THE FLOODMAPS ARE CHANGING
The flood maps in Myrtle Beach are changing. Are you looking at buying a house and you’re not sure whether it’s in a flood zone? Did you already buy a house, and now you’re not sure whether you need flood insurance? How do you know? Let me show you. (music).
Hi. My name is Lance MacMillan with Mango Homes, powered by Keller Williams Myrtle Beach. I am a licensed realtor serving the entire metro Myrtle Beach area. And today I’m going to be showing you how to use the flood zone tools for both Horry and Georgetown Counties, which if you don’t live here, that basically makes up all of Myrtle Beach.
WHY ARE FLOOD MAPS IMPORTANT?
So why are flood zones important? Two reasons. One, while everybody likes to go to the beach, nobody likes the beach to come see them at their house. That’s the obvious one, that’s number one. Number two, flood insurance. If you are in a federally legislated flood zone, they can force you to buy flood insurance. And this could, depending on your budget, be a budget breaker.
Now, clearly, this is important to you if you’re buying a home in Myrtle Beach, but also if you already live here and you already have a home here. If your home is financed, they have a direct say in whether you have to get flood insurance or not. And because the flood map is changing, there are some people out there right now who are going to have to get flood insurance and they don’t know it.
HOW THE TOOLS WORK, AN OVERVIEW
So with that being said, what I want to do is give you guys the English version on how to use these tools. It’s a lot easier than it looks, and I just want to make that clear to you before you dig in. First thing you do is you plug a link into your browser and you hit enter. And again, all the links to all of this stuff, it’s right in the description of the video below. So, there’s one link for each county. Each county has its own tool. They both work pretty much the same, even though they look totally different. You’ll see, trust me.
So, you pull up the link, you enter an address. Once the address is entered, it’ll center on the address for you. Once that address is up, you press a special button and it tells you one of three things. Either it’s in a flood zone, it’s not in a flood zone, or it’s on the edge of a flood zone. So what this means to you is this. You’ll see a code. Don’t worry about the codes. The codes are basically telling you what you need to know, right? I’ll translate that for you. And there’s a document that translates it all for you, too. Again, all this is going to be in the description of the video.
So the codes will basically show you this. If it’s an A or a V, that means you’re in a flood zone. Don’t worry about everything that follows the A or the V. It’ll be like AE17, or V20, or something like that. Don’t worry about that. If it’s an A or a V, you’re in a flood zone. If you see an X, that X means you’re not in a flood zone. If you’re not in the flood zone, you don’t have to worry. You’re nowhere near close.
If you see something like X500, or something like 0.2% is another one that they use that basically means the same thing, that means you’re in a 500-year flood zone. That means the chances of it flooding where you’re at are minimal. They’re not going to make you get flood insurance, again, because they’re banking on there being a flood once in 500 years. But if you wanted to get flood insurance, you could probably get a pretty good rate for it. They’re not going to make you get it if you’re in that middle of the line, close to 500-year flood zone kind of area.
Now, if you want to learn how to do this yourself, because let’s face it, that’s why you’re here, right? What I’m going to do is I’m going to swap over to my desktop here in a second and the first thing I’m going to do is show you Horry County’s tools, and then I’m going to show you Georgetown County’s tools. Now, the tools are amazing. They show you everything in the exact detail that you want, but they’re not necessarily user-friendly. You figure software is written by engineers, and they’re doing this for people that are vested in weather and geography. So, yeah, it’s like that.
STAY TUNED: FREE GUIDE!
Make sure to stay tuned till the end of the video, because I’ve got a freebie for you guys at the end that I’m going to tell you about and it’s going to help you understand all of this even more. So with that said, over to my desktop.
HORRY COUNTY MAP
Hey, thank you so much for holding. I am back. So we’ve moved, as I said, over to my desktop. I’ve got both of our flood maps pulled up here. Now, the first thing I’m going to do is concentrate on Horry County. Horry County is the county that’s right near the North Carolina border. It encompasses 75% of what you would call Myrtle Beach, basically, if you’re not from here. South of that is Georgetown County, and I will do that next.
So this is what you’re going to see when the tool populates. This link up here, right up here, I’m going to have that in the description to the video so you can just click on it. But this is what it’s going to look like. Now, in order for me to illustrate something later on, what I’m going to ask you to do, and what I’m going to do, is over here, I’m going to click these three things off. Actually, no. Here we go. This is what we’re going to click off.
Now you’ll see all the shiny, happy colors go away. First thing we do… And they’ll come back later. Again, this is for illustrative purposes. I want to teach you guys something. First thing we’re going to do, pull up our address. Whatever address it is that you have in mind. This could be the property where you live and you’re wondering if you’re going to need flood insurance. This could be the property that you’re looking to buy. Regardless, this is how you do it.
You’re going to click on it. You’re going to come over here to where it says address and you’re going to click on that. Now me personally, I have an address already picked out. It’s near a flood zone, but it’s not necessarily in a flood zone. So, I can show you what all of that stuff looks like on the map. Now, this is a park downtown called Chapin Park, and it’s at 400 14th Avenue North.
Now, don’t hit enter. Once you’ve got that typed in, don’t hit enter. Hit this little magnifying glass up here. It seems to work a little better if you do that, so I’m going to do that. And it’s going to populate a whole bunch of little flags down here. Here’s one right there. Here’s a couple right here. Now, the one that I want is right here, so I’m going to click that. The tool zooms in for me, and what do you know? There’s Chapin Park.
So, you’ll see some elevation information over here. Don’t let that confuse you. What I’m going to do is I’m going to come up here to the layers tab again, if you see that in the upper left-hand corner. I’m going to tap that. And what you’re seeing here, the elevation information, I’m just going to click that off. Now we don’t have to worry about that confusing us.
So, where is the flood map in relation to Chapin Park? Again, like I said before, there’s two flood maps. There’s the current flood map written right here in Horry County. That’s Current FEMA Flood Zones. And then there’s Regulated FEMA Flood Zones. That’s going to be the new flood map. And as of December 9th, the recording of this video, that is not necessarily active yet, but it’s pending. It’s going to be any day now. So, if I want to see the current flood map, here’s what I do. Click on that, give it a second, and it populates. What do those colors mean? If I come to my dropdown right here, you’re going to see the color codes. So again, V, that’s coastal flood zone. A is an inland flood zone.
You can see right here, what they’re saying is that in the event of a horrible storm, you’re going to see the water roughly encroach right there. That’s the old data. It has a chance to get up about this high. If you’re looking, that’s right where Withers Drive is. Now, if you had a house in Chapin Park, which, you know, who has a house in a park? But if you did, you could say to yourself, “All right, so it’s going to get about a block away in the worst of cases, and it’s not going to get any further.” So you’re good there.
I’m going to come back over here. I’m going to click out of Current FEMA Flood Zones. That’s the current map. And I’m going to pull up the new one that hasn’t been released yet. Again, that’s Regulated FEMA Flood Zones. You’re going to see where this is different. Takes a second to populate. And there it is.
So what do all these colors mean? I’m going to go here to my dropdown, and here’s what we’re looking at. Dark purple. Dark purple. That’s the ocean coming up to say hello. A means inland flood zone. They’re saying in a worse case, it’ll intrude up into here. Now, see this light purple right here? That light purple corresponds to 0.2% annual chance flood hazard. And what that means, if you go back and look at the FEMA information, that means that one in 500 years, basically, there’ll be a flood that reaches that far.
So if you’re in that area, they won’t necessarily force you legally to get flood insurance, but you may want to consider it. I mean, yes, it’s a one in 500 year, but, you know, it could happen. Again, if you had a house in Chapin Park, looks like you’d be safe in this case. Going to go back here, click that off, it goes away.
GEORGETOWN COUNTY MAP
Now let’s move over to Georgetown. Georgetown, I’m going to click on this right here. Again, the link to Georgetown flood map is going to be in the description of this video. This works exactly the same, but it honestly, it looks totally different. So, Georgetown County. I’m going to zoom out a little bit.
This is Horry County up here. Georgetown is south of there. So, I have an address pulled in Georgetown County as well that’s in an interesting spot. It’s 10880 Ocean Highway. So when I start typing, it automatically knows, “Hey, do you mean 10880 Ocean Highway?” So I’m going to click that. What that’s going to do is that’s going to highlight my address. Now, a property card comes up. It says zoom to. I’m going to zoom to that. Now I can get down to the street level on this bad boy.
Now that I’m there, this property card, it kind of gets in the way, so I’m going to cross that out. Because, see the little blue dot? I already know where our property is. Now, again, I picked this. This is an interesting property. Moving this around. Okay, here we go. We have Atlantic Ocean. We have Pawleys Island itself. We have the Pawleys Island Creek. We got a bunch of marshland here. And then we have our property.
And if I didn’t mention it, our property in question is the Pawleys Island Hammock Shops. And as an aside, if you’ve never been there, it is so cool. It’s a really nice place to spend an afternoon and walk around and go shopping. All right. So, what do we do with this to pull up the flood maps? Upper right-hand corner, I’m going to pull open the layers manual. Layers menu, sorry. All right.
Right here where it says GTGIS, you’re going to want to click that. You get a huge dropdown with all kinds of stuff in it. So in order to make it a little less confusing, I’m going to go here where it says streets, because honestly I don’t really care about the streets. I just care about the property. And I’m going to get rid of the streets, and you’ll see where that drops all off the menu.
Now, I want to highlight the actual plot right here. So, I could honestly, I could pick any of these, but just for giggles, I’m going to pick lot lines with TMS number. Takes a second and you see all of the legal boundaries for all of these plots come up. So I’m going to zoom in a little bit. This is our property right here. The boundaries and these corners, this is an odd-shaped lot. But again, this is a big retail subdivision right off of 17, so, it is what it is.
Now in order to pull the flood map itself, I’m going to roll all the way down here. You’re going to see some really confusing stuff. And this is going to change. So again, as of December 9th, the filming of this video, 2021, here is where you will find the current flood map, FEMA Flood Zone Current Effective, and the proposed flood map that’s going to take effect basically any day. And strangely enough, it’s FEMA 2019 Flood Zones, not FEMA 2021 Flood Zones.
It looks like they’re in the middle of changing everything over, they just haven’t done it yet. So, your information could be here, but right now it’s not. It’s right here. So again, just like before, let’s look at the current flood zone as of this date. I’m going to click here, and it’s going to take a second and boom, look what pulls up. Again, if it has an A in it or a V, that is a flood area. A, flood area. X500. What the heck is X500? It sounds like something they would sell on a late night to clean something, right? X500, that is your 500-year flood zone. It corresponds with what you saw on the Horry County map where it said 0.2% chance of flooding.
So, if you happen to have a house in this area where this purple stripe is right here, going all the way down here. Like for instance, if you lived there, that is in a 500-year flood zone. You’re not mandatory to get flood insurance as it stands right now. But you know what, you might need it. Who knows? It’s up to you. Right here, we have a different color. That X. That X means that is not in danger of flooding under any circumstances. Again, as of this point.
Now, the new information, I’m going to come back over here. I’m going to unclick that and make that information go away. The new flood zone, which hasn’t legally hit yet, but it’s going to be any day. Right here, FEMA Flood Zones Preliminary 2019. Again, at some point it’s going to be 2021, but it just, not right now. FEMA 2019 Flood Zones Preliminary, I’m going to click that. And it’s going to take a second. You’re going to see different information below.
So, V. What they’re saying is, “Hey, all of this salt marsh is prone to flood up into this area.” You’ll notice where that’s starting to encroach a little closer to the main part of our property here. And we have an A. That means that that’s an inland potential flood zone, and that’s on the backside of our property here. Couple buildings here that are actually in the flood zone. So, you’ll notice that the 0.2% chance flood zone, the 500-year flood zone, is now taking over this entire property, and it’s extending its way across the street. And just for illustration, I’m going to zoom out a little bit. I’m going to see how far across the street that goes. It’ll take a second to populate.
And that’s really confusing. So, sorry about that. Let me zoom in. Okay, now you can see the boundaries. See how this boundary comes up? What it’s saying is, they’ve revised the information. The flood zone ends here, but one in 500 years, you may see water come across Highway 17. And honestly, if there was flooding coming from the ocean going across Highway 17, that really would be a one in 500-year event, because, oh my God, that would be rough. Anyway, that is how you determine the flood zone in Georgetown County.
FOR YOU: FREE GUIDE!!!
And that’s how you do that. I hope that helped you guys. If you want more, we have a guide that we built for you, a 17-page guide. That’s the freebie that I mentioned earlier. There’s a link in the description. If you click the link, it’ll automatically get sent to you. It’s 17 pages complete with screenshots, all the links that you need, everything that you would want to possibly learn about in order to safely determine whether your property’s in a flood zone or whether it’s not in a flood zone.
I hope all this helps you guys. Thank you very much for sticking around till the end of the video. Until next time, please like and subscribe to the channel. I’ll talk to you later. (music).