So our idea was to reduce risk for buildings (and) make the building freeboard 2 feet across the city.” ![]() Kevin Shunk, the city’s flood plain administrator, told the Austin Monitor, “It’s been found that the single most effective way to reduce (flood) risk to a building is to elevate the building higher. In part, the altered timeline is due to the addition of three other revisions to the city’s flood plain regulations, including a new residential redevelopment exception to incentivize private investment to reduce the flood risk of existing residential buildings, an extension of the existing Colorado River exception to Lake Austin and portions of Lake Travis within the city’s jurisdiction and increasing the distance above the flood plain – called freeboard – for buildings 2 feet above the 100-year flood plain.Ĭurrently, buildings are only required to be 1 foot above the flood plain, unless a building is in the central business district, where it must be out of the flood plain by 2 feet. Now, after engaging residents, commissions and local real estate groups, Watershed Protection is anticipating code changes to come before Council in October. The 100-year flood plain represents areas with a 1 percent chance or greater of flooding within the year and the 25-year flood plain is an area within a flood plain subject to a 4 percent or greater chance of flooding. To remedy the incongruence between past and present, the Watershed Protection Department promptly proposed rolling out interim flood plain definitions that designated what was the pre- Atlas 14 500-year flood plain as the new 100-year flood plain and pre-Atlas 14 100-year flood plain as today’s 25-year flood plain. Now Atlas 14 has rendered the city of Austin’s current flood maps out of date.Īlthough the Watershed Protection Department originally anticipated it would present Council with comprehensive proposed code changes for flood maps this spring, according to a department memo last week, that timeline has been extended. Last fall’s major floods turned scientific conjecture into observable reality. ![]() ![]() The Atlas 14 study conducted by the National Weather Service indicated that in the immediate future, Central Texas is likely to experience more powerful storm events that will increase flooding by 30 percent.
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