What is flood recovery data?  After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, FEMA gathered data to assist State and local officials as well as home and business owners to assess the extent and magnitude of the two storms.  This data also helps identify the increased flood hazards that these and other storms have had on the region over the last 25 years.   This flood recovery data will assist the 15 affected parishes in recovering from the disasters as well as plan redevelopment projects to avoid future flood damages.

The data was gathered from Federal and local sources by several means; engineering modeling, geospatial information analysis, physical surveys, information extracted from existing maps, and historical records.  The data was then compiled into FEMA advisory recovery maps.  These maps are for recovery purposes only and do not supersede the current adopted Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs). The advisory recovery maps indicate high water marks surveyed after the storm, surge inundation limits depicted as contours, and advisory flood elevations.  Work continues in developing additional recovery data such as the U.S Army Corps of Engineer’s studies on storm surge modeling. 

Flood recovery data is used in producing new flood hazard maps for all the communities that were affected by Katrina and Rita.  This new data will be distributed as digital maps and will be more accurate than the existing paper FIRMs.  These new Digital Flood Insurance Rate Maps (DFIRMs) will require adoption by the communities for insurance purposes under the National Flood Insurance Program.

In this section, you will find information not only about flood hazard mapping but also about floodplain management and flood insurance.  Please read the rest of this section to better understand how flood hazard maps support the efforts of communities to establish programs and regulations to reduce flood damages.  This data will also aid the insurance industry to actuarially rate property to reduce the economic impacts of flood disasters.