Flood Zones IV: The Reckoning

What a long strange trip it's been. I know more about flood zones, flood insurance, and base flood elevation (BFE) than I thought possible. Well, actually, I never thought about it. I was mostly oblivious to anything beyond what a flood zone is. I am grateful for the knowledge, though. One should know as much as possible about every aspect of the property that he or she plans to purchase. It is, after all, a major investment, likely the biggest anyone will ever make. I cannot even write a hundredth part of the knowledge I have gained in the last few days. The best part is that we are almost through the fire. One step at a time, we are taking care of this. The insurance made me nervous. The agent we are likely to work with had told me that the best case scenario for flood insurance was $454 and the worst case was $3600 (those are yearly premiums). The determining factor would come from the elevation certification that was performed by a survey team on Tuesday. We got our hands on the report today and faxed a copy to the agent. She put in the calculations and . . . BOOM! $454, baby! Yes, that adds $38 a month to our house payment, but, hey, it is waterfront property.

The one unknown in this equation is that our mortgage guy has never submitted a report where the BFE was determined by the community. Basically, there was no BFE assigned to the area by FEMA. It makes sense. FEMA does not have the money or manpower to send people to every home in the country in a potential flood area to determine the BFE. So it makes sense that the FEMA form for elevation certification has a place wherein the surveyor can check the BFE as "Community Determined." I did some additional research on that today, and it does seem that in order to do that, a community can check historic flood levels. Well, it just so happens that that area has never flooded in recorded history. That is to our benefit. We'll just wait and see what the USDA loan people have to say about the community determination. That said, we have put our names to a contract.