The Six Flood Questions on Connecticut's Disclosure Form

Connecticut's Residential Property Condition Disclosure Report ends with six questions about flood. They sit in Section I, numbered 60 through 65, on the last page a seller initials. They have been on the form since the July 2025 revision, which means most people selling a house in Fairfield County this year have already answered them. Very few remember doing it.

That is worth correcting, because two things happening around those questions are going to make the answers matter more than they have. A FEMA map revision is working its way through the county, and the state has published data suggesting the federal maps understate how many houses are exposed.

What the Form Actually Asks

Question 60 asks whether the property sits in a FEMA-designated floodplain, and if it does, which zone. Question 61 asks whether the seller, or any previous owner the seller knows of, received assistance from FEMA, the Small Business Administration, or another federal or state disaster program for flood damage. Question 62 asks whether a flood insurance policy is currently in effect. Question 63 asks whether a FEMA elevation certificate is available. Question 64 asks whether the seller has ever filed a flood damage claim. Question 65 asks whether any structure on the property has experienced water penetration or damage from seepage or a natural flood event.

Each one gets checked yes, no, unknown, or not applicable. The unknown column is where the trouble lives. Question 60 has a knowable answer for every property in Connecticut, and it takes about two minutes to find. Checking unknown on it is not a neutral act. It tells a buyer's attorney that the seller did not look, and it invites the exact question the seller was hoping to avoid, only later and with less control over the framing.

It is also worth being clear about what this form is and is not. It is a disclosure of what the seller knows, not a warranty and not a substitute for inspection. A seller who answers honestly is not taking on liability for conditions they were unaware of. A seller who answers carelessly is doing something else entirely.

The Maps Being Redrawn Here Are River Maps

Say "flood zone" in Fairfield County and people picture the shoreline. The map revision actually moving through the county is not a coastal study. In 2019 FEMA opened a flood risk study of the Saugatuck River watershed, rebuilt on new topography, new aerial imagery, and revised hydraulic modeling. Preliminary maps came out of it, and the 90-day appeal window ran from February 16 to May 16, 2024. Darien's notice to residents says it plainly: only a portion of its panels are being updated, and its coastal panels are not part of the work. Fairfield's affected panels run along the river corridor.

The effective date has moved more than once. Fairfield's own page still carries a projection of November 2025, which has come and gone. Darien's more recent notice puts the Letter of Final Determination in late February 2026 and the new maps in force around August 2026, and attributes the delay to the federal shutdown last fall. Anyone quoting a firm date is guessing. What is not in question is that the preliminary maps are finished and public. FEMA publishes them through its preliminary flood hazard portal, searchable by state and county, and the land use office in any affected town can show you which panel your parcel sits on.

The reason to care is narrow and financial. If a parcel moves from Zone X into an AE zone, a federally backed lender will require flood insurance as a condition of the loan. That is not a preference a buyer can decline. It arrives as a line in the monthly payment, and near the water it can be a large one. It also means question 60 may have a different answer next year than it has today, on a house nobody has touched.

The FEMA Map Is Not the Whole Answer

After the August 2024 floods in western Connecticut, the state went looking for better information. The Connecticut Insurance Department partnered with First Street to publish a free property-level climate risk tool, making Connecticut the first state to offer one to all of its residents. You enter an address and see that property's exposure to flooding, wind, heat, and other perils, drawn from data that used to sit only on the insurer's side of the table.

The instructive part is where the two sources disagree. First Street flags roughly 81,000 more Connecticut properties as facing severe flood risk than the federal maps do. The gap is mostly rainfall. FEMA's maps are built around rivers and coastline, and they do not model the localized downpour that overwhelms a storm drain on a street nowhere near either one. A house can sit outside every mapped zone, answer no to question 60 accurately, and still have to answer yes to question 65. Those are different questions, and the second one catches far more houses than the first.

What Sellers Should Handle Before Listing

Look up the parcel's current FEMA zone and keep the printout, so question 60 gets a real answer instead of a shrug. Then find the elevation certificate if one exists, which is question 63 and also the single document most likely to save money. Previous owners often had one prepared, town building departments sometimes hold a copy, and a certificate showing the lowest floor above the base flood elevation can reduce a premium substantially. It is worth an afternoon of looking before paying for a new survey.

For question 64, check the record rather than trusting memory. Your carrier can tell you what has been filed, and a CLUE report will show claims a prior owner made. Then take question 65 seriously, because it is the broadest one on the page and the one sellers most often wave off. A finished basement that took two inches in a 2024 storm is a yes. Sellers who answer yes and attach the repair invoice consistently do better than sellers whose buyers find the water line themselves during the inspection. One more thing worth knowing: the flood zone field in the MLS is optional and is left blank on the large majority of listings. It is not a substitute for the disclosure, and neither side should treat it as one.

What Buyers Should Ask

Read to the end of the report. Section I is on page eight of nine, after the roof and the septic and the radon, which is roughly where attention runs out. If anything in it is marked unknown, ask for a real answer before the inspection contingency does the work for you. Get an actual insurance quote during the inspection period rather than an estimate afterward, because premiums swing enormously with zone and elevation and that difference is worth knowing before financing is locked. If the house sits near the Saugatuck or one of its tributaries, look at the preliminary panels as well as the effective ones, since the preliminary version is the better picture of where the line is headed. And run the address through the state's risk tool, which will tell you about rainfall exposure the federal map was never designed to capture.

None of that is slow work, which matters, because this is not a market with much room for a leisurely diligence period. Across Greenwich, Stamford, Darien, New Canaan, Westport, Fairfield, Norwalk, Wilton, and Ridgefield, the median single-family sale over the past 90 days spent 16 days on market (SmartMLS, as of July 30, 2026). Questions nobody thought about in advance tend to go unasked.

The Practical Read

Six questions at the end of a nine-page form is an easy thing to treat as paperwork, and it mostly gets treated that way, right up until the deal where a buyer reads them closely and asks something the seller has not prepared for. The houses this reaches are not only the ones with a dock. They are the ones on the low side of a street, the ones backing a brook that runs hard three days a year, and the ones sitting in a river floodplain that a new map is about to describe differently than the old one did.

If you are preparing to sell in one of the shoreline or river towns and you are not certain what your parcel's flood status actually is, that is a solvable problem and a short conversation. I am glad to walk through it with you before it becomes a question you are answering under a deadline.