Flooding and drainage

The flood zone, street by street

Timberwood spans three flood zones, and which one a house is in depends on where on the street it sits. The table shows the share of addressed lots in Zone AE, the mapped high-risk zone where a mortgage lender requires flood insurance.

148 of the 1,014 lots counted here are in Zone AE, about one in seven. They are not spread evenly. Two streets are almost entirely inside it and most streets are entirely outside it.

Those shares were counted here. Every addressed Timberwood lot was checked against FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer, the data behind the official maps.¹

What the three zones mean

About half the neighborhood sits in one floodplain or the other, and the table above only covers the smaller half of that.

Zone AE is the one a lender checks. A federally backed mortgage on a house in it requires flood insurance, and new building is regulated to a set slab height. A 1% chance every year compounds to about 26% over a 30 year mortgage.

A third of Timberwood is in the 500 year floodplain, and that is the band most people here have never been told about. FEMA marks it Zone X, the same letter it uses for ground outside the floodplains entirely, which is why it goes unnoticed. Flood insurance is not required in it and a policy is cheap. It is still a floodplain: the City of Humble's floodplain permit rules cover the 500-year band as well as the 100-year one, so fill, grading and storage need a permit here too.² A 0.2% chance every year compounds to about 6% over 30 years.

The rest of Timberwood is outside both, and no lender can require flood insurance on it.

The counts come from the same check as the street table, every addressed lot against FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer.¹ The map counts a little differently and will not always match to the lot: it draws every parcel including a handful with no address on them, and it pulls the one floodway lot out of Zone AE and gives it its own color, so its AE count reads 147 and its floodway count reads 1. To see it drawn, open the map on its flood view and each lot is shaded by its zone. Your own lot page names the zone outright.

This table was wrong until August 20, 2026. It previously said Pheasant Run was about 75% in Zone AE and Quail Run about 70%, and it did not list Oriole Lane or Blue Jay Circle at all. Both of those figures were far too high and the two streets most affected were missing. The counts above were recomputed from the parcel data and spot-checked against FEMA's live map. If you read this page before that date, read it again.

Timberwood is on FIRM panel 48201C0485M, effective June 9, 2014.¹ Ground a couple of miles east, toward the river, is on a different panel.

A lot can be in a different zone from the pavement in front of it, so a street average does not establish the zone for one address. A house outside Zone AE can also flood: nationally, 29 percent of flood insurance claims between 2014 and 2024 came from outside the high-risk areas,³ and the state insurance department says "More than half of homes flooded by Hurricane Harvey were outside of designated flood zones."⁴

You can look an address up on the FEMA Flood Map Service Center, which searches by address,⁵ or on the Harris County Flood Education Mapping Tool.⁶

New maps are in draft. Harris County Flood Control released draft MAAPnext flood maps in February 2026. Draft is not FEMA's formal preliminary stage. The county says: "They are not final, not regulatory. Nothing changes right now related to flood insurance requirements or development regulations."⁷ The county's schedule does not reach an approved map until around 2028.⁷ The drafts would move most of these streets into a higher risk category.

The regional record

During Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, major flooding hit the San Jacinto River from "heavy rainfall, Lake Conroe releases and backwater from Lake Houston", and over 664 homes along the river were damaged.⁸

Lake Conroe reached its highest level on record, 206.24 feet above sea level on August 28, 2017, against a normal pool of 201 feet, and made its largest release on record, 79,141 cubic feet per second the same day.⁹

The subdivisions the weather service named between Humble and Lake Houston were Northshore, Bellaeu Woods, Riviera, Treasure Cove, the Kings Lake and Kings River communities, Atascocita Shores and West, Ramblewood and Walden, along with US 59, West Lake Houston Parkway, North Houston Avenue, Thelma Road, Hamblen Road and Aqua Vista Drive.⁸

Timberwood does not appear in those lists. The lists record what the weather service reported on and do not establish whether Timberwood flooded.

Permits and flood maps

• The City of Humble requires a permit for floodplain development, fill of any amount, grading and storage, and states that "often, a floodplain development permit is required even when a construction permit may not be required".² The rule covers the 500-year floodplain as well as the 100-year one.² See permits.
• A Letter of Map Amendment corrects a wrong flood zone on one property. FEMA charges nothing to review a LOMA and normally answers in 60 days. The elevation certificate it requires has to be prepared by a licensed surveyor or engineer, which is the cost and most of the wait.¹⁰

What neighbors can add

• Which houses took water in Harvey, in the 2015 and 2016 events, or in Imelda
• Which streets hold water in an ordinary hard rain
• Which ditches and inlets stop draining and need reporting