Sam Phillips remembers the flood of 1973, when a few inches of rocks protected his Point Place house from the crashing waves of Lake Erie.
The water threatened, but it never entered his Lakeside Avenue house. Others in Point Place, though, weren't as lucky.
"The water did come up, but it didn't come over the existing breakwall," Mr. Phillips said. "I'd lived there long enough not to worry about it because I'd seen the water high many, many times prior to that. I wasn't scared."
In the 1980s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers installed a much higher levee to protect Point Place from floods, which damaged hundreds of homes in the early 1970s.
But while those levees have protected most Point Place residents from floods - and kept them from needing flood insurance for the last 20 years - the area is now in danger of losing its accreditation from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
And Mr. Phillips, like hundreds of residents in Point Place and across the county, could find himself forced to buy flood insurance as part of FEMA's map modernization program, which determines what areas will be included in a new flood plain map.
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081005/NEWS12/810050338
Well, I *was* going go bid on a house on 316th Street. Not any more. I'm not going to assume ownership of a property where some faceless government agency can arbitrarily set some monthly nut that I have to crack for them.