SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. – With less than 70 days until the start of the next hurricane season, Seminole County is starting to update its floodplain management plan for the next five years.
Emergency Manager Alan Harris says it’s something the county does with input from the community as they look for ways to become more resilient to floods. Work done during the last report from 2020-2025 led to the county evaluating all of its basins. Those studies are being used to help decisionmakers pinpoint mitigation projects and provide the most accurate picture of what risks there are in certain flood-prone areas.
“From those basin studies we’re already looking at projects that can be implemented to make our community more resilient to floods,” Harris said.
There will be a public meeting Thursday night so the county can seek out more information from residents as it plans ahead toward 2030.
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Harris says it will lead to new projects that could include improving stormwater systems, elevating homes out of the flood zone and buying more flood-prone houses and demolishing them.
Wednesday, Harris met our News 6 team at a property off of Orange Boulevard that was bought out in 2012 and demolished. Seminole County’s program uses Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood-mitigation grant funds to purchase properties, demolish the existing structure, and then return the land to the floodplain.
“This home was repetitively lost over and over again. It flooded, there were insurance claims,” Harris said. “It was more of a benefit for the insurance companies, for Seminole County, for the state of Florida, for the resident to move them out and to return this back to the floodplain.”
Harris says that through the program, nothing can be built on the property again. The land he showed our crew Wednesday now has a retention pond on it where water can drain from nearby communities that have developed around it.
“You can see the topography of the land. It really pointed directly to this house,” Harris explained. “So, where this house was, was collecting water from all the community and the neighborhood and going right in here.”
The county already knows which neighborhoods are the most flood-prone due to lessons learned from Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Ian, and other storms over the years, but Harris says the ongoing basin studies will hopefully help them understand what other areas could be at risk. New technology including Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), Geographic Information System (GIS), and satellite imagery can also help update existing flood maps.
Right now, anyone can access maps online from FEMA and see if their address is in a flood zone, but Harris says many of those maps are older and Seminole County’s flood footprint is changing due to development and climate.
It’s another reason why the county must do what it can to continue to understand the hazards here locally and reduce future risks.
“We’ve had four 100-year floods in the last seven years. Floods that aren’t supposed to happen in 100 years, we’ve had four of them,” Harris said. “We know that we are seeing more water. We know that we are seeing more issues with flooding. We want to be more resilient.”
Harris says the community is the county’s “sounding board,” and that’s why he hopes people attend this week’s meeting.
“We know that you know your neighborhood better than us. You live in your neighborhood every single day. You see where the trouble sites are, because you’re out walking your dog, talking to your neighbor,” Harris said. “So, if you have an area that we want to look at, we want to hear that, because that can go to a project, which can go to a remedy, which can go to resilience.”
Thursday’s meeting starts at 5:30 p.m. at the Seminole County Library Northwest Branch, 580 Green Way Boulevard, Lake Mary.
You can find more information shared by the county online below:
