We have one item on the agenda.

It's a discussion regarding the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, community rating system and flood insurance.

And we have Scott here from Public Works to talk about that with us.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for allowing me to come here tonight and take a few minutes.

But it is part of the community rating system that we're a part of.

And it's not might be a shorter presentation than we're done.

Thank you very much.

Oh, okay.

There's the mouse anyway.

I've never had it not advanced for me.

Hey Bryce, you back there available?

Yeah, we need one of those lights in his office, of course.

Oh, here it goes now.

We just decided to finally uh the same button for the 20th time.

So to kind of start off with, is as the mayor pointed out, this is part of the FEMA.

Uh so it's a requirement.

We're part of the community rating system.

We'll talk about that a little bit more here as we go.

But we kind of need to start off with first off with what is a floodplain.

When you look at a river system or a creek or a large channel, usually there's a large widened area around of it so that when that water gets too high, when it starts getting to its flood stages, it has an area where it widens out.

And that can range from a you know, you look at the this the Canadian River, it's very wide.

It's a that's a mile or more wide in some areas to Mhof Creek and areas where it's literally just the width of the channel or barely more.

So it's a really variable item.

This is just kind of a picture here that kind of depicts that.

You can see in that normal condition, you got the little river.

It floods, the water spreads out because it needs more room to be able to move and to be able to collect that water.

If anybody has questions or comments, feel free to reach out.

So when we start talking about what a regulatory floodplain is, uh it's technically it's the land that is subject to 1% or greater chance of flooding any given year.

That's figured out through mathematical modeling.

Uh that's how they came up with them initially.

Uh now, of course, it's a lot more sophisticated.

Uh, back in the day, they literally kind of did some you know, numbers on an engineering pad and then went out and drew them on a on a topo map.

Today we have much more uh detailed modeling that we utilize to figure that out.

But you'll also hear this one percent chance or greater chance of flooding called the 100-year flood or the 1% chance flood.

They're really trying to quit using the 100-year flood because it can happen every year for 10 years, and then it may not happen for a lot of years.

Uh, these areas when they're identified and they're mapped out by FEMA.

That's considered the special flood hazard area or SFHA as they like to call it.

And here's a couple of photos and some areas where we see some frequent flooding throughout Norman there in the bottom.

So just to kind of review for everybody, I think we've all seen these this map before, but all those areas in blue are floodplains.

You can see there's quite a bit of them.

Uh you've got the very large area starting over there on the west side or to the left, which is the 10 mile flats, which is a large flat area.

Uh, we see a lot of flooding in that area, and then of course, down there to the south of that is the Canadian River flood uh area.

So that comes up into Norman, and many of our creeks that come through Norman actually combine with that, and they that zone gets really hard to tell through there.

And then you can't see them quite as well, but all the major creeks, uh, Brooke Caven, Markle, uh Bishop, uh, M.

Hoff, all of them have floodplains associated with them.

And then there on the north side of town, that's the Little River, which has a very large floodplain.

That's a very flat area that widens out quite a bit.

And then you can see the other tributaries that feed into the the Lake Thunderbird and then going out of Lake Thunderbird.

And those are all of our primary uh flood areas that we have identified.

So this kind of shows you what a floodplain may look like.

This is kind of as you're looking down the channel.

So you can see that normal channel in the middle, that's where the water would normally be.

And then you've got that area that that dashed line is the base flood elevation.

That's where they've calculated that that water would rise to in that 1% chance flood.

So that's where that water would get up to.

But the part some of the areas that we really are mindful of are this floodway area in the middle, and that's basically the area that needs to be kept clear to allow the water to be able to move freely.

That's where if we wind up with a lot of structures in there, we can wind up with a lot more flooding, a lot more damage being caused.

So we actually have more strict rules for that floodway area.

And then you've got that area out there on the edge, which we call the flood fringe.