.” A 100-year flood has a 100-year return interval, but Blessing said that does not mean such a storm is only expected to occur every 100 years. Rather, it means there is a 1-in-100 chance, or a 1 percent chance, that the event will occur in any given year. Thus, a 50-year event would have a 2 percent chance of occurring each year, a 10-year event would have a 10 percent chance, and so on.

Brody said one problem with FEMA’s 100-year flood plain maps is that they assume that flooding will only take place in one dimension, that is, either downstream or upstream, and not perpendicular to the channel.

“That assumption doesn’t hold when you’re in really low-lying areas, like Armand Bayou or other coastal watersheds that are very flat,” he said. “When flooding rain accumulates in these areas, it can flow in just about any direction depending upon how high it gets.”

Another issue with FEMA’s maps is their lack of granularity. Brody and Blessing said the type of soil (such as clay versus sand) and the way land is used (such as a concrete parking lot or a school playground) have significant impacts on flooding, and FEMA’s models often use a single classification for entire neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods. In so doing, they miss out on small-scale features that can significantly affect flooding.

Sebastian said focusing on 100-year events is also problematic because short, intense rainfall events that don’t meet the 100-year threshold can still cause serious flooding.

“In Armand Bayou, a 100-year rainfall event is one that drops 13.5 inches of rain in a 24-hour period,” she said. “In reality, we also experience much more intense rainfalls in less time. So, for example, when it rains 6 inches in two or three hours, it can also cause serious flooding.”

In several other studies, including a number that examined flooding in the Clear Creek watershed, Blessing, Brody, Sebastian and SSPEED colleagues have shown that other approaches, like distributed hydrologic modeling and probabilistic flood plain mapping, can be far more predictive of flood damages and flood risk.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation. The findings and opinions reported are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the funding organizations or those who provided assistance with various aspects of the study.

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High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:

https://www.defense.gov/Photos/Essay-View/CollectionId/16936/
CAPTION: An aerial view shows extensive flooding from Harvey in a residential area in Southeast Texas, Aug. 31, 2017. (Air National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Daniel J. Martinez)

http://news.rice.edu/files/2017/09/0911_100YEAR-705-lg-26lab5d.jpg
CAPTION: Harvey caused some of the most catastrophic flooding in U.S. history last month. A new study of flooding between 1999-2009 in several southeast Houston suburbs found that FEMA’s 100-year flood plain maps failed to capture 75 percent of flood damages from five storms, none of which reached the threshold of a 100-year event. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

The DOI of the Natural Hazards Review paper is: 10.1061/ (ASCE)NH.1527-6996.0000242

A copy of the paper is available at:
http://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%29NH.1527-6996.0000242

SSPEED homepage: http://sspeed.rice.edu/sspeed/

Center for Texas Beaches and Shores home page: www.tamug.edu/CTBS/

About Rice University
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,879 undergraduates and 2,861 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for happiest students by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.

About Texas A&M University at Galveston
Texas A&M University at Galveston is a special-purpose campus of Texas A&M University offering undergraduate and graduate programs under the name and authority of Texas A&M University. With a distinct identity in marine themes, Texas A&M Galveston is intimately connected to the land grant mission of Texas A&M University and, as such, its academic programs and research initiatives are linked to finding basic and applied solutions in maritime affairs, science and technology and ocean studies. The institution is under the management and control of the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System.