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Being located on a floodplain affects a property's insurance requirements, building guidelines, flood control options, property values, permitting constraints, and zoning. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) maintains maps showing floodplain boundaries, but many had become outdated. The floods in 2003 and 2005 were the largest and most widespread Indiana had seen in years, and highlighted the inadequacy of the FEMA maps. Reevaluating them became a crucial task.

The Indiana Department of Natural Resources' Division of Water become the lead agency for updating Indiana's floodplain maps. During the first phase of the project, existing maps were converted to an electronic format, and made available at www.floodmaps.in.gov.

For the second phase, the Division partnered with public and private firms to develop new and revised floodplain studies. Innovative project management and contracting practices resulted in significant cost savings, allowing the Division to expand the scope of the project to cover additional waterways.

An additional component of the project was notifying landowners of changes to the floodplain maps, and the ramifications of those changes. The Division developed an outreach plan, using parcel boundary data as the basis for an informational mailing sent to each affected landowner, including them in the process of correcting and updating the maps.