Flood Zones in Washington

What the Record Shows for Washington

• Federal flood map: Not digitised for this town. That is an absence of information rather than an absence of risk, and the town's building department is the place to ask.
• Mapped wetland: about 8.3% of the town's land area. Massachusetts regulates work inside a buffer reaching out from the edge of a wetland, so proximity matters as well as presence.
• Dams: 14 inventoried, of which 7 carry a high hazard potential classification and 4 carry none at all. Hazard potential describes what a failure would do, not how likely one is.
• Cleanup registry: 0 listed release sites in the state's registry. An empty list means nothing was reported, not that the ground is clean.

The Question the Town Cannot Answer

Whether a specific property sits inside a flood zone is a parcel-level question, and no town-level page can settle it. Check the address for the point rather than the town.

Two things worth reading beside this. What flood insurance claims here actually show: about a quarter of paid claims in this region came from properties the map placed outside the high-risk zone, so the map governs your premium rather than your risk. And why 48 of the 101 towns have no digitised map at all, which is the single most misread fact in this dataset.

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