HARPSWELL

Harpswell is appealing the latest Federal Emergency Management Agency flood maps.

Whether flood insurance will rise depends on the accuracy of flood map for your community. In coastal communities, such as Harpswell, residents’ rates can change drastically if a new map determines their property is more likely to flood than in previous versions.

That’s what makes Harp- swell’s appeal of FEMA’s flood maps so critical.

The town is one of several communities working with Ransom Consulting on a joint appeal of the new preliminary maps released by the agency. The final map will be used to set the new National Flood Insurance Program rates.

The goal of the appeal process is to create more accurate and detailed maps than the preliminary ones, hopefully convincing FEMA to accept changes and find areas of Harpswell less likely to flood.

As Nathan Dill of Ransom Consulting explained, the agency’s model necessarily looks at larger chunks of area encompassing multiple towns and then makes determinations about risk.

“FEMA is looking at this in a much broader scale,” he said. “They’re going county by county.”

This method, however, can miss a lot of the variation between — and on — individual properties, which distorts the risk. Ransom Consulting will look at smaller areas overlooked by FEMA, to create more accurate maps.

“Where you have a very complicated shoreline like you do in Harpswell, it varies quite a bit,” said Dill.

Between two Town Meetings in 2017, residents approved spending more than $100,000 to appeal the FEMA map.

The town had to then wait for FEMA to open its window in which appeals could be filed. That 90-day window opened Aug. 2, and Thursday selectmen approved a work order of up to $70,000 to begin the second phase of the appeal process.

Fred Cantu, town code enforcement officer, cautioned that it would still be several months before Harpswell will know if FEMA accepted any of the proposed changes.

“At the end of that 90 days they accumulate all of the packages together, then they put everything in front of a scientific review at FEMA,” he said. “They have six months to do that, which puts us somewhere around January or February.

“At that point in time, when they have completed their review, they will either accept the appeals and make changes as need be,” Cantu added, “or they will say there’s not enough to warrant any changes.”

At that point, the agency will issue its final flood maps.

The FEMA Flood Map Service Center can be accessed at msc.fema.gov/portal/home.

nstrout@timesrecord.com