FEMA and the NYS DEC held a meeting at the Cantiague Elementary School on Tuesday, July 22, for the public to come in and see the preliminary flood maps that tie into flood insurance rates. The DEC encourages homeowners to view the maps and let them know if there are any changes that need to be made. On the one for Oyster Bay, Bay Avenue was called Larrabee Avenue, as if Larrabee were an "L" shaped road. They are correcting the error.

The above map is one of the Oyster Bay area indicating the new flood plain lines. The public is invited to check out the status of their own property by checking with FEMA Flood Maps available online at http://rmc.mapmodteam.com/RMC2/Counties_Nassau.htm. Put your address in and a map of your home will come up giving you information on where your property stands in relation to the flood plain. Even if a part of your house falls into the flood plain - you are in the flood plain. The TR Elementary School is in the flood plain because a part of it is in that newly defined area.

The importance of finding out if you are on the new FEMA flood maps is to save your insurance costs. If you are in a flood plain now, but not before, you can sign up for flood insurance now at a rate that will be half the amount you will pay if you sign up after the maps are finalized.

You will note in the map that for example, Firemen's Field that was in the 500-year flood plain is now in the 100-year flood plain. As such, if any building is built there, it must conform to federal guidelines for erecting a house in a flood plain. If a building is going for a LEED rating, it cannot receive the highest - platinum rating - if it is built on a flood plain. The DEC itself found that out six years ago, when they built on flood plain themselves, said a DEC official at the FEMA meeting.

Another issue in the case of Firemen's Field is that it has a rating of A-E 10 zone which means that in a hurricane, the water is predicted to rise 10 feet above the mean high water.

There have been many changes in the flood plain - and in many cases property has been removed from the flood plain because now the DEC is looking at elevation and not just the distance from the water.

At the July 17 East Norwich Civic Association meeting, Caroline DuBois, who attended the FEMA meeting to check the maps, said her mother Carol DuBois remembers the LIRR railroad tracks in Oyster Bay in the 1950s, were under water. ENCA member John Wallace added that the water hit the 50-yard line on the Roosevelt football field in the 1992 storm. Ms. DuBois said in that same storm two postal workers who parked their cars in Firemen's Field found them with the water over the tops of their cars.

Another local resident told this reporter that he remembers a storm many years ago where the water reached up to Orchard Street.

Ms. DuBois said both she and Matt Meng received calls from Rose LoBianco Murphy who is visiting Oyster Bay from Florida. Ms. Murphy was a longtime member of the Doubleday Babcock Senior Center.

Caroline DuBois related Ms. Murphy's story that when she was 10 years old her family was living on Maxwell Avenue, next to the post office. The stoops to the house were five feet high and in the 1938 hurricane the water came into their living room.

After the storms, the community, the homeowners and the government have to clean up the disaster created, just as they have with Katrina. FEMA is trying to whittle down the process after the hurricanes, before they happen through better awareness of the dangers.

The FEMA maps still have to be adopted by the community. As a member of the National Flood Program, each community has to adopt their own area map.