The debate has taken on greater urgency in the 2018 storm season as Hurricane Florence gathers strength in the Atlantic Ocean.

wildfires last year, while forgiving $16 billion in debt accrued by the National Flood Insurance Program.

Until the 50-year-old program stops paying to rebuild homes that have flooded an average of five times — socalled Severe Repetitive Loss Properties — and make other changes, the losses will keep mounting, Moore said.

Legislation that passed in the House in November would begin to make changes, requiring FEMA to tell homebuyers if their properties have flooded before and mandating that communities come up with plans for minimizing flood risk.

The bill, the 21st Century Flood Reform Act, would limit future coverage and discounts for high-risk properties, modify premiums and

surcharges paid by policyholders, expand opportunities for private insurers to sell policies, offer assistance to low-income households, and authorize financing for flood-mitigation assistance.

But the Senate has yet to act on the measure. Congress has extended the flood-insurance setup without change seven times over the past year, with the latest extension set to expire Nov. 30.

By then, the severity of Hurricane Florence will be known. The duration of the rainfall and the trajectory that the storm eventually takes will be key to the flooding risk, according to James Belanger, a senior meteorological scientist at the Weather Co., a unit of IBM. The trajectory “is really worst-case scenario for rainfall and flooding impact of the central part of North Carolina as well as Virginia,” Belanger said.

Although there are more than 444,000 National Flood Insurance Program policies in force in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, the vast majority of those policies are for properties located in the Special Flood Hazard Areas on the

program’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps, with very little flood insurance being obtained in flood-prone areas outside the mapped flood plains, said Samantha Medlock, head of North America capital, science and policy for Willis Towers Watson.

This means that many families will suffer uninsured losses, since standard homeowners-insurance policies do not cover flood damage, she said.

FEMA did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Currently, the National Flood Insurance Program has about $10 billion in borrowing authority remaining, and Hurricane Florence isn’t likely to consume all of the funding, said R.J. Lehmann, director of finance, insurance and trade policy for the R Street Institute, a Washington think tank.

“They are prepared to handle this storm,” Lehmann said. “But if we have multiple storms — there are others out there in the Atlantic basin — things could get a little more dicey.”