Collier County's floodgates

Josh Evans knew about the federal flood-map revisions in Collier County long before the recent outcry over this government swamping.

Evans, a young engineer and entrepreneur in Bonita Springs, alerted clients last year that the federal government was going to make a mess of the flood maps.

When he started J.R. Evans Engineering in 2010, he discovered that the federal government was proposing to put most of Collier County in a flood zone. That would have devalued thousands of acres because owners are severely restricted on what they can build or rebuild in a flood zone.