Based on guidelines passed down from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, officials from the City of Hattiesburg will soon be required to adopt new flood panels and an upgraded flood ordinance that reflect changes in state process.
The new measures, which must be approved by Hattiesburg City Council members by Sept. 19, will see some areas removed from the current flood zone, while other areas will be added to that designation. The matter was brought to a recent council work session by Ginger Lowrey, who serves as planning division manager for the city.
“The city has received firm data for adoption that updates our flood zones, so there are a handful of panels in our flood zone that have seen changes,” Lowrey told council members. “We started the update of this data a few years back; (FEMA) handles all of the data gathering, and they use lots of different methods.
“This is part of a statewide process as well; they kind of spread it throughout the state in updating their data. So there are many, many municipalities that are going through this.”
Residents can view an interactive map of the zones by visiting www.hattiesburgms.com and clicking on the “Flood Information” link. The legend for the map is broken down into the following categories: properties newly affected; properties no longer in the 100-year flood zone; unchanged 100-flood-year area; areas no longer in the 100-year flood zone; and newly-added areas in the 100-year flood zone.
Twenty-seven structures are newly added to the flood zone, including some in Ward 2 and Ward 5. In addition, 119 parcels are newly added to the flood zone.
However, 279 parcels are no longer in the defined flood zone.
All changes are dictated by the aforementioned FEMA studies.
“They review data that has to do with the elevation of the land itself, waterways (and other factors),” Lowrey said. “They worked with an engineering firm to determine where the flood zones have changed.
“Flood zones continuously change, because we continuously grow and evolve our communities. We have things like stormwater maintenance and ways to improve our streams, but we also add things like parking lots and structures, so typically, flood zones only expand. It’s not very often that they’re reduced. I don’t know overall, in the state, what other communities are experiencing for reduced flood zones, but I would say this is not necessarily common to lose flood zones.”
In addition, the city also contains flood zones that are labeled as Zone A, which mean there is no data informing residents of how high they are required to build structures. Per the new standards, 181 of those properties - many of which are in Ward 5 - are now classified as A-E.
“So those properties now have that data, and we don’t have to hire an independent engineer to determine how high they have to build,” Lowrey said. “We recently had a church that had to rebuild (after a tornado), and they had to hire an engineer to determine that flood zone.
“Rather than just have an engineer tell them how high it is, they had to do a pretty in-depth study to find that out. So that was something that’s actually improved in a sense.”
According to the city’s website, approximately 25 percent of the Hub City’s property is located in a Special Flood Hazard Area. The vast majority of homes and businesses within that area are older, low-lying, and built prior to FEMA’s flood designations.
However, many of those properties have been elevated because of reconstruction that came after tornadoes in 2013 and 2016.
