Property owners would be remiss in believing the BFE on the EC, flood zone determination, or any other source is accurate if the document does not say how the BFE was measured. Since many professionals don’t have an hour to use FEMA’s accurate method for your BFE, they use simpler and faster methods to approximate it. There is no requirement to use FEMA’s highly accurate LOMA process, or to take data from the FIS as described above. To calculate a flood insurance premium, FEMA’s Flood Insurance Manual (FIM) says a BFE value from an Elevation Certificate (EC), a flood zone determination, or any other source can be used. The procedure produces an accurate BFE to 0.1’ (that’s 1.2 inches) for your specific structure, but it can take up to an hour to gather the materials and calculate the BFE. The procedure leverages not only the Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM) but also the highly accurate floodplain engineering and professional land survey data found in the Flood Insurance Study (FIS). Additionally, training for this method is adopted and provided by the National Flood Association (NFA) and the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) for their eLOMA Certification and Certified Floodplain Manager certifications. All staff who process a LOMA on behalf of FEMA are trained to use this process. There is a standard method for calculating the BFE used by FEMA when establishing an official BFE for a Letter of Map Amendment (LOMA) application. Moreover, most stakeholders are generally unaware of how their BFE is measured. With that level of importance, you would assume there would be clear standards for reporting accurate BFE values and penalties for inaccuracy. So, the BFE is one of, if not the most, critical measurements we can use to evaluate and plan for flood risk. And it is frequently used for other insurance, planning, and flood mitigation activities. The BFE is also used by planners so a structure can be built above the 100-year floodplain. Generally speaking, the nearer the structure’s elevation is to the BFE the greater the risk, and for structure elevations below the BFE, the further the structure’s elevation is to the BFE, the more flood water would be expected to inundate the structure during a flood event causing greater damage, therefore higher insurance premiums. The Base Flood Elevation (BFE) represents the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) 1% Annual Chance Floodplain (aka.
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