New flood maps are coming for Rensselaer County. FEMA will explain them in person on September 29.

The flood maps that decide whether a house is “in the floodplain” are being redrawn for all of Rensselaer County, and the people who drew them are coming to Troy to answer questions. The Town of Schaghticoke put the notice on its homepage this week.

Tuesday, September 29, any time between 3 and 6:30 p.m., FEMA representatives will be at Hudson Valley Community College, in the Bulmer Telecommunications Center (the BTC), Rooms 1, 2 and 3, at 80 Vandenburgh Avenue in Troy. There is no presentation to sit through. You walk in, find the map for your neighborhood, and talk to a real person about what it shows. The flyer, put out by FEMA and the state Department of Environmental Conservation, has one piece of homework: bring your flood insurance declaration page if you have one.

Why a map matters to your wallet

FEMA’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps do more than describe risk. They set rules. If a map puts your home in a high-risk zone (the “special flood hazard area,” often labeled Zone A or AE) and you have a federally backed mortgage, flood insurance stops being optional. Move a property line onto or off of that shaded area and the insurance picture changes with it.

The maps now in force for much of the county date back years, in some places to paper maps drawn long before modern elevation data. The new preliminary maps use current terrain and hydrology, and they are digital, so you can compare old and new down to the parcel. Some properties will come out of the high-risk zone. Others will go in for the first time. That second group is the one that most needs to show up on the 29th.

What “preliminary” means

These are proposed maps, not final ones. After preliminary maps are released, FEMA and the communities review them, and there is a formal appeal and comment period before they take effect. An appeal has to be backed by technical data, which is a high bar for a homeowner, but the open house is where you find out whether you have a reason to look into it, and what a surveyor’s elevation certificate could do for you. The town, as the community that administers floodplain rules locally, has a role in that review too, and we will ask what Schaghticoke’s building department has seen in the new panels.

Who in Schaghticoke should care most

The town has more water than people realize. The Hoosic River runs the northern edge, the Tomhannock Creek and Buttermilk Falls cut through the middle, and the Hudson forms the western line, with the Deep Kill and a dozen smaller streams draining into all of it. July’s record rains put some of that on display. If your property is anywhere near moving water, or you have ever had a basement take on water in a hard rain, it is worth pulling up the new map before the 29th so you arrive with a specific question.

Do your homework first

• Look up your address on FEMA’s Flood Map Service Center to see the map in force today.
• The county’s preliminary maps and the new Flood Insurance Study are on FEMA’s preliminary data portal.
• FEMA Region 2 also has a side-by-side viewer that shows the old paper map and the new digital one for the same spot.
• Dig out your flood insurance declaration page, or your homeowners policy if you want to ask whether you need flood coverage at all. Standard homeowners insurance does not cover flooding.

If you can’t make it, the FEMA Mapping and Insurance eXchange takes questions by phone at 877-336-2627. We’ll report back on what the new maps show for the town after the open house.

Update, October 3. The open house came and went without local news coverage, and FEMA has not yet published the Federal Register notice that starts the 90-day appeal period for Rensselaer County, so the maps remain preliminary with no legal clock running. What you can do now, plus a separate federal loan program for July’s storm damage with a November 23 deadline, is in our follow-up.

Sources: the “Stay Informed, Know Your Flood Risk” flyer from FEMA and the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation, as posted on the Town of Schaghticoke homepage and by the Town of North Greenbush; FEMA’s published guidance on preliminary flood maps and the appeal process. The description of insurance requirements is general; your lender and insurer are the authorities on your own policy.