The term 100-year flood can be misleading. The 100-year flood does not necessarily occur once every 100 years. Rather, it is the flood that has a 1 % chance of being equaled or exceeded in any given year. Thus, the 100-year flood could occur more than once in a relatively short period of time. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) defines it as the 1 % annual chance flood, which is now the standard definition used by most federal and state agencies and by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)