Maps bring confusion, cost

Some high and dry areas are now considered flood zones. Maybe.

By DAN DeWITT, Times Staff Writer
Published July 22, 2007

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George Casey pointed to his 160-acre farm in the middle of a "blue blob."

That's what engineers at the Southwest Florida Water Management District call the aqua-shaded "flood zones" on the district's new watershed maps.

The zone south of Wiscon Road, near Brooksville, covers 80 acres that Casey already knew was in a floodplain and 40 acres that remained dry even during the epic rains of March 1960.

But if Casey develops the 40 acres, he will now pay higher engineering fees and bear the cost of digging large retention ponds that will consume homesites. He will also have to bring in about $640,000 worth of fill dirt.

"Based on what I've seen, the old map was adequate and the new map is pretty extreme," said Casey, 65, who attended a workshop about the maps at Swiftmud's headquarters last week.

Swiftmud engineers call this "sticker shock" - the stunning realization of how costly a new line on a map can be. The new maps more than double the county's freshwater flood zones - the areas engineers think will flood during a once-a-century rainfall - from about 30,000 acres to 75,000.

That means the owners of thousands more homes may be forced to take out expensive flood insurance policies. Building within these blue blobs is always expensive and sometimes impossible.

"The true economic impact of this is in the millions," said Lew Freidland, president of Jireh Inc., the developer of Seven Hills.

Because of these high stakes, the technical, bureaucratic work of drawing new flood maps has recently become the most hotly debated development issue in the county. Builders, real estate agents and landowners - including Freidland, Brooksville banker Jim Kimbrough and retired mining engineer Tommy Bronson - have met with county and Swiftmud engineers repeatedly since January to point out what they consider flaws in the new maps.

The government agencies have listened and agreed to revise the maps to account for rainwater that drains through the sandy soils in Spring Hill and other parts of the county.

That work will increase the cost of the $5.3-million mapping project, though no one knows by how much. It will also leave Hernando without reliable maps for at least another year. In the meantime, the different approaches the district and county have decided to take have added to the confusion. The county will base building permits on the new maps, while Swiftmud is sticking with the old ones.

"It's a mess. It really is a mess," said Janey Baldwin, a member of Swiftmud's Withlacoochee River Basin Board.

New maps overdue

The controversy obscures just how badly the maps were needed in the first place, said Gene Altman, a senior engineer with Swiftmud. The Federal Emergency Management Agency recognized this in 2001, when it started making money available to update federal flood insurance maps throughout the country. Those funds, along with money from Swiftmud and the county, paid for the new maps in Hernando.

The county has known that new maps were needed at least since El Nino flooding in the winter of 1997-98, when large parts of the county designated as dry land on the existing maps were submerged for weeks, said John Burnett, the county's water resources specialist.

Those maps, completed in 1984, were based mostly on aerial photographs taken in the 1950s, when Hernando's population was less than 10,000, Burnett said. Roads, parking lots and houses built since then have dramatically altered drainage patterns and reduced the land's ability to absorb water, he said.

Mapping technology, meanwhile, has improved so much in the past 23 years that engineers can now say not only whether land will flood after a 100-year storm - about 12.5 inches of rain in one day or about 17 inches in five - but also how deep the floodwaters are likely to be.

Better maps can prevent homeowners from being caught without insurance if their homes are flooded. They also protect the government from liability, Altman said at last week's workshop, pointing to a display of a house off Whitman Road north of Brooksville built in 2002.

The county issued the building permit for that house based on old maps that showed no danger of flooding on the land. Then, during the 2004 hurricane season, heavy rains poured 3 feet of water into the home.

FEMA paid $298,000 to buy and demolish the house, about $50,000 more than the cost of the study that would have told the buyer to raise the elevation of the home or not build on that lot.

"That was a brand new house, just about," Altman said. "That's our poster child."

Cost to home buyers

Landowners and real estate agents counter with hardships caused by what they say are inaccurate maps.

The federal government will not base flood insurance rates on the maps until they are final. But that doesn't stop private insurance companies from using them now, said Ana Trinque, government affairs chairwoman for the Hernando County Association of Realtors.

Recently, Trinque said, one of her clients signed a contract to buy a house in Spring Hill on high, dry land far from any lake.

Once the insurer learned the lot was in a new flood zone, its quote for the $160,000 house climbed from $2,200 to $3,600, Trinque said. That placed the monthly payments beyond the reach of the buyer, she said, and demonstrated that the flood maps have created one more obstacle to reviving the housing market.

"We've got taxes and homeowners insurance. Now we have the flood zone maps," she said. "That's three strikes."

Bronson said he began planning what he called a "care campus" two years ago on 30 acres west of Brooksville, on the north side of State Road 50. He planned to donate 5-acre parcels to a half-dozen charities, including the Salvation Army.

Clustering the organizations would allow them to refer clients to different charities, all of which would have been easily accessible to Brooksville and a main highway. When the new maps placed the land in a flood zone, however, the increased construction costs "brought the whole process to a halt," said Bronson, who added that he has never seen water on the property. "It never crossed my mind there could be a flood problem."

Casey grew up on a dairy in Pinellas County near a farm owned by John Culbreath, who later moved his operation to Hernando. In 1959, Culbreath's land was saturated by 77 inches of rain, the highest one-year total in Hernando history, and was then inundated by 27 inches that fell in four days in March 1960 - the flood that inspired the creation of Swiftmud.

Casey said his father had him deliver milk cans and hay to Culbreath's stranded cattle. One of the few patches of Culbreath's farm above ground, Casey said, was the 40-acre parcel that he now owns.

"I've seen the 100-year flood," he said.

Sandy soil is special

The engineers who created the maps also realized the maps weren't right when consultants completed the first ones more than a year ago.

"We saw they were conservative," Altman said. "We re-evaluated it."

The main problem, he said, was the maps' failure to account for percolation, the draining of water into the ground. FEMA guidelines do not allow the maps to account for percolation because it isn't much of a factor in most of the country, Altman said.

But following the lead of Marion County, Swiftmud applied in October for special permission to calculate percolation's effects in Hernando. FEMA granted the exemption in June because of the sandy, porous soil in some parts of Hernando, especially Spring Hill, where the maps are likely to change drastically.

That will have little effect on land near Brooksville. Nor does it resolve all the landowners' and developers' complaints, said Cliff Manuel, president of Coastal Engineering Associates of Brooksville.

Running computer models for the study with five-day storms as well as one-day storms produces maps that conflict with the standard Swiftmud uses when it issues permits for designing drainage on property; the permits must only account for a one-day storm.

Because the county is basing its building permits on the new maps, developers who have already received Swiftmud permits and county approval for their projects' plans may be told by the county Development Department that they must elevate the lots before they can build a house.

That has already happened in established subdivisions, including Southern Hills Plantation and Hernando Oaks, parts of which have been included in the new flood zones, Manuel said.

"It creates a huge problem for development in Hernando," he said.

Gary Fisher, the county's zoning administrator, said his office will consider information landowners provide to show the new maps are incorrect. The county is using the new maps, he said, because engineers from Swiftmud and the county assured him they are more accurate than the old ones.

"My position is, we got this information, the public should be aware that they may be living in a flood zone," Fisher said.

In most parts of the county, that is probably true, Altman said: "If I lived in a blue blob area, I think I would tend to want to get flood insurance."

Dan DeWitt can be reached at dewitt@sptimes.com or 352 754-6116.

FAST FACTS:

Attend the final flood map workshop

The Southwest Florida Water Management District has already conducted two workshops to discuss new flood maps for Hernando County. The final workshop, for watersheds on the west side of the county, will be from 4 to 8 p.m. Aug. 6 at the Spring Hill Branch/Harold G. Zopp Memorial Library at 9220 Spring Hill Drive, Spring Hill. More information about the flood maps can be found at www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/projects/wmp/index.html.

[Last modified July 21, 2007, 18:36:30]