The Flood History Your Westchester Landlord Has to Hand You

Yes, and in writing. Anywhere in Westchester County an owner has to give every prospective residential or commercial tenant a completed Flood History Disclosure Form covering the previous ten years before the lease is signed, and if they skipped it and you later take flood damage, the law lets you go to court to recover it.

What has to be on the form, and the box to read first

Ask for the flood disclosure before you sign and you get, for nothing, the closest thing to a survey of the building's wet history. Chapter 581 of the Laws of Westchester County makes an owner tell a prospective residential or commercial tenant whether the property sits in a Special Flood Hazard Area on the FEMA maps, and whether flooding known to the owner has happened at least once in the ten years before the lease and damaged any part of the premises. The county form turns that into boxes: the FEMA map panel under prefix 36119C, the zone, the flood history, a description of the events and the damage, and any work the owner has done to cut the risk. Section 581.21 asks separately for one more thing, and it is the single most useful line on the sheet: an estimate of where the water line was inside the premises. That height tells an assessor how far up the wall to open, and whether the insulation below it is coming out. If you read nothing else, read that.

Which leases it covers, including renewals and sublets

More people are owed this form than think they are. Chapter 581 was approved by the County Executive on 29 June 2022 and took effect on 15 August 2022, and by its own terms it covers leaseholds, sublets and renewals entered into on or after that date. So a sitting tenant who has renewed at any point since that summer should have been handed a flood history too, not only somebody moving in with boxes. Section 581.21 also puts the identical duty on a tenant who sublets, which catches the arrangement almost everybody treats as informal. One thing to note before you go looking for advice elsewhere: this is a Westchester County law and it does not reach into New York City, so a page written for a tenant in the Bronx will not tell you what you are owed here.

Being outside the flood zone is not the reassurance it sounds like

The form itself undercuts the map. It states that on average about 40 percent of all flood insurance claims come from outside high risk flood areas, and the county repeated that figure when it announced the law. Sitting outside the mapped zone changes what insurance costs, not whether water gets into your basement. The law is drafted to match: Chapter 581 defines a flood to include not just the overflow of inland or tidal waters and runoff from an established water source, but a ponding of water at or near the place where heavy or excessive rain fell. A yard that puddles in a downpour and pushes water under a basement door is a flood for the purposes of this disclosure, with no river in sight. Which is exactly the kind of repeat problem that turns into mold, because nothing about it looks dramatic enough to fix the first time.

Basements, storage rooms, and the reason this law exists at all

The instructions on the form tell owners to describe all flood events associated with the building or the property in the past ten years whether or not it lies in a Special Flood Hazard Area, including whether electricity or water had to be shut off, whether tenants had to be moved out for repairs, and how far parking areas and separate storage areas flood. Storage rooms are on that list for a reason, and they are usually where the ruined belongings and the first musty smell are found. The committee statement behind the law is blunter still: it records Westchester tenants hit by flooding of basement apartments in 2007, 2011, 2012 and 2021, water rising over five feet in some cases, and those apartments then re-let to new tenants who knew nothing about it. It also records the flash flooding of 1 September 2021 that killed at least eleven people in basement apartments in New York City. If the unit you are looking at is below grade, this is the section of the form to be difficult about.

Nobody gave you one and the basement has already flooded

You may not have to absorb it. Section 581.31 provides that where a landlord has not complied with the disclosure duty, a tenant who suffers flood damage during the lease may bring an action in a court of competent jurisdiction to recover those damages, and section 581.41 makes two or more defendants acting in concert jointly and severally liable. We are a mold and drying service and not your attorney, so take the legal question to one. What we can tell you is what makes that conversation possible later: dated photographs before anything is thrown out, a note of how high the water got against a fixed point like a stair tread, the date and time, and a written record of what you asked the landlord and when. Drying still has to start straight away, and it does not prejudice anything to get it started.

What the disclosure tells us before we have seen the building

Send the form through with your request and the first visit starts several steps ahead: we already know whether this has happened before, roughly how high, and what the owner says they did about it. That shortens the assessment and it changes the scope of the work, because a building with a history needs the water route dealt with rather than the same wall replastered every spring. Plenty of buildings here have a history. FEMA figures in the City of Yonkers annex to the county hazard mitigation plan put 239 city properties on the repetitive loss list and 801 settled claims against only 447 policies in force. If yours is one of them, that is worth knowing before you spend, not after. Use the form on this page, attach what the landlord gave you, and we will get the assessment booked.