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Police, kids celebrate Black History Month
Is your insurance about to go up? New flood maps may cause a rise in rates BY JIM HILLEY jim@theitem.com New flood maps under development for the Wateree River watershed in Sumter County may affect whether property owners in that area will have to acquire or pay more for insurance when the new maps are finalized, according to Senior Planner Helen Roodman of Sumter City-County Planning Department. “We have a set of maps that are in our comment period,” she said. Roodman said Federal Emergency Management Administration and South Carolina Department of Natural Resources hired a contractor two or three years ago to produce the new maps, and they are being reviewed by planning agencies, civil engineers and surveyors. “We are looking for anomalies and anything we disagree with,” Roodman said. Those technical revisions must be reported back to the contractor by early March, she said. The contractor will make any necessary revisions and submit them to FEMA and DNR. The process of updating the maps began well before last October’s flood, Roodman said. She said the term 1,000-year flood, which has been popularly used to refer to last year’s flood, is not really accurate. “We no longer use that terminology,” she said. Planners, surveyors and civil engineers would consider it a 50-year flood in some places and up to a 700-year flood in others. Roodman said what used to be considered a 100-year flood is instead looked at as a 1 percent chance of a flood in any given year, and a 1,000-year flood would be a .1 percent chance of a flood in any given year. Insurance coverage is based on probabilities, she added. Some changes in the Wateree flood plain are expected, she said, as well as in some subdivisions near Shaw Air Force Base. “I expect the flood maps around the Wateree flood plain to better reflect the contour maps,” she said. Each time the maps are revised they become
PHOTOS BY KEITH GEDAMKE / THE SUMTER ITEM
Harlem Parson, 5, gets a boost in his shooting from Sumter Police officer Ebony Ivy during the department’s annual Black History Month Celebration. Students from seven elementary schools wrote essays and drew pictures of whom they admired, and the winners were treated to a pizza party at ChuckE-Cheese on Wednesday. Sgt. Gary Atkinson helps Ke-Nysha McDowell play a game at Chuck-E-Cheese during Sumter Police Department’s celebration of Black History Month.
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Democrats head Powerful storms kill at least 6 people to polls Saturday BY JIM HILLEY jim@theitem.com Saturday is the day for Palmetto State Democrats to make their voices heard during the South Carolina Democratic Presidential Preference Primary. South Carolina’s primary is widely expected to indicate whether former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s support among the black community in Southern states will boost
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her chances of holding off a challenge from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination for president. Both candidates have visited Sumter in the last week, with Sanders appearing at Serendipity Café on Monday morning and Clinton holding a rally at Morris College on Wednesday evening. In his visit, Sanders said
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WAVERLY, Va. (AP) — Tornadoes tore through towns as far north as Pennsylvania, heavy snow canceled hundreds of flights in the Midwest and power outages left tens of thousands of residents from the Carolinas to New England in the dark as severe weather raked across a broad swath of the country for a third day. The storms Wednesday claimed at least a half-dozen lives, three of them in the tiny town of Waverly, Virginia, where a 2-year-old child and two men, ages 50 and 26, were killed during the storm, said
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Nick Mobley helps clean up a house owned by a family friend on SEE STORMS, PAGE A5 Wednesday after a storm hit Appomattox County, Virginia.
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