Hmm, my landlord conveniently forgot to tell me that my apartment was built in a DAM (well almost). DAMN! My lease contract didn’t state that it was a flood plane, which it should have. The flood was so bad that my mother (who was visiting) was rescued from my apartment with a boat. Apparently, the apartment complex flooded two years ago during another major storm. Can I sue him?
Probably.
Say… you didn’t happen to pick your user name before the flood, did you?
Just curious. 
Umm, yes I picked it before the flood. OOOPS!
Well, if you live in a flood * plane * why don’t you just fly away.
I think flood plains are a matter of public record and you are presumed to know what is a matter of record.
What, exactly, is a flood plain? I understand the general concept, that it’s an area prone to flooding, but is there a more precise definition?
Plane or plain? I think plane. A plane is a flat surface. A flood plane would be land that is subject to accumulating water. Water level arises, and I have to move out. 
Okay. I am not a lawyer.
If you live in a house that you own, and it’s built on a flood plain, you can buy flood insurance. If you don’t buy flood insurance, and it floods, then you are, legally speaking, S.O.L. There’s no one you can sue.
If you live in an apartment that you rent, and it’s built on a flood plain, your landlord, as the property owner, can buy flood insurance for it. If he doesn’t buy flood insurance, and it floods, then he is S.O.L. And, I would suppose, so are you.
I’ve never heard of suing your landlord because his apartment building flooded. If the building burned down, you would expect his homeowner’s insurance to recompense you for your losses. And if he didn’t have homeowner’s insurance that would recompense his tenants for their fire losses, then you would sue him, because landlords may reasonably be expected to have fire insurance coverage.
But flood insurance is different, because it doesn’t flood that often. If your landlord happens not to have flood insurance, then I think you are S.O.L.
P.S. to Ken: Yes, a flood plain is a technical, engineering, and geological thing. It means the flat part alongside a river, stream, or creek, where the waters rise and spread out when the watercourse floods. Contractors and engineers who are building houses and apartments have access to what are called “contour maps” that show the elevation of the land they’re building on, and there are fairly arbitrary designations marked there, based on educated guesses, as to how high the water will rise in a “10 year flood”, meaning “once every 10 years”, a “20 year flood”, a “50 year flood” and the dreaded “once a century flood”, which actually seem to happen about every 10 years, but go figure.
Several lawyers on this board have emphasized the importance of getting local legal advice since the laws differ in Kalamazoo and Kentucky. But here in Saint John, Canada, I know of a case where someone bought a house cheap, which was on land which was known to flood each year. However, there was nothing regarding this written down and indeed the realtor was successfully sued for failing to disclose this information. I would expect you could sue despite the availability of insurance. In Canada, real estate agents are also required to disclose UFERA insulation, and a whole host of other confounders if they are aware of them.
I don’t think that an owner of property is liable to make a 3d party beneficiary to his insurance. You want to be protected? Get renter’s insurance.
I have renter’s insurance, but they did not cover it. I had to ask for flood insurance, which is different to renter’s insurance. If I had known the place was built in a pool, I would have got the flood insurance. Blimey!
I say hell no.
If you had flood insurance, you would have known about it. There are some catastrophes that you can insure for, like hurricane, tornado, earthquake, and some that you can’t, like landslide.
Quick story. There is a neighborhood here in Seattle called Magnolia. The southwest side of Magnolia is called The Bluff. That’s where all the “Richy Rich’s” live in their two million dollar homes with swimming pools and breathtaking views.
The whole Bluff is made of compacted sand: a nightmare for both earthquakes and landslides. One night, a few years back, it rained harder than most of us had ever seen. The Bluff became saturated and the houses started to slide, most of the owners still asleep in their beds.
About four of these million dollar plus homes slid into the Puget Sound. Others made it only part way down and still cling to the sandy cliffs. And there are a few that remain right on the edge of the Bluff, with about ten feet of grass between their foundations and the sandy edge.
If you drive down the bluff today you will see about ten homes with for sale signs. It doesn’t matter if the owners tried to sell them for two million or fifty bucks. They are completely uninsurable and always will be. Some of them have been abandoned, for fear that the next big rain will send more houses tumbling down that sandy slope.
So the lession is. You gotta build your house upon a rock, with a good foundation in a solid spot…
I am a landlord and my insurance doesn’t cover the tenants property under any circumstances. It says so in their lease. It is the tenants responsibility to insure their stuff. I am not your mommy. That said, this is america and anybody can sue anybody. Get a lawyer and have a ball.
There are some areas near the coast where you just cannot get flood insurance due to the likelihood of hurricanes. Where I live, it took much shopping to procure one, but it was expensive.
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- Similar: A co-worker of mine’s parents bought a nice country home on a small hill some years back. Several years later they decided to do some fairly involved landscaping, and found out that the pretty little hill their house was built on was, in fact, a mound of garbage from a trash dump that was closed during the 1930’s. Through legal assistance they found that basically, since it was public knowledge that the house was built on an old trash dump (county maps from the period clearly showed it as such), they couldn’t get squat from the seller as compensation, even though he didn’t tell them. (If the seller was the builder I dunno) -On the upside, they found that they don’t have reveal that info to any prospective buyers, unless the buyer specifically asks about it. They can’t lie about it, but they don’t have to offer the information.
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- Similar: A co-worker of mine’s parents bought a nice country home on a small hill some years back. Several years later they decided to do some fairly involved landscaping, and found out that the pretty little hill their house was built on was, in fact, a mound of garbage from a trash dump that was closed during the 1930’s. Through legal assistance they found that basically, since it was public knowledge that the house was built on an old trash dump (county maps from the period clearly showed it as such), they couldn’t get squat from the seller as compensation, even though he didn’t tell them. (If the seller was the builder I dunno) -On the upside, they found that they don’t have reveal that info to any prospective buyers, unless the buyer specifically asks about it. They can’t lie about it, but they don’t have to offer the information.
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- Somewhat Related: The Mississippi/St Louis region dikes that broke a few years back were repaired not with soil, but with sand. The Army Corps of Engineers wanted to start repairs as soon as possible, but when the dike breaks were dry enough to get construction equipment in place, the agricultural fields that the dirt had washed onto were still too wet to use graders to recover the dirt. So they used sand, capped with a couple feet of dirt. - MC