RILEY COUNTY, KS - Riley County, which contains the City of Manhattan, is creating a countywide Digital Flood Insurance Rate Map (DFIRM). As part of their participation in the Cooperative Technical Partner (CTP) initiative, the county is taking advantage of several concurrent revisions in the county and incorporated areas within the county to convert from multiple hard-copy single jurisdiction FIRMs to a single countywide DFIRM.
Building on their existing Geographic Information System (GIS) resources, Riley County is integrating the results of three existing preliminary flood studies within the county into a countywide DFIRM. The county has recent high-quality digital orthophoto base maps, road centerlines and jurisdiction boundaries and has already converted their existing FEMA maps to GIS. The county is digitizing the preliminary FIRMs from the flood studies in progress and integrating them with their existing GIS data.
Riley County is one of the first projects to use the DFIRM standards to produce a GIS product instead of a CADD product. This project will update three ongoing studies for several streams within the communities of Odgen, Riley, Manhattan and Riley County to achieve a number of modernization goals for FEMA. Riley County’s portion of the project will use effective and revised data to create a countywide DFIRM rather than a separate DFIRM for each jurisdiction. This effort is built on previous efforts completed by the county to obtain and/or create digital flood hazard data.