No federal funding has been made available yet for a mapping project to assess about a dozen levees that help protect more than 3,500 people in Butler County from flooding.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency released a report last week on initial levee analysis and mapping, but said no money has been allocated to move forward with the effort. Local partners will be notified when this occurs, FEMA said.
Officials met in March with Butler County commissioners and other area stakeholders to discuss a process which could change who is considered high risk under flood zone maps for area homeowners.
FEMA believes this effort would make maps more accurate.
The current mapping system classifies all unaccredited levees as being "without levee" in analysis of flood hazards.
The levees along the Black River and St. Francis River that would be part of the process are all unaccredited.
A program started in 2013 allows some protection to be assessed to unaccredited levees through additional data collection, hydrologic and hydraulic modeling, FEMA reports.
The document released last week includes preliminary data collection, such as descriptions of levees in the mapping area (see accompanying story), information on work to keep local stakeholders informed and how data has been gathered to date.
Local stakeholders include county, city and drainage district representatives, as well as state officials.
Maps presented in March show large sections of northeastern Butler County could move into a lower risk category.
Other areas between Neelyville and the Black River could move into a higher risk category.
An advantage will be for those property owners who currently fall in the flood zone A category, Butler County Emergency Management Agency Director Robbie Myers said at the time. There is no base flood elevation recorded for these areas, which offers no way for the property owner to establish if their property sits below or above flood stage.
Residents have expressed concern the natural valley method of mapping selected for the Butler County project will still not capture all of the protection provided by the existing earthen levees.
Natural valley mapping assesses each levee individually. It assumes the single levee offers no protection, while the other levee systems are assumed to provide flood risk reduction, according to the report.
A different type of mapping process could be requested, but it would require the owner of the levee to provide additional data on nearly a dozen additional criteria, which could be cost prohibitive, officials have said.
The earliest funding could be allotted to the current mapping project would be for a project start date of October 2018, the report notes. If that were to occur, it would take until 2022 to complete the mapping process.