What is a basement?
Does it have to have a minimum headroom?
The rest of the world thinks of a basement as being an occupiable space.
The FEMA Technical Guide =Requirements for Flood Openings in Foundation Walls and Walls of Enclosures on page 5 lists a definition.
Basement: Area of a building that has its floor subgrade (below ground level) on all sides. NFIP
regulations do not allow basements to extend below the base flood elevation (BFE) except in
dry-floodproofed, non-residential buildings.
There is no height guidance- it could be only 2 feet tall as long as all four sides have the adjacent grade higher than the crawlspace floor.
Most of the Flood Plain administrators recognize that this definiton does not apply for a crawlspace of 3 feet height.
However I have one local jurisdiction that uses this to define a basement- even if it is only 2 feet tall.
Once they define the crawlspace as being a basement, now the crawlspace floor becomes basement floor,
and therefore the crawlspace (aka basement) floor must be at the FPG elevation.
However with this definition, there never would occur the instance shown in the diagram on page 13 of the guide.
Can the code be amended to reflect some actual usable height criteria with the basement defintion- similar to the Residential code which requires 6'-8" height minimum?
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Paul Kimmerle P.E., M.ASCE
OWNER
Kimmerle Engineering
Hudson IN
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