Kellogg, FEMA at standstill

KELLOGG –– Progress between the city of Kellogg and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to revise aging flood maps has ground to a halt.

Earlier this month, under the supervision of engineering firm Alta Science and Engineering, the city re-submitted its letter of map revision (LOMR) in a new digital format for consideration by the national agency.

Mike Fitzgerald, Kellogg’s Public Works director, has been on this project since it began – however, he initially approached it when he was serving on the Shoshone Board of County Commissioners – it’s his opinion that the process has boiled down to being a cat and mouse game between the agency and the local governments who are trying to fix what they consider to be a decade’s old mistake.

“The stuff that they’re asking us to clarify is down to the milli-inches,” Fitzgerald said. “We’ve been doing this for so long that we’ve now been forced to resubmit our information in a new digital portal. The good news is that we don’t have to start all over, but we did have to go back and basically resubmit all of our work.”

The original LOMR submission was in early 2021, but it has been sent back to the city numerous times by FEMA asking for clarifications.

The root of the issue is that for years homeowners who live in Shoshone County along the I-90 corridor where the South Fork Coeur d’Alene River runs have existed within a FEMA-designated floodplain which in turn has forced them to pay for annual flood insurance on their properties.

This mandatory insurance for properties that still have a mortgage on them is tied to several dated FEMA flood maps. These maps show the possibility of 10, 50, 100, and 500-year flood events.

The number of years in flood terms are probabilities that come from historical data including rainfall and stream stage, and represent the possibility of a river hitting flood stage within a certain period of time.

In any given year, a 10-year flood has a 10 in 100 chance of occurring, a 50-year flood has a one in 50 chance of occurring, a 100-year flood has a one in 100 chance, and a 500-year flood has a one in 500 chance.

The current maps say that 100 and 500-year flood water flows would be potentially disastrous to much of the Kellogg, Smelterville, and Pinehurst areas, and thus require flood insurance.

In 2020, those three cities came together to petition new information from the US Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE), which had been monitoring the flows of the river for decades and determined that previously unmonitored water studies had essentially led to erroneous predictions being made on the old maps.

For those unfamiliar with the area, specifically, the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River flows through much of the Silver Valley before converging with the North Fork just south of the Snake Pit in Enaville. Beginning near Elizabeth Park, it flows into a deep channel that runs alongside I-90, until it gets through Kellogg where the river banks level out.

On the current FEMA floodplain maps, the channel would be full to the underside of the bridges that run over it during a 100-year flood – but 2018 measurements from ACOE have determined that it would take a 500-year event in order to fill the channel the way FEMA believes a 100-year event would.

According to FEMA, anything with more than a 1% chance of annual flooding is considered high risk and requires flood insurance – but those new numbers suggest that many areas throughout the county should be considered 0.2% of annual flood risk.

The reason for the inflated numbers, according to Shoshone County Emergency Manager Dan Martinsen is due to a smaller sample of measurable data at the time that the current maps were formed and then the numbers had not been tracked or updated regularly since then.

Alta has backed this claim up by studying more than 150 different cross-sections of the river between Elizabeth Park and Pinehurst – which, along with the data from the ACOE, was the basis for the LOMR.

Flood insurance policy prices vary depending on flood area and structure characteristics.

In general, the range is from just over $300 in 2020 to thousands of dollars annually per property according to representatives at the Shoshone County Courthouse.

Rod Plank, a retired former special projects manager with the city, believes that this project is of the utmost import – because of the number of properties that exist in these areas that have been deemed high risk, the dollar amount attached to those potential savings could be huge for what has become an aging community.

“The goal is to help our homeowners,” Plank said previously. “There’s a lot of folks who pay a lot of money annually and if we can ease that burden in any way, then we’re going to do what we can.”

Until FEMA decides that they’re satisfied with the data contained in the LOMR, they will not adjust their maps. In the meantime, the residents of the Silver Valley can only wait and hope.

According to Fitzgerald, there is no timetable that FEMA is beholden to, but he anticipates that once they have the additional information submitted, the process should move right along.

This will include setting up a time for residents to come and learn the steps that will need to take in order to remove the seemingly unnecessary insurance that they have been carrying.

A representative from FEMA could not be reached for comment.

The Shoshone News-Press will continue to follow this story for any developments.