With residents driving through flooded roads and draining soggy backyards the morning after a deluge on Monday, some might check their flood insurance coverage and notice a few changes are going into effect.

That’s because nationwide policy provisions took place on April 1 that will hike premiums for policyholders in high-risk areas that pay below-market prices. There are 3,836 residential and commercial flood insurance policies in York County, according to numbers released by FEMA this year, and Insurance Journal estimated that around 1 million policyholders nationwide would be affected.

The changes include a 10 percent fee (which will either be new or rise, depending on the risk zone one lives in) assessed for the “reserve fund” ”“ used by the National Flood Insurance Program to offset costs during disasters ”“ as well as a fee aimed at businesses, condos and second homes. The maximum and minimum deductibles are also going to be increased for certain policies.

Flood insurance hikes are at the center of two pieces of congressional legislation aimed at reforming flood insurance ”“ one that tried to fix the financial woes of the National Flood Insurance Program by increasing insurance premiums, and one that tries to moderate the sweeping changes of the first. Future mapping may also have an impact on towns in York County with floodplains.

The Biggert”“Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 passed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, and was a major overhaul of the National Flood Insurance Program. The heavily-subsidized program had long paid out far more than it brought in, and with huge payouts from Hurricane Sandy, legislators wanted a long term plan to make the program solvent.

“It has always been supplemented by federal money, but Congress said, ”˜We gotta make this stand on its own,’” said Robert Bohlmann, former chief of the York County Emergency Management Agency.

The Biggert-Waters act created a 25 percent annual rise in premiums for high-risk policyholders that had previously been subsidized, until the premium matched the risk of the property. This would be a carrot-and-stick policy, encouraging high-risk policyholders to adopt measures decreasing their risk in order to lower their premiums.

“The vicious cycle (of build and rebuild) needs to stop ”“ at the same time you have people who have lived for years in Saco. ”¦ Premiums (would) rise so quickly many would have lost their jobs,” Saco Code Enforcement Officer Dick Lambert said of the original Biggert-Waters proposal.

This was swiftly revised by the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014, which limited premium increases in an effort to soften the blow of Biggert-Waters. Among several changes, the 25 percent rate increase was lowered to 18 percent.

Ultimately, changes that take place over the next few years will be a mash-up of both laws. Both will introduce more homeowners into the risk pool in an attempt to lower premiums, as well as offering more incentives for owners in high-risk areas to decrease their risk.

The other development is, simply, that the science of floods has gotten much better in the 21st Century.

One case study of this is a U.S. Geological Survey report of two floods in Ogunquit that happened in 2006 and 2007. According to the methods used by the old FEMA maps, floods of that magnitude were only likely to happen once every hundred years, with several streams in the 2006 flood swelling beyond FEMA’s probability for 500 years.

“Many of our maps date back to the 80s and 90s and engineering has come a long way ”“ the maps continue to become more accurate,” said Sue Baker, program coordinator of the Maine Floodplain Management Program.

New FEMA mapping procedures will likely provide better information about risk in York County, and bring changes in how flood insurance is administered with it. However, Baker said while preliminary maps of York and Cumberland County were released in 2013, currently they are on hold and likely will not be made official until 2017, as FEMA is awaiting an appeal in Massachusetts that challenges some of the scientific methods they used.

For Lambert in Saco, he wants to make sure the maps are as accurate as possible, as many more residents would be incorporated into flood zones.

“The (flood elevations) are significantly higher than anything I’ve seen or residents have seen,” Lambert said. He said in his years working in Saco, Seaside Avenue has never had more than a few inches of flooding. However, the new maps predict flooding could easily be several times higher than that during a storm. Lambert said that new flood maps would incorporate many more people into flood zones.

Robert Bohlmann pointed to local efforts to mitigate flood risk in Kennebunk as positive steps foward, but says the troubles he faced as Emergency Management chief tells him there is still quite a bit more to do.

“I’m not a scientist and I don’t have an answer ”“ but I can tell you that I watched two streets disappear,” he said of Camps Ellis in Saco.