Chapter Hazard Analysis

Subbasin	Buildings
Estimated Damage
Eastview Estates	50 to 80 homes	$400,000
Upper Indian Creek	30+ homes	$100,000
	1 nursing home	$125,000
Middle Indian Creek	8 homes	$15,000
Lower Indian Creek	Garbe Steel Co. 5	$205,000
South Tributary	J&B Industries	Under development in 1983. Damage would have been around $1,000,000
Source: Floodplain Management Study – Indian Creek and Tributaries

A 1989 study for the Blackberry Creek watershed reported that the 1983 flood was estimated to be a 35-year event with $300,000 in property damage. A 1999 plan for the Blackberry Creek watershed estimated that the 1996 flood caused $18,000,000 in property damage to basements and $13,800,000 from first floor damage.

The Blackberry Creek study found 90 buildings at risk for the 100-year or base flood event and estimated damage of $1,608,400. This produces an average damage per building of $17,871 in 1989 dollars. The Comprehensive Stormwater Management Plan states that damage from the 1996 flood “were nearly $14 million in the Blackberry Creek watershed.”

Another source of damage data is past claims paid by the National Flood Insurance Program. These are shown in the table on the next page.

Flood insurance claims figures do not include items not covered by a flood insurance policy, such as landscaping and automobiles, and the value of lost family heirlooms. They also do not include damage to uninsured or underinsured properties. With these caveats in mind, the two tables show:

• 
  The hardest hit communities have been Aurora and Montgomery.
  
• 
  The most expensive floods were July 1983, September 1986, and July 1996.
  
• 
  The July 1996 flood not only affected the most properties, it caused the most damage per property.
  
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  Claims over the last 24 years have averaged approximately $12,000 for the structures and $5,000 for contents.
  

If one adjusts for inflation and accounts for the deductibles and uninsured items, we could conclude that floods in Kane County can be expected to cause $15,000 - $20,000 damage to structures and $6,000 - $10,000 for contents.

Based on these numbers, $25,500 is assumed to be the average cost per flooded building. This number is multiplied times the number of buildings in the floodplain in the last column in the table on page 2-18. The result is the expected dollar cost of a 100-year or base flood in terms of property damage to buildings and their contents.