Thursday, September 14, 2017

Will Rebuilding After Harvey and Irma Make More Flooding Inevitable?

Kenny Crippen looks at the debris outside his home on Plantation Island, Florida, where he rode out Hurricane Irma.
Photograph by David Goldman / AP
The aim of the National Flood Insurance Program, which was created by Congress, in 1968, in the aftermath of Hurricane Betsy, is to provide “affordable insurance to property owners.” The program offers what amounts to subsidized coverage, and according to its critics, and also to some of its supporters, the N.F.I.P. has had the perverse effect of encouraging rebuilding in areas where homes and businesses probably shouldn’t have been built in the first place.
Many homes enrolled in the program have been flooded and repaired more than once. These are known as “repetitive-loss properties.” Then there are homes that have been flooded and repaired at least four times. These are known as “severe repetitive-loss properties.” Into this latter category falls a Mississippi house valued at sixty-nine thousand dollars. The house has flooded thirty-four times, resulting in a total of six hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars in claims.
“It’s basically lather, rinse, repeat,” Steve Ellis, the vice-president of the non-partisan group Taxpayers for Common Sense, recently told Politico.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the National Flood Insurance Program, which was supposed to pay for itself, is deeply in debt; it owes nearly twenty-five billion dollars to the federal government. Authorization for the program was set to expire on September 30th, but then, last Friday, with Houston still flooded from Hurricane Harvey and Florida bracing for Irma, President Trump signed a bill extending the authorization for three months.
Figuring out how to fix the N.F.I.P. is a real and urgent task. (In 2012, Congress approved a measure that was supposed to raise N.F.I.P. premiums, to better reflect the actuarial risk of the policies; then, in 2014, lawmakers reversed themselves, approving a second measure that effectively countermanded the first.) It might also be seen as a metaphor. The response to a disaster can reduce the damage from future calamities, or it can exacerbate it. As Houston and the battered cities of Florida start to look toward rebuilding, obviously decisions ought to be made with an eye toward reducing future risks. But, given who’s running the country and the states most affected, it’s hard to imagine they will be.
Consider the situation in Florida. In many parts of the state, owing to climate change and the accompanying sea-level rise, rain is no longer a prerequisite for flooding. All that’s needed is an unusually high tide. Floridians call this “sunny-day flooding.” A study published in 2016 in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management found that in Miami Beach the frequency of such flooding had increased by a remarkable four hundred per cent over the previous ten years.
Scientists studying this phenomenon have exhorted Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, to acknowledge the problem and try to figure out how to deal with it. Instead, Scott has prohibited state officials from even talking about climate change.
“It’s more than an absence of leadership,” Eric Buermann, the former board chairman for the Southwest Florida Water Management District, who is also the former general counsel to the state’s Republican Party, told the Washington Post last week. “There’s harm being done by denying the problem.”
(As it happens, much of Irma’s destruction was caused by wind, rather than by flooding, but here again government policy may have put more people at risk. In Florida, after Hurricane Andrew, which struck in 1992, it became so difficult to get insurance against wind damage that the state formed its own insurance company and offered incentives to induce private companies to enter the market. Now no one is sure whether those private companies will be able to pay out.)
America is, of course, currently a nation run by deniers. Trump is the denier-in-chief, and he has appointed deniers of various stripes to virtually all key positions. These include Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior, Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy, and Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Just last week, the President nominated another climate denier, Representative Jim Bridenstine, a Republican of Oklahoma, to run NASA.
Climate change clearly exacerbated the damage of both Harvey and Irma, if for no other reason than the fact that higher sea levels produce higher storm surges. (In addition, hurricanes draw their energy from the warm surface waters of the oceans; as sea surface temperatures rise, storms are expected to become more ferocious, and, since higher temperatures also produce evaporation, storms will drop more rain.) But last week, as Irma bore down on Florida, Pruitt told CNN, “To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced.” This prompted the Republican mayor of Miami, Tomás Regalado, to respond that this was, in fact, exactly “the time that the president and the E.P.A. and whoever makes decisions needs to talk about climate change.”
“If this isn’t climate change, I don’t know what is,” Regalado told the Miami Herald. “This is a truly, truly poster child for what is to come.”
Which brings us back to the National Flood Insurance Program. Even before Harvey and Irma, Texas and Florida were among the states with the most frequently flooded properties. (The others are Louisiana and New York.) One of the reasons that the N.F.I.P. is in so much trouble is that most of its flood maps don’t account for climate change and hence are out of date.
Writing about the program on Monday in the Washington Post, Logan Strother, a visiting scholar at Princeton, noted that the N.F.I.P. could be redesigned “to discourage people and businesses from living and building in flood areas—and to help with the costs for those who are flooded nevertheless.” But he doubted whether this would actually happen. Congress isn’t keen on making the needed changes, and state and local officials, and also homeowners and developers, are usually more interested in trying to preserve the status quo—even as it disappears under the waves.
After disasters, Strother lamented, “people rebuild right back in these areas, making the next major loss inevitable.”

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