What would a flood look like at your house?

New tool shows how high water could rise on many Norfolk homes

NORFOLK — Wondering how waterlogged your house would be after a big storm? Or maybe you’re thinking about buying or renting somewhere in Norfolk but can’t make heads or tails of the federal flooding maps and the different flood zones.

The city of Norfolk has just rolled out a new tool called the Flood Risk Learning Center that will show — visually show, not via arcane elevation charts — just how high the water will rise on most houses in the city.

It’s as simple as typing in an address and lining up a slider at ground level on a photo of the house.

Once you’ve done that, the program will superimpose floodwaters you could expect with a reasonably likely flood scenario.

City staff found when trying to communicate the risk of flooding to homeowners and renters, residents would become confused and overwhelmed after getting wrapped up in federal flood zone designations and the droves of information available.

“The impetus was first to deliver the message in a way that was digestible — flood depth,” said Matt Simons, a Norfolk city planner.

The tool doesn’t cover every property in Norfolk. Simons said larger footprints of commercial buildings or large apartment complexes made it more difficult to estimate a ground level, which is needed to make an accurate representation of flooding. So for now, the tool only deals with single-family homes, duplexes and triplexes. But it still covers more than 56,000 properties across the city.

Ultimately, the goal is to educate and steer people in vulnerable areas toward purchasing flood insurance and/or implementing flood mitigation strategies, Simons said.

The program isn’t one-size-fits-all, either. Developed with a company called Civis Analytics, it gives targeted results, as well as targeted recommendations, depending on how high the flood risk for a given property.

In the lowest-lying areas, users will see the result of flood events that could reasonably happen once every 10 years. Those on higher ground may see the result of a Category 3 hurricane.

“We wanted people to know they still have flood risk, even if they are out of the 500-year flood plain,” Simons said.

The intention isn’t to shock, Simons said, but to prompt some to take those next steps of getting a new flood insurance policy or installing flood vents in their crawlspaces.

Simons said about 80% of homes in Norfolk that face a high risk of flooding have flood insurance coverage, considerably higher than the national average.

But outside of the riskiest designations, only 10% have such plans, despite Norfolk being a low-lying coastal city that would be largely inundated by a mid-sized hurricane. Standard homeowners or renters insurance doesn’t cover flood damage, so special policies are required which take 30 days to go into effect. That’s part of the reason Norfolk’s trying to get the word out early, before hurricane season starts in June.