Flood Management, Insurance, and Assistance Information

National Flood Insurance Program (Floodsmart.gov)
Information on flooding, flooding risks, flood insurance and when it is required, how to prepare and recover from a flood, how to make a claim for assistance following flood damage, and other useful information.

Bloomfield Flood Management Regulations
The Flood Management Regulations regulate development within the Special Flood Hazard Area (a.k.a. the 100-year floodplain) and the floodway.  The Flood Management Regulations are contained within the Bloomfield Zoning Regulations.  Virtually all development activities of any kind within the SFHA require a Flood Management Permt before they can be undertaken.  Flood Management Permits are issued as part of the Zoing permitting process.  See the Planning and Zoning Department webpage (Click Here) for more information.

Flood Damage Assistance when you don't have insruance or Insurance doesn't cover the damage:
FEMA has issued a helpful brochure (Click Here to see it) and has a specific webpage (Click Here to go to it) to help inform you what assistance may be available to you if you suffer damage and do not have flood insurance, (eligibility may be severly limited if your damaged building is located in a Special  Flood Hazard Area [or you have received assistance from  FEMA previously on the building] and you 'chose' not to purchase flood insurance,) or if you incurred damage/expenses that your flood insurance does not cover or is delayed in covering.  At the upper left of the webpage are links to get to the application webpage and other related informational webpages.

Bloomfield Flood Management Administrator
The Town Engineer is the Flood Management Administrator (FMA)  for Bloomfield.  The FMA implements, administers and enforces the Flood Management Regulations, and makes interpretations as to the extents of the Special Flood Hazard Areas as well as regulatory flood eleveations, not associated with insurance matters, where data may be missing or found to be inaccurate or superceded by better information.

Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs)
The FIRMS are [now] digital maps issued by FEMA that designate the boundaries flood zones for insurance purposes and the floodways for regulatory purposes.  Prints or digital versions of FIRMs may be obtained from FEMA's website.  In addition, the Engineering Office and the Town Clerk's offices in Town Hall has printed copies of the relevant map sheets for Bloomfiled; and the Engineering office has the FEMA digital flood data incorporated into their GIS data.  The Town GIS version of the data is not official, however it is incorporated into essentially the same base GIS datasets that FEMA used in order to create the FIRMs and is a primary resource that the Town Engineer would use to make a determination of the actual boudary of a floodzone.  Therefore, the Town's GIS flood management data is appropriate for all but the most critical of applications.  The FIRM maps indlude elevation information on them within the Special Flood Hazard Area (SFHA).  However, these elevations are approximate and should not be used for any regulatory or technical purpose.  Rather, elevations for such purposes should be obtained from the Flood Insurance Study (see below).

Flood Insurance Study (FIS) and the Base Flood Elevation (BFE)
FEMA also issues a Flood Insurance Study in conjuntion with the FIRMs; and, in fact, the FIRMs are based on the Flood Insurance Study.  The Flood Insurance Study establishes elevations for floods at selected cross sections along a studied watercourse.  The FIS creates and includes plotted profiles of these flood elevations, along with the stream bed, at the ceterline of the particular watercourse being studied.  The FIS also includes tables for each watercourse that list information at each cross section location obtained and modelled in the study.  A particularly important element of information at each cross section is the Base Flood Elevation (BFE).  The BFE is the elevation of a flood with a recurrence probability of 0.01 (1/100) in any given year at the particular cross section location.  It is also commonly known as the "100-year flood elevation", although the connotation of this is not entirely correct.  The BFE is the flood elevation that controls in all regulatory and technical [SFHA] flood matters not related to insurance matters or the limits of the floodway.  The BFE was/is the basis for the plotting of the SFHA (a.k.a. the "100-year floodplain"), however errors and inaccuracies occur, and over time better elevation information may become available.  In such cases, plotting the BFE elevations on the better elevation data, or correcting for errors or inaccuracies, will result in boundaries for the 0.01 probalility flood that differ from those depicted on the FIRM.  FEMA gives the local Flood Management Administrator the authority to, based on the best information available and sound technical practices and judgement, to apply the BFE / 0.01 chance probability limits based on the new/corrected data for non-insurance related matters.

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