My neighbors live in a ground level house that was flooded with two feet of water during Hurricane Irma. They do not have insurance as they said they could not afford it. They called FEMA for help. It took almost two months but FEMA finally sent someone to check the damage. They had already had a church group tear out drywall and had replaced appliances.
FEMA sends them a letter stating they will give them $16,177 if they agree to buy flood insurance and maintain it. The cheapest she was able to find was $2700 which will rise each year. Conversely, my husband has an employee that lived in a small, old camper trailer which was destroyed. He was sent a check for $21,000 with no caveats.
How is this fair? Neighbor was flooded 12 years ago and FEMA made them whole with no mandate. Is it because they own the house outright? If they accept the money and don’t maintain insurance they will have to pay it back. What would yee Dopers do?
I’m no expert, but I assume it’s based on whether you’re on a flood plain. If floods are expected regularly, you should be expected to insure against such an occurrence, and if you don’t do so, you should not expect free government money.
That said, an article in The Sunday New York Times talked about how screwed up the federal flood insurance program is. One fun anecdote: “Its records, for instance, show that a house in Spring, Tex., has been repaired 19 times, for a total of $912,732 — even though it is worth only $42,024.”
Could it be that the camper/trailer was destroyed and no longer is at risk, while the house being rebuilt is? FEMA actually loves that as that structure is no longer a flood risk (and hoping he moves to a different area).
!My hope as well as he is living in the office which is downstairs. The problem is the rv Park he was in must bring electrical up to code. Hubby is very busy HVAC so he needs. Him. We have room in our yard but no, just no.
FEMA flood insurance results are always a moving target. Each disaster is different. The law and it’s regulations constantly change in large and small ways and Congress’es response to each disaster is different. Trying to compare one award to another is never going to make sense. Worse, every time Congress and the public try to make things more rational and fairer-they make things worse somewhere else.
The country is too diverse and disasters are all too different to have a one size fits all system. If the economics of regional insurance programs could be worked out, that would help, but then if the feds are involved people would complain that region A was being treated differently than region B. Can’t have that even if the regions are in fact different. Sigh.
Like so many things, there are no easy solutions.
Purchasing flood insurance as a rider to a full homeowners’ policy should be substantially cheaper (though the HO policy will obviously cost more in total).
If private flood insurance is available, that is. In the Florida Keys that’s not a given and, if it can be found, will likely be as expensive if not more than an NFIP policy. To be fair, private policies usually offer a bit more coverage than the NFIP equivalent (living expenses during repairs, for instance).
That said, living in a flood area comes with additional risk. IMHO, the risks to personal property should be borne by the owner, not the country as a whole. Government should be on the hook for restoring publicly owned infrastructure and the like, for sure, but not so much Joe Bloe’s house. Again, IMHO.
FEMA reassesses the effectiveness of levees periodically. You can be out of the flood plain one year and in the flood plain the next. Although usually people get notified of the change in status.
If your house gets destroyed by a flood every 15-20 years, how much should you expect your flood insurance to cost? Insurance is only cheap if the likelihood that the insurer will have to pay a claim is very low. If your house is in a flood plain, it is actually very likely that your house will flood, which means flood insurance is going to be very expensive, because it can’t work otherwise.