dog willing the creek don't rise
23 May 2007 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouBoy, that phrase has taken on a new meaning around here.
When we bought this house, we didn't know until we were driving through West-by-god-Virginia that we were purchasing a house in the 100-yr flood zone. (Gee, thanks for the warning, assholes.) Given the type of loan, flood insurance would be mandatory -- there goes about $750 a year. Lovely.
The hidden teeth-kick in that tidbit? The BFE (base flood elevation, aka the big fucking exasperation), as last measured by FEMA, was 612.8 feet. Our house's oh-so-pedestrian concrete slab (and thus the foot-level of our only living space) is 613.5 -- not quite a foot outside the BFE, but close enough. Reason for our insurance cost? Our garage floor -- on the opposite side of the house from the creek -- has an elevation of 612.6. That's point-two feet: only 2.5 inches below the BFE! Not even a bloody half-foot! Barely a quarter-foot!
My grand scheme all along has been to throw down a concrete overlay in the garage. There's a 4" drop from the back workshop area, anyway, and I'm sick of taking a step and nearly twisting my ankle. For $100, I could do a 3" overlay or thereabouts, slant it towards the outside, and in a weeks' worth of work I'd be able to call the surveyors and say, "come save me lotsa money, boys."
Until I, for some who-knows-now reason, was on the city gov't pages, and noticed a tiny snippet about FEMA remeasuring the flood plains after 29 years. Wait, that floodzone level was 29 years old? What're we at now? With some trepidation, I open the mapping system, wait for it to load, enter my address...
And we've moved from an AO rank to an AE, because now the flood zone level is...
615.7.
Oh, that's just peachy. We're now two feet under the big fuckingexasperation MIGRAINE. I could overlay all I wanted to, until the cow comes in, and I'd never make it. FEMA's oh-so-pointless suggestions? Well, I could tear down my house and donate the land to the city. Yeah! Sure! I'll get right on that! Or, I could move the entire house to a different piece of land -- oh, like that's gonna happen. Or, I could raise the entire house -- two feet. Cheaper if I don't raise the slab at the same time, y'know, but still -- I do not love this house nearly enough to make any of those worth it.
I could build levees -- but that'd take up pretty much all of the 200' between me and the creek. Creek-side, the ground by the house's foundation has an elevation of about 611' (eyeballing the various topo-maps), and to get any clearance on levees (or floodwalls), you have to have something called foot-space or free-space, whatever, starts with an F. So that means 615' - 611'= 4' + another 1' clearance... that's a 5' high levee, which means the levee's base -- for it to be stable and to hold back 4' worth of water -- would be somewhere around 40' across. (A levee works best when its sides have the lowest possible rise to the run.) Still...40 feet!? I only have 5' worth of clearance between the creek-side of the house and the property line, people!
Or, I could build a floodwall... assuming I could get the city to okay me tearing into the conservation land along our northeastern property line (creekside), because the floodwall base would be nearly as wide as it is tall, and you don't want it within distance of the house equal to 2' + floodwall height. (If the floodwall comes down, it won't crumble, and it won't seep; according to the good souls at FEMA, the wall will explode outward from the pressure of the water, and between floodwall-shrapnel and water onslaught, the damage could be worse than no wall in the first place -- so the last thing you want is wall within shouting distance of house, where the shrapnel could just come right through the siding, urgh.)
That means 6' minimum away from house-foundation, which puts it on the empty lot instead of our land, and -- this is where it gets even better -- the empty lot's property has an elevation of 609.5. That's right. That land is a foot and a half lower in elevation than ours -- which means now the floodwall must be nearly seven feet high.
The issue here is that any onsite (aka one-house) floodwall can't really top about 4'; it's point of no return over that. The cost would be phenomenal to build an underground support structure strong enough to offset water pressure of a flood. Which really made me laugh, considering that to build a floodwall only 3' high, it's approximately $120 a linear foot.
A floodwall running just along our northeastern property line -- the one parallel to the creek -- would end up costing us as much as we've already spent on all our interior improvements. And a few bottles of wine! An entire case, even! Bloody hell, I'm not spending that much on a stupid-ass wall!
I read, and read some more, and read some more, and fussed a number of times at CP, and kept reading, and the stupid FEMA pages -- oh, how I long for the days of Clinton when at least I knew that the folks in charge of any department were there because they were bright & experienced, even if they didn't like the person appointing them. Oh, for non-partisan appointments rather than me sitting here going, "gee, did this person get this web content job because s/he was a member of the Young Republicans? Because I'm not seeing any other reason s/he would deserve it..."
For instance: if you build a new property below BFE, or do "substantial changes over a certain threshold" to an existing property, then you must follow FEMA regs for new properties within BFE. I'm clear on that... right? Ha, ha, ha, NO.
Notice there's no actual definition of what 'substantial' means -- let alone what exactly they mean by 'certain threshold.' Do they mean "how much you spent"? Because if so, I've not spent much more than about 10% of the value of our house at purchase, on improvements -- and that number includes things like ceiling fans and new appliances and paint and various other things not usually counted as "major house improvements". Do they mean "how much those improvements would have cost you if you'd paid for someone else to do the work like any other person with more than half-brain capacity"? If so, I might be screwed -- from what I can figure, even our minimal improvements (relatively) would have cost around $50K total, so far, and I'm not even counting building out the kitchen and installing new entrance doors. Do they mean "enough changes to affect market value"? Because we bought the house not quite 18 months ago, and already it's gained about 20% over our original purchase cost, just from house sales around us. I'd like something other than "certain threshold", please.
Morons.
Lest we forget, there's also that "must" -- as in, emphasized several times in FEMA online stuff, you must do this. Or what? You'll come make faces at me? My insurance policy will be found null and void if I do flood? My insurance policy won't reimburse me for more than my original purchase of the house? If this is the Republican FEMA concept of helping the helpless with warm fuzzies, please... stop. I'd be quite fine without the stupid warm fuzzies, if I could just get some straight answers about what this change means.
And, for the time being, I'm going to take it at face value that when the city's govt site reports that if you're paying flood insurance at X levels, and your BFE-rank changes, you'll be grandfathered in at original levels and that this will convey to the next owners. I damn well hope so, because according to FEMA's graphs, our zip code, house assessed value, and BFE rank indicate we should be paying just shy of double what we're paying currently. On the other hand, it was September when FEMA released its new measurements, and we've not gotten an increased bill -- or announcement of any such -- so I'm hoping that for once, what they say really is what they mean.
A'course, I'm also still waiting on reply from the city's GIS offices. Bastards.
This meant I spent yesterday not working on, erm, work *cough* but on puzzling out everything I could find out about floodzones, prevention, levees, floodwalls, and that meant for every search I hit eight thousand links to Hurricane Katrina. Great. No, I really don't need to know why the floodwalls collapsed; if I build ones that big here, I wouldn't even be able to see the sandstone cliffs on the creek's other side, let alone the three-story condos sitting above them. (Well out of the BFE, I might add... bastards.)
The irony is that before I left on last trip, I'd been trying to track down a landscape architect who could come up with a good landscaping plan to turn our yard back into an edge-of-woods property, instead of a surburban land, must-mow-regularly, shows-if-you-don't-water, energy hog. Of the ones who replied, the answer was always, "right now we're really busy," and I'm going: "what, now?" It's May. Another month, and if you get those plants in the ground they'll only have a month (or less!) before getting suckerpunched by the July/Augustbloodbath heat waves. I was figuring, July, August, we make plans -- maybe put someone else through the agony of doing the hardscaping, just to be ready -- and then in September and October, start putting in green things.
But now, obviously, the slant has changed from "make my lawn into non-lawn" to "help me figure out a way to at least alleviate the psychological sense of exposure to a creek that might swamp my house in two feet of muddy water, please". Because, really, the one really important question is: will I be unable to sell the house, thanks to the floodzone levels?
The goal is to do a lot of work on the house -- not just to make it a nicer place to live, mind you -- but so when we go to sell, we can get a profit. I'd been hoping for at least 25% increase on sale price, maybe more, depending on how much we'd done (and landscaping is, honestly, a big part of that, on a more psychological level). But I don't want it to be that someone offers us what we paid for the house, and only because of the improvements. That is, that the improvements don't become a profit-maker but a loss leader against the "your house might be swallowed up whole by the creek someday" factor.
Yes, if you're wondering... yesterday was a Very Bad Day, as a result.
Near day's end, I wrote back to the landscape architects who'd replied, explaining the news, and that I'd be leaning more towards the question of retaining walls, possible homeowner-friendly means of minor flood prevention (since definitively holding off a 100-yr flood is out of the question). Just enough, y'know, so that any potential buyers in three or four years would look at the property and say, "it doesn't feel like it's exposed, just sitting here on the edge of a big flat area and waiting to get whapped from the northeastern side..." That sort of feeling might be just about all I can manage, shy of convincing the city -- and my neighborhood -- to permit/assist me in building a vernal pond on the northeastern corner of my property (and stretching into the woods & empty lot), or in tearing up the old, overgrown bermuda grass across the empty lot and replacing it with native plants that won't clump so thick at the roots that they're as impermeable as any concrete...
And what do I get? So far, two architects have responded: "you'll need an engineer for that." Uhm, thanks, that'd be why I asked in your email, "and if this is outside your experience, could you refer me to an engineer?" Everywhere else on the planet, that kind of question usually means "and give me a name, you twit." I can't possibly be the first person to come along who'd want a retaining wall over 3', let alone a free-standing wall of any sort -- so you have to have worked with at least one engineer, somewhere, at some point. Right? No?
What do you people do, just dig holes and stick in plants? Because frankly, that I can bloody well do on my own.
In between gnashing my teeth over inadequate and ambiguous threats on the FEMA site, of course.
Bastards.
On the other hand, go ahead. Ask me about levees, flood walls, flood zones, urban reforestation, ephemeral ponds, edge growth versus deer population, retaining wall construction, microclimates, elevation measurements, wet and dry flood protection, or building berms. Go on. I can take it.
When we bought this house, we didn't know until we were driving through West-by-god-Virginia that we were purchasing a house in the 100-yr flood zone. (Gee, thanks for the warning, assholes.) Given the type of loan, flood insurance would be mandatory -- there goes about $750 a year. Lovely.
The hidden teeth-kick in that tidbit? The BFE (base flood elevation, aka the big fucking exasperation), as last measured by FEMA, was 612.8 feet. Our house's oh-so-pedestrian concrete slab (and thus the foot-level of our only living space) is 613.5 -- not quite a foot outside the BFE, but close enough. Reason for our insurance cost? Our garage floor -- on the opposite side of the house from the creek -- has an elevation of 612.6. That's point-two feet: only 2.5 inches below the BFE! Not even a bloody half-foot! Barely a quarter-foot!
My grand scheme all along has been to throw down a concrete overlay in the garage. There's a 4" drop from the back workshop area, anyway, and I'm sick of taking a step and nearly twisting my ankle. For $100, I could do a 3" overlay or thereabouts, slant it towards the outside, and in a weeks' worth of work I'd be able to call the surveyors and say, "come save me lotsa money, boys."
Until I, for some who-knows-now reason, was on the city gov't pages, and noticed a tiny snippet about FEMA remeasuring the flood plains after 29 years. Wait, that floodzone level was 29 years old? What're we at now? With some trepidation, I open the mapping system, wait for it to load, enter my address...
And we've moved from an AO rank to an AE, because now the flood zone level is...
615.7.
Oh, that's just peachy. We're now two feet under the big fucking
I could build levees -- but that'd take up pretty much all of the 200' between me and the creek. Creek-side, the ground by the house's foundation has an elevation of about 611' (eyeballing the various topo-maps), and to get any clearance on levees (or floodwalls), you have to have something called foot-space or free-space, whatever, starts with an F. So that means 615' - 611'= 4' + another 1' clearance... that's a 5' high levee, which means the levee's base -- for it to be stable and to hold back 4' worth of water -- would be somewhere around 40' across. (A levee works best when its sides have the lowest possible rise to the run.) Still...40 feet!? I only have 5' worth of clearance between the creek-side of the house and the property line, people!
Or, I could build a floodwall... assuming I could get the city to okay me tearing into the conservation land along our northeastern property line (creekside), because the floodwall base would be nearly as wide as it is tall, and you don't want it within distance of the house equal to 2' + floodwall height. (If the floodwall comes down, it won't crumble, and it won't seep; according to the good souls at FEMA, the wall will explode outward from the pressure of the water, and between floodwall-shrapnel and water onslaught, the damage could be worse than no wall in the first place -- so the last thing you want is wall within shouting distance of house, where the shrapnel could just come right through the siding, urgh.)
That means 6' minimum away from house-foundation, which puts it on the empty lot instead of our land, and -- this is where it gets even better -- the empty lot's property has an elevation of 609.5. That's right. That land is a foot and a half lower in elevation than ours -- which means now the floodwall must be nearly seven feet high.
The issue here is that any onsite (aka one-house) floodwall can't really top about 4'; it's point of no return over that. The cost would be phenomenal to build an underground support structure strong enough to offset water pressure of a flood. Which really made me laugh, considering that to build a floodwall only 3' high, it's approximately $120 a linear foot.
A floodwall running just along our northeastern property line -- the one parallel to the creek -- would end up costing us as much as we've already spent on all our interior improvements. And a few bottles of wine! An entire case, even! Bloody hell, I'm not spending that much on a stupid-ass wall!
I read, and read some more, and read some more, and fussed a number of times at CP, and kept reading, and the stupid FEMA pages -- oh, how I long for the days of Clinton when at least I knew that the folks in charge of any department were there because they were bright & experienced, even if they didn't like the person appointing them. Oh, for non-partisan appointments rather than me sitting here going, "gee, did this person get this web content job because s/he was a member of the Young Republicans? Because I'm not seeing any other reason s/he would deserve it..."
For instance: if you build a new property below BFE, or do "substantial changes over a certain threshold" to an existing property, then you must follow FEMA regs for new properties within BFE. I'm clear on that... right? Ha, ha, ha, NO.
Notice there's no actual definition of what 'substantial' means -- let alone what exactly they mean by 'certain threshold.' Do they mean "how much you spent"? Because if so, I've not spent much more than about 10% of the value of our house at purchase, on improvements -- and that number includes things like ceiling fans and new appliances and paint and various other things not usually counted as "major house improvements". Do they mean "how much those improvements would have cost you if you'd paid for someone else to do the work like any other person with more than half-brain capacity"? If so, I might be screwed -- from what I can figure, even our minimal improvements (relatively) would have cost around $50K total, so far, and I'm not even counting building out the kitchen and installing new entrance doors. Do they mean "enough changes to affect market value"? Because we bought the house not quite 18 months ago, and already it's gained about 20% over our original purchase cost, just from house sales around us. I'd like something other than "certain threshold", please.
Morons.
Lest we forget, there's also that "must" -- as in, emphasized several times in FEMA online stuff, you must do this. Or what? You'll come make faces at me? My insurance policy will be found null and void if I do flood? My insurance policy won't reimburse me for more than my original purchase of the house? If this is the Republican FEMA concept of helping the helpless with warm fuzzies, please... stop. I'd be quite fine without the stupid warm fuzzies, if I could just get some straight answers about what this change means.
And, for the time being, I'm going to take it at face value that when the city's govt site reports that if you're paying flood insurance at X levels, and your BFE-rank changes, you'll be grandfathered in at original levels and that this will convey to the next owners. I damn well hope so, because according to FEMA's graphs, our zip code, house assessed value, and BFE rank indicate we should be paying just shy of double what we're paying currently. On the other hand, it was September when FEMA released its new measurements, and we've not gotten an increased bill -- or announcement of any such -- so I'm hoping that for once, what they say really is what they mean.
A'course, I'm also still waiting on reply from the city's GIS offices. Bastards.
This meant I spent yesterday not working on, erm, work *cough* but on puzzling out everything I could find out about floodzones, prevention, levees, floodwalls, and that meant for every search I hit eight thousand links to Hurricane Katrina. Great. No, I really don't need to know why the floodwalls collapsed; if I build ones that big here, I wouldn't even be able to see the sandstone cliffs on the creek's other side, let alone the three-story condos sitting above them. (Well out of the BFE, I might add... bastards.)
The irony is that before I left on last trip, I'd been trying to track down a landscape architect who could come up with a good landscaping plan to turn our yard back into an edge-of-woods property, instead of a surburban land, must-mow-regularly, shows-if-you-don't-water, energy hog. Of the ones who replied, the answer was always, "right now we're really busy," and I'm going: "what, now?" It's May. Another month, and if you get those plants in the ground they'll only have a month (or less!) before getting suckerpunched by the July/August
But now, obviously, the slant has changed from "make my lawn into non-lawn" to "help me figure out a way to at least alleviate the psychological sense of exposure to a creek that might swamp my house in two feet of muddy water, please". Because, really, the one really important question is: will I be unable to sell the house, thanks to the floodzone levels?
The goal is to do a lot of work on the house -- not just to make it a nicer place to live, mind you -- but so when we go to sell, we can get a profit. I'd been hoping for at least 25% increase on sale price, maybe more, depending on how much we'd done (and landscaping is, honestly, a big part of that, on a more psychological level). But I don't want it to be that someone offers us what we paid for the house, and only because of the improvements. That is, that the improvements don't become a profit-maker but a loss leader against the "your house might be swallowed up whole by the creek someday" factor.
Yes, if you're wondering... yesterday was a Very Bad Day, as a result.
Near day's end, I wrote back to the landscape architects who'd replied, explaining the news, and that I'd be leaning more towards the question of retaining walls, possible homeowner-friendly means of minor flood prevention (since definitively holding off a 100-yr flood is out of the question). Just enough, y'know, so that any potential buyers in three or four years would look at the property and say, "it doesn't feel like it's exposed, just sitting here on the edge of a big flat area and waiting to get whapped from the northeastern side..." That sort of feeling might be just about all I can manage, shy of convincing the city -- and my neighborhood -- to permit/assist me in building a vernal pond on the northeastern corner of my property (and stretching into the woods & empty lot), or in tearing up the old, overgrown bermuda grass across the empty lot and replacing it with native plants that won't clump so thick at the roots that they're as impermeable as any concrete...
And what do I get? So far, two architects have responded: "you'll need an engineer for that." Uhm, thanks, that'd be why I asked in your email, "and if this is outside your experience, could you refer me to an engineer?" Everywhere else on the planet, that kind of question usually means "and give me a name, you twit." I can't possibly be the first person to come along who'd want a retaining wall over 3', let alone a free-standing wall of any sort -- so you have to have worked with at least one engineer, somewhere, at some point. Right? No?
What do you people do, just dig holes and stick in plants? Because frankly, that I can bloody well do on my own.
In between gnashing my teeth over inadequate and ambiguous threats on the FEMA site, of course.
Bastards.
On the other hand, go ahead. Ask me about levees, flood walls, flood zones, urban reforestation, ephemeral ponds, edge growth versus deer population, retaining wall construction, microclimates, elevation measurements, wet and dry flood protection, or building berms. Go on. I can take it.