Welcome to the Dane County Floodplain Website
Floodplain Zoning
Under state and federal law, all communities that participate in the
National Flood Insurance Program must adopt floodplain zoning ordinances to limit development in flood-prone areas. Dane County's floodplain
zoning ordinance (Chapter 17, Dane County Code) applies within areas
determined to have at least a 1% chance of flooding in any given year.
Floodplain Mapping
Areas below the Regional Flood Elevation are shown on the county's floodplain zoning maps,
as adopted by the county board. In most cases, the official floodplain zoning maps are the
same Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRM) used by insurance companies to determine eligibility
for the National Flood Insurance Program. FIRM maps are produced by the
Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The FEMA Map Service Center is the official repository
of FIRM maps and other floodplain mapping products such as Letters of Map Amendments and
Flood Insurance Studies. Finding floodplain documents related to your property is often as
easy as performing an address search at the Map
Service Center Website.
If you are in need of creating a printable map of your property showing the floodplain boundary,
these instructions from FEMA will walk you through the process of
How to Find Your FIRM and Make a FIRMette.
For properties in rural Dane County, floodplain boundaries and the flood storage district
boundaries can also be viewed in Dane County's interactive mapping software,
DCIMap.
January 2, 2009 Adopted FIRM Maps:
Below are online copies of all available Final FIRM maps for Dane County in Acrobat PDF format.
Some of these files are quite large (17 MB). Depending on the speed of your internet connection, they may
take as long as 15 minutes or more to download. You will probably get the best results if you right-mouse-click
and select "save target as," then save the file to your hard drive. The Flood Insurance
Study provides detailed information about how these maps were created.
As more detailed and more accurate floodplain data becomes available, the county board may adopt other official maps to supplement the FEMA FIRM maps.
A complete list of all adopted floodplain maps is included in
Section 17.05(2), Dane County Code.
If you have reason to believe that the final maps do not accurately reflect flood conditions on your property, you have the following option:
- If you do not already have a Letter of Map Amendment, you may apply for one directly from FEMA
For incorporated cities and villages, contact your local floodplain zoning agency for more information
see the County
Clerk's website for contact information or at:
Other Resources
If you have additional questions that cannot be answered from the online resources above, contact us at:
Dane County Department of Planning & Development
ATTN: Floodplain Mapping Updates
Room 116, City County Building
Madison, WI 53703
(608) 267-4115
standing@countyofdane.com
Date Revised: 1/14/10
Planning & Development