Does New River frontage flood?

Flood history in the river counties is written down in at least one public plan. Grayson County's 2024 comprehensive plan, in its history chapter, records major floods in 1916 and 1917 that affected Fries and Mouth of Wilson, and a 1940 storm that dropped more than 10 inches of rain in 24 hours, with major flood damage across the county.

Those are history, not a forecast. The plan does not tie them to one stream, and they say nothing about how often any stretch of the New River rises. What they do show is that flooding in this county has been bad enough to earn a place in the county's own record.

The New River itself is an unusual one. The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources says the New River begins as two streams in the mountains of North Carolina that merge four miles from the Virginia line, flows northward rather than southward like most major rivers along the eastern seaboard, and meanders some 160 miles through Grayson, Carroll, Wythe, Pulaski, Montgomery and Giles counties. DWR also calls it the oldest river on the North American continent, a claim that is the agency's own.

Low, level ground along a river is often called bottomland. The name says where the ground sits, not whether a flood map puts it in a hazard zone.

The question a lender, an insurer and a floodplain office all ask of frontage is narrower than whether the river has ever risen. It is whether the parcel sits inside a mapped special flood hazard area.

Under the federal flood insurance rules, that area is the land in the flood plain subject to a 1 percent or greater chance of flooding in any given year. The base flood that maps are built around is the flood with a one percent chance of being equaled or exceeded in any given year. Those are definitions of the mapped zone. They are not a promise about when water will next reach a given field.

How zone letters, panels and the floodway appear on that panel is laid out in reading a floodplain map. And the map has limits DCR states plainly: flooding can occur on any property, not just within high or moderate flood risk areas. Land outside the floodplain line is outside the mapped zone, not beyond the river's reach.

Flood mapping reaches a sale through the loan, and the rule a regulated lender applies is federal, with exceptions written into the statute.

Federal law has lending regulators direct regulated lending institutions not to make, increase, extend or renew a loan secured by improved real estate or a mobile home in an identified special flood hazard area where flood insurance is available, unless the building is insured for the term of the loan for at least the outstanding principal balance or the maximum coverage available, whichever is less. The statute excepts loans with an original principal balance of $5,000 or less and a repayment term of one year or less, detached structures on residential property that do not serve as a residence, and self-insured State-owned property. What a specific loan requires, and what the coverage costs, are for the lender and an insurer.

The flood map says nothing about who owns the water's edge. The riparian rights that come with frontage, and where an owner's land stops at the river, are title questions taken up in who owns the riverbed in Virginia. Putting a structure in the water is a permit question of its own, covered in whether you can build a dock on the New River.