Taylor Engineering has performed flood insurance studies (FIS) for over 40 counties in Florida, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. These comprehensive, county-wide engineering analyses of riverine and coastal flood hazards included storm surge, erosion, and wave modeling in tidal areas; stream channel topographic surveys and basin-wide hydrologic and hydraulic modeling (rural and urban). Models applied for these studies include HEC-1, HEC-2, HEC-HMS, UNET, AdICPR, HEC-RAS, and SWMM/EXTRAN models.

Recently, Taylor Engineering has applied dynamic RAS models to the low-gradient bayous in Louisiana. This complex system required not only dynamic routing of the flood peak, but hydrologic methods that can account for the very long lag times and large-scale basins typical in the bayous. These areas resemble the physiographic features that were modeled for Lee County, FL. These FIS applied the AdICPR model because it uses a lower peak-rate factor in hydrologic computations.

Today's FEMA FIS incorporate the latest GIS technologies in hydrologic and hydraulic model setup and post-processing. Using LiDAR topographic data, these models incorporate automated routines to merge field survey data with overbank data. These automated routines improve the quality of the models by increasing the number of cross sections for each stream segment. In addition, automated routines improve efficiency by reducing model setup time. Taylor Engineering has also developed automated routines to incorporate field surveys of structure data - greatly reducing the time needed to incorporate them into the RAS model. These studies established GIS coverages of the 10-, 50-, 100-, and 500-year flood hazards throughout each respective county.

As part of FEMA's Map Modernization effort, Taylor Engineering is responsible for 14 counties in three states. These efforts include extensive public involvement and community interaction. Taylor Engineering works closely with FEMA and the communities to produce the best maps with available funding and schedule requirements. We believe good communication must accompany great engineering to ensure communities can understand and use the resulting information and maps.