True Flood Risk

CLIPS

A Foot Saved My Home - The Personal Story Behind True Flood Risk

The Realities of Flood Risk - Misconceptions, Insurance, and Accountability

Why Property-Specific Flood Risk Data Matters

How Satellite Data Enhances Flood Risk Assessment

TRUE FLOOD RISK

The latest round of natural catastrophe (NAT CAT) events is upon us. I am in the northern hemisphere, so it's related to water. At the beginning of the year I conducted an exhaustive review of all the #LAfires geospatial responses.

This turned into a series of podcast episodes culminating in a discussion with Jamon van den Hoek.

A theme was synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to detect building damage. There were some side quests related to near real time earth monitoring for commodities trading, key company profiled was Ursa Space.

So now the floods are upon us. The Camp Mystic tragedy on 4th of July took the lives of 27 souls asleep in a summer camp lodge by Guadalupe River in Texas.

Necessarily, I am conducting a review of useful geospatial products and services that help respond. I've already done this in a terrific episode with SwissRE, regarding a recent acquisition of theirs, Fathom.

Gavin was precient in spending time discussion his team's flood modelling work across the US. Now we have an example in front of us about the consequences of ignoring them. Why? Shockingly, Camp Mystic managed to wrangle an exemption from the 100 year flood polygon and what that means for insurance and positioning buildings. Quoting from Wikipedia:

“Between 2011 and 2020, FEMA re-shaped its Special Flood Hazard Area to exclude 30 camp buildings following appeals from the camp, possibly due to insurance or increased regulation concerns.[19] The Special Flood Hazard Area marks the region most at risk for once-in-a-century floods. In 2025, at least 12 camp structures were considered to be within the Special Flood Hazard Area, with more being partially within the area.[19]”

[19] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/12/us/texas-flooding-fema-flood-map-camp-mystic

Starkly speaking, humans have a terrible history of adjusting safety behaviour through loss of life. I know this from myriad examples during engineering projects in several countries in a career since 2011. The number of stories I have heard leaders tell of lives lost on the job during project kick off to cause adherence to safety standards is almost at a level of desensitization.

So, here we are, more lives lost, including 20 or so innocent young girls on a summer camp. So, it is time to consider what our discipline can do, which is a hell of a lot. We can attend to for example True Flood Risk, the topic of this episode. It is an inspirational story of entrepreneurship based on someone barely avoiding flood damage to their home.

This is because the ground floor height of the founder's home was just higher than the neighbour's. The neighbour got flooded, her house did not. Based on this simple observation, a measurement idea emerged and it has ballooned into a business from there. The usual insurance service is there. A great story. Listen in. Another outcome of this tragedy is this viral LinkedIn post of mine. I said:

"I mean it’s time for our discipline to get to work. This type of analysis can be done at nation scale immediately and Overture Maps Foundation’s building footprints used to detect which people are next in the firing line. An LLM connected to the pipeline could then automatically write political and media campaign material and strategies to pressure funding out of governments. ⚙️🔧"

It was prompted by a Reddit post. My LinkedIn post got 377,000 impressions and 305 reactions, 9 reposts and 267 comments. It went on for days. None of those that responded showed me the app that I am calling for.

I am now building it.