Kenny Crippen looks at the debris outside his home on Plantation Island, Florida, where he rode out Hurricane Irma.
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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