FEMA’s flood maps not yet open for review

Officials facing Oct. 5 deadline

After four years of revisions, Palm Beach County’s new flood insurance rate maps have been finalized.

That’s what the Federal Emergency Management Agency told the county and its cities in a letter on April 5, triggering a six-month windowfor their elected officials to formally adopt the maps. There’s just one problem. Sevenweeks after FEMA started that clock, the county and its cities are still waiting for the agency to make the flood hazardmaps available for public inspection.

Ken Todd, Palm Beach County’s water resources manager, said FEMA told them in earlyApril that they would release the maps to the public within “four to sixweeks.”

On Tuesday, FEMA spokesman Danon Lucas said the maps won’t be available to the public for another one to two months. Yet, local governments still face an Oct. 5 deadline to formally adopt the maps, along with flood management plans, if they want property owners to remain eligible for coverage by the National Flood Insurance Program.

Todd said, “What makes this difficult for everybody is how do you adopt maps you haven’t received yet? That’s the boatwe’re all in.”

Only a handful of county and city officials have glimpsed the long-awaited maps. And those are .pdf image versions, meaning they can’t easily search for properties or tally how many properties have been added to or removed from mandatory flood insurance zones compared with the current map versions, which have been in use since the 1980s.

FEMA reluctantly sent those image files to Doug Wise, the county’s flood plain administrator and building official, who told the agency he needed them for long-range planning, Todd said. FEMA asked Wise not to release them to the public because they are still undergoing a quality control check, Todd added.

And while Wise will allow anyone a glimpse at his