When Donna Edgar found out that new flood maps from the FederalEmergency Management Agency would place her house in a high-riskflood zone, she couldn't believe it.

Her home, on the ranch she and her husband own in Texas hillcountry about 60 miles north of Austin, sits well back from thenearby Lampasas River.

“Her house is on a hill,” said Herb Darling, the director ofenvironmental services for Burnet County, where Edgar lives.“There's no way it's going to flood.”

Yet the maps, released last year, placed the Edgars in what FEMAcalls a “special flood hazard area.” Homeowners in such areas areoften required, and always encouraged, to buy federal floodinsurance, which the Edgars did.

FEMA eventually admitted the maps were wrong. But it took Edgarhalf a dozen engineers (many of whom volunteered their time),almost $1,000 of her own money and what she called an “ungodlynumber of hours” of research and phone calls over the course of ayear to prove it.

Edgars is far from alone.

From Maine to Oregon, local floodplain managers say FEMA'srecent flood maps — which dictate the premiums that 5.5 millionAmericans pay for flood insurance — have often been built using outdated,inaccurate data. Homeowners, in turn, have to bear the cost offixing FEMA's mistakes.

“It's been a mess,” Darling said. “It's been a headache for alot of people.”

Joseph Young, Maine's floodplain mapping coordinator, said hisoffice gets calls “almost on a daily basis” from homeowners who saythey've been mapped in high-risk flood areas in error. More oftenthan not, he said, their complaints have merit. “There's a lot ofpeople who have a new map that's unreliable,” he said.

Maps built with out-of-date data can also result in homeownersat risk of flooding not knowing the threat they face.

FEMA is currently finalizing new maps for Fargo, N.D., yet themaps don't include any recent flood data, said April Walker, thecity engineer, including from when the Red River overran its banksin 1997, 2009 and 2011. Those floods were the worst in Fargo's history.

Fargo has more recent data, Walker said, but FEMA hasn'tincorporated it.

It's unclear exactly how many new maps FEMA has issued in recentyears are at least partly based on older data. While FEMA's websiteallows anybody to look-up flood maps for their areas, theagency's maps don't show the age of the underlying data.

FEMA's director of risk analysis, Doug Bellomo, said it was“very rare” for agency to digitize the old paper flood maps withoutupdating some of the data. “We really don't go down the road” ofsimply digitizing old maps, said Bellomo. FEMA did not respond toquestions maps regarding Fargo or other areas.

State and local floodplain officials pointed to examples whereFEMA had issued new maps based at least in part on outdated data.The reason, they said, wasn't complicated.

“Not enough funding, pure and simple,” Young said.

Using new technology, FEMA today is able to gather far moreaccurate elevation data than it could in the 1970s and 1980s, whenmost of the old flood maps were made. Lidar, in which airplanes mapterrain by shooting laser pulses at the ground, can provide datathat's 10 times more accurate than the old methods.

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Lidar is also expensive. Yet as we've reported, Congress, withthe support of the White House, has actually cut map funding by more than half since 2010, from$221 million down to $100 million this year.

With limited funding, FEMA has concentrated on updating the mapsfor the populated areas along the coasts. In rural areas, “it'ssort of a necessary evil to reissue maps with older data on them,”said Sally McConkey, an engineer with the Illinois State WaterSurvey at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which hasa contract with FEMA to produce flood maps in the state.

When old maps are digitized, mapmakers try to match up roadintersections visible on them with the ones seen in modernsatellite imagery (similar to what you can see using Google Earth).But the old maps and the new imagery don't always line upcorrectly, leading to what Alan Lulloff, a senior project managerwith the Association of State Floodplain Managers, called a“warping” effect.

“It can show areas that are actually on high ground as being inthe flood hazard area when they're not,” he said. “That's thebiggest problem.”

When FEMA issued new maps last year for Livingston Parish inLouisiana, near Baton Rouge, they included new elevation data. Butthe flood studies, said Eddie Aydell III, the chief engineer withAlvin Fairburn inDenham Springs, La., who examined the maps, were “a conglomerationof many different ancient engineering studies” dating from the1980s to 2001. The mapmakers did not match up the new elevationdata with the older data correctly, he said, making structures inthe parish seem lower than they really are.

“It's going to be a nightmare for the residents of our parish,”he said.

Bonnie Marston's parents, Jim and Glynda Childs, moved toAndover, Maine, where Marston lives with her husband, in 2010 withthe intention of building a house. But when they applied for a loanthe bank told them that FEMA's new flood maps for the county,issued the year before, had placed the land on which they plannedto build in a special flood hazard area. The cost: a $3,200 annualflood insurance bill, which the Childs had to pay upfront.

Marston spent $1,400 to hire a surveyor, who concluded herparents did not belong in a special flood hazard area. FEMAeventually removed the requirement for them to buy flood insurance— though it didn't actually update the map. The bank refunded theflood insurance premium, but Marston said FEMA wouldn't refund thecost of the survey.

“In my mind it's a huge rip-off,” Marston said.

Edgar, 68, a retired IBM software developer, said she couldn'tunderstand why FEMA thought her house was suddenly at risk offlooding. When she called FEMA and asked, she said the agencycouldn't tell her.

“They just said, 'You need to buy flood insurance,'” she said,and told her she could apply for what's known as a letter of mapamendment if she thought she'd been mapped into a special floodhazard area in error.

Her husband, Thomas, a professor of chemical engineering at theUniversity of Texas at Austin, knew David R. Maidment, a civilengineering professor there who is an expert on flood insurancemapping. While she hired a surveyor, wrangled with FEMA and talkedwith state and county officials, Maidment and several of his Ph.D.students drove up to the ranch to study it as a class project aswell.

The experience, Maidment said, showed him “in a very smallmicrocosm” the importance of using up-to-date elevation data in newmaps. The Texas state government paid to map Burnet County, wherethe Edgars' ranch is located, in 2011 using lidar. But FEMA's newmaps for the county don't include the lidar data.

FEMA removed the Edgars from the special flood hazard area inMarch, but again it hasn't actually changed the maps. Letters ofmap amendment acknowledge that FEMA's maps were incorrect withoutactually changing them. While the Edgars don't have to buy floodinsurance, the new, inaccurate maps remain.

Darling, the county's director of environmental services, saidhe had gotten calls from dozens of homeowners with similarcomplaints about the new flood maps.

“We've still got 'em coming in,” he said.

The contractor that created the new maps, appeared to have takenshortcuts in drawing the maps, Darling said, including not usingthe new lidar data. Without lidar, he said, issuing a new map is“just a waste of money.”

The experience, Edgar said, had left her feeling deeplyfrustrated, as a both homeowner and a taxpayer. FEMA hasn'treimbursed her for the surveying costs or for the flood insurancepremium she and her husband paid. “It falls to the homeowner tohire a professional engineer and pay” hundreds, even thousands, “todisprove what I would call their shoddy work,” she said. “I don'tthink that's fair.”