ZIP 23703
Portsmouth city, VA

The heaviest year

2016 is the heaviest year on file: 40 paid claims, 19.0% of the ZIP's total. The rest is spread across the other 27 years on file. The largest named event in the record is Hurricane Isabel, with 36 claims.

7 of those claims — 3.3% — were filed since 2017. The bulk of this ZIP's record is older than that.

Named event	Paid claims	Share of record
Hurricane Isabel	36	17.1%
Hurricane Floyd	31	14.7%
Hurricane Matthew	27	12.8%

Where the claims sat on the map

Of the 209 claims here that record a rated flood zone, 126 — 60.3% — were on properties rated outside the mapped high-risk area, in a B, C or X zone. Most of the paid flooding in this ZIP happened to properties the maps did not treat as high risk. Flood insurance is not required outside the high-risk zone, and most properties there do not carry it — so these counts come from the minority who did.

The water near this ZIP

The closest gauges publishing official flood thresholds are Elizabeth River near Pinehurst in Portsmouth (IN MLLW) (3.5 mi), Elizabeth River at the Midtown Tunnel (in MLLW) (4.1 mi) and James River (VA) at Sewell's Point (IN MLLW) (4.4 mi). A gauge describes one point on one river — it will not see street drainage, sewer backup, storm surge or flash flooding.

Read current gauge conditions for 23703 →

What this does not say

These are paid National Flood Insurance Program claims, nothing more. They count insured properties whose owners filed and were paid, so they are a floor on how often this ZIP has flooded — never a measure of how likely it is to flood next. Uninsured flooding leaves no trace here at all.

The figures are aggregates published by FEMA. No individual claim, address or policyholder appears on this page or in the data behind it. Nothing here is a forecast, a warning, or advice about insurance.