Fredericton's new interactive flood-risk map aimed at homeowners

While incidents of flooding are on the rise in New Brunswick, Fredericton residents are now just a click away from an assessment of their property's flood risk — and not just from the nearby St. John or Nashwaak rivers.

The City of Fredericton has launched an online neighbourhood flood risk map. The city hopes the map will help property owners most at risk try to mitigate it.

Users can click on a property location or search by postal code to see a colour-coded listing on whether the property is at risk in any of four categories of flooding.

There is also a chart showing the property's elevation relative to either of the city's rivers.

Jillian Hudgins, an environmental strategist and program manager at the city, told Information Morning Summer that the map considers the risk of overland flooding, river flooding, basement flooding because of rain, and winter flooding.

"So there could be a risk of river flooding to your property and that could just be a corner of your backyard," she said. "So we've done the analysis at the property-line level and the property owner can go on, and they can see the risk level for those four types of floods."

The map also has a section where residents can explore capital projects aimed at mitigating flooding that have been completed by the city in recent years.

Hudgins said there are also suggested strategies to prevent or mitigate flood damage, varying from small actions such as cleaning your gutters to larger ones such as property grading.

"There's some easy options that people can take," she said. "Like storing hazardous material or important material out of the basement or at least in a water-tight container, keeping your valuables safe, clearing catch basins around their property and ceiling, cracks in their foundation and covering window wells."

The New Brunswick consumer advocate for insurance says the map is also useful for insurance consumers, despite their potential flood risk being very public.

Michèle Pelletier said insurance companies typically do their own mapping anyway, and the benefit is that it can be an early notice to a resident to speak to their broker about water-damage coverage for their property if they haven't already.

"If [the companies] see you're in a flooding zone, they'll decide if they want to insure and probably your premium will be higher than someone not in that zone," she said. "But we have to remember that coverage — flooding and water damage — most of the time, it's not covered under your regular policy. It's something you have to buy to top-off your regular policy."

She also said that any tool that can help inform someone about flood risk can help that person mitigate it in advance, if possible, and lessen the number of property insurance claims in the area.

"We know if there's more flooding and there's more claims, all our premiums will go up because that's the way insurance works," said Pelletier.

The city received a municipal resiliency grant of $100,000 from Intact Public Entities and Intact Financial Corporation to help finance the interactive map.