<figure><figcaption>Orange County Stormwater Management Chief Engineer Daniel Negron examines paper copies of the county’s official flood maps, which he says FEMA made widely available online in 2009. Before then, Negron says he and other staff would scan the paper flood maps into Orange County’s own, digitized system. (Molly Duerig / Central Florida Public Media)</figcaption></figure>

It’s business as usual today at The Breezeway Restaurant & Bar in Historic Downtown Sanford.

The place is filled with voices of patrons and laughter, almost drowning out the clinking of glasses and silverware. It’s the lunch rush. People are enjoying a drink with their Friday afternoon lunch, and General Manager Louis Quiñones is in the zone, weaving in and out of the place to ensure his staff gets through the busy shift.

Once things settle down a bit, Quiñones sits down for a moment to recall a day in September 2021, when he was called into the restaurant because flooding water came rushing in through the restaurant’s outdoor courtyard, where customers were dining.

Locals at the Breezeway are no strangers to the classic, Central Florida afternoon thunderstorm, as Quiñones puts it. What caught them by surprise was the flooding.

“That one was really, really weird because that one actually wasn't a hurricane; that was just a normal storm. It was almost – I don't want to say ‘flash flood,’ but that's basically what it was.”

<figure><figcaption>Sanford is flooding more often these days, partly because the city’s 100-year-old stormwater infrastructure can’t keep up with demand from new development, according to Breezeway General Manager Louis Quiñones. “The amount of water that's coming in, it's like you're trying to dump a gallon through a straw. It's just too much,” Quiñones said.(Credit Shane Murphy)</figcaption></figure>

A video of the event went viral, making national headlines. The video shows people propping their feet up on their tables to avoid the water, mostly laughing it off. Those good vibes, Quiñones says, were his favorite part.

“In this area, our mentality, our characteristic is, basically, just have fun with it,” he said. “You're not gonna be able to change the waters.”

But the behavior, flow, and patterns of water do change.

A year later, Hurricanes Ian and Nicole came through, but it was an unnamed tropical storm afterward that Quiñones says caused the most damage.

The Breezeway’s family of buildings dates back more than 100 years. The cobblestone on the iconic pub’s courtyard floor was laid out over a century ago.

“This is a very old building, so things like that do affect us big,” Quiñones said. “When you have deterioration, when you have the flood coming through, we're losing equipment, we're losing furniture, it does a lot to it.”

In Seminole County, rainfall totals are up 150% since 2011. Quiñones said he’s all too aware.

<figure><figcaption>NOAA data show a 150% increase in Seminole County’s rainfall totals since 2011.(Graph by Lillian Hernández Caraballo / Central Florida Public Media)</figcaption></figure>

“Flooding wasn't like this when I was here back in 2017. (...) Now, it's literally washing through where you're up to your calves, basically,” he said. “It's something new for us, so we're trying to figure out how to get through, especially the next coming years.”

Flooding can be tough to predict. For Central Florida communities relying on official flood maps that are almost 20 years old, it can be even more difficult.

A lot has changed in two decades, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) flood maps don’t fully account for all those changes: like development, stormwater infrastructure, and climate change.

But importantly, the scope of FEMA flood maps is limited to begin with. The maps are designed primarily to illustrate where one, specific type of flood is most likely to occur: the 100-year flood.

Also called a Special Flood Hazard Area or SFHA, the 100-year floodplain is an area with at least a 1% chance of flooding each year. But it’s a bit of a deceptive term, according to Seminole County Public Works Project Manager Jeff Sloman.

“What's called a 100-year flood, is defined as a storm event that, statistically, has a 1% chance of occurring every year. It's not a storm that occurs every hundred years,” Sloman said.

In fact, in the last five years alone, nearly half of U.S. counties experienced a flood event, according to FEMA. And nationally, 40% of flood insurance claims come from outside the 100-year floodplain.

“Binary views, the ‘in or out’ of a flood zone, can lead to the misconception that properties outside of the FEMA flood zone are safe from flooding,” a FEMA spokesperson wrote in an email to Central Florida Public Media. “There is no such thing as a ‘no-risk zone.’”

<figure><figcaption>Seminole County Public Works Project Manager Jeff Sloman shows reporter Lillian Hernández Caraballo an example of what a basin study looks like, during an interview in late April for “Central Florida Seen & Heard: Rising Water.” Seminole is in the process of studying nearly all of its basins at once, Sloman said at that time.(Molly Duerig / Central Florida Public Media)</figcaption></figure>

Even as flooding gets worse, the state of the country’s flood mapping is incomplete, according to the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM). A dozen years after the enactment of a 2012 federal law requiring FEMA to develop and maintain adequate flood maps, only about a third of the nation has been mapped.

That’s partly because the process of gauging flood risk is lengthy and expensive, requiring lots of coordination between local, state and federal agencies. Although FEMA produces the actual flood maps, the federal agency relies on data collected at the local level.

In Seminole County, it’s the first time nearly all of the county’s drainage basins are being evaluated at once, Sloman said.

<figure><figcaption>All three of Sanford’s drainage basins discharge into Lake Monroe, which is in itself a basin to the St. Johns River. A basin, or watershed, is an area that collects, stores, and transports water to a certain point; Sanford Public Works Manager Mike Cash describes it as “wherever that water [in Lake Monroe] arrives from.”(Molly Duerig / Central Florida Public Media)</figcaption></figure>

Along with helping to update flood maps, basin studies also help the county develop flood mitigation projects, which can be costly, Sloman said. Before this most recent undertaking, Seminole County hadn’t updated most of its basin studies in at least twenty years, per the county’s 2018 stormwater master plan.

Conducting a single basin study can take months. On