‘THE HIDDEN THREAT’
Sea-level rise could make dream homes a nightmare for Anne Arundel residents buying waterfront properties
Editor’s note: Over several months this fall, The Capital examined how flooding driven by climate will change Arundel Arundel County. A live forum will be held on The Capital’s Facebook page on Tuesday at 7 p.m. Readers can ask questions for The Capital along with representatives from NOAA, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the County Executive’s office and MD Realtors. To send them in advance, email ssanfelice@capgaznews.com.
Joan Stansfield loves the homes she sells in Shady Side so much, she bought two for herself.
The town has become her escape from the bustle of Washington, D.C., a place where she can watch the sunset on the Chesapeake Bay and catch crabs off her dock.
“You get off Route 4 and it’s just like phew this boulder comes off your shoulders and the stress comes off… It’s chill, rawrustic beauty,” she said.
“Shady Side and south county are on fire with people buying. Prices are ramping up.”
But those dream homes could become a nightmare, according to scientists who say sea level rise is coming to flood homes and vital roads in Anne Arundel County. Stansfield didn’t know this because, like homeowners and realtors around the state, she wasn’t given information scientists say is vital to the future of homes like hers.
Real estate agents such as Stansfield use FEMA’s 100-year floodplain maps to determine whether their homes are required to have flood insurance, which many interpret to mean they are safe from flooding. But climate scientists say FEMA’s maps shouldn’t be used to predict flooding.
Bill Sweet, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s sea-level rise expert living in Annapolis, said that because FEMA only considers historical events when making its flood maps, they don’t take sea-level rise into account.
“Past risk is not the best predictor of future risk,” Sweet said. “I think that’s sort of the hidden threat.”
Sea levels are even higher now than when FEMA’s Anne Arundel County mapswere developed in 2015, he noted, and risks are only increasing. A storm with a one in 100 chance of occurring now will have about a one in 10 chance
by 2050, Sweet said.
“Flood risk is changing rapidly,” Sweet said. “We are trying to provide useful tools and products at NOAA to help but they are not regulatory by any means. It’s just part of our mission to help folks plan in the coastal zone.”
For now, Stansfield has flood insurance on both her Shady Side homes even though it’s only required for one of them. But she doesn’t think about a future where they might flood.
“I’m not a worrywart. I don’t sit around and think the worst,” she said. “I’m not in fear of the land disappearing or anything like that. If it floods, it floods andwe will do what we need to do and rebuild or what have you.”
Still, Sweet and other scientists say it’s not that simple and the time to start thinking about flooding is now.
‘Where it can rain, it can flood’
Higher sea levels mean that deadly and destructive storm surges push farther inland, which also means more frequent nuisance flooding, according to NOAA. In the last century, precipitation from heavy storms has increased in the eastern United States by more than 25% since 1958, according to a 2016 Environmental Protection Agency report.
NOAA explains that sea-level rise is caused globally by emissions from human activity warming oceans, causing water to expand, and increased melting of glaciers and ice sheets. But sea-level rise does not increase at the same rate globally. In Anne Arundel County, sea-level rise is accelerating along its 530 miles of shoreline while the ground is also sinking.
Sea levels in Anne Arundel County have been rising about an inch every seven years, according to NOAA and Climate Central analysis. But no one can be sure what will happen, Sweet said, because sea-level rise doesn’t increase on a smooth trajectory.
No matter how fast it happens, Doug Myers, a Chesapeake Bay Foundation senior scientist, said, sea level rise is not stopping— allwe can do is brace for it.
“This is not a train you can stop on a dime. It is rushing ahead,” Myers said.
Myers points to the real estate industry as the reason residents don’t understand flood risks.
“The real estate industry doesn’t like looking at this because it means a home isn’t going to outlive the mortgage,” Myers said.“Whowants to buy ahomeif it’s going to be underwater in the next 30 years?”
Maryland sellers are only required to specify whether their property is located in a FEMA flood zone, conservation area, wetland, or Chesapeake Bay critical area. They don’t have to disclose to potential buyers whether there have been any flood damages to structures on the property or whether the home requires flood insurance.
While legislation to address the impact of sea-level rise on state and local projects was passed in 2018, all of its real estate disclosure sectionswere removed.
The Coast Smart bill was sponsored by Del. Dana Stein and co-sponsored by his fellow democrats Dels. Kumar Barve, David Fraser-Hidalgo, Barbara Frush, James Gilchrist, Anne Healey, Dan Morhaim, Shane Robinson and Marvin Holmes. None responded to requests for comment.
Ten Republican senators and 39 house members voted against the bill including Anne Arundel Dels. Michael Malone, Sid Saab and TonyMcConkey. McConkey lost a re-election bid in 2018.
There was another attempt in 2019 to expand Coast Smart law criteria to private properties, which also failed.
Maryland Realtors opposed the 2018 bill’s sea-level rise disclosure sections, arguing that since the average home seller stays in a property for about 10 years, the average home buyer won’t see an impact from sea-level rise.
“The purpose of disclosure is not to inform buyers of what could happen to a property at some future date when they no longer own the property, but to educate them about impacts that may affect their use and enjoyment of the property,” Maryland Realtors’ testimony against the bill says.
Bill Castelli, a lobbyist for Maryland Realtors, said he’s not against information to help property owners understand flood risks, but he is skeptical.
“I would certainly want to know more about the projections on sea-level rise and how accurate they are,” Castelli said.
“We know the FEMA maps are accurate in what they project out and the mapping technology is pretty good. I would want to know how (other organizations) arrived at a projection 30 or 40 years from now and how that plays into that property.”
There are still advocates for stronger flood transparency laws inMaryland. Joel Scata, an attorney on the National Resources Defense Council’s water and climate team, said the availability of flood risk information in theUnited States is all around poor. But it doesn’t have to be.
“Unfortunately a lot of states have poor flood disclosure laws. Maryland is one of them,” Scata said.
The council gave the state a D grade in its flood risk disclosure lawratings.
To the north, Pennsylvania got a C. Its disclosure law requires a seller to specify any past or present flooding problems affecting the property and whether any part of the property is located in a flood zone or wetlands area. There is no specific requirement to disclose whether a property is mandated to be covered by flood insurance.
Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma rank the highest, with mandatory property disclosure requirements for flooding.
It’s not too late, he says, for Maryland to do the same. He points to Texas, a state not known for being regulation friendly that passed what he calls some of the best disclosure laws in the country after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
“If Texas can do it, Maryland can definitely do it,” Scata said.
A report from the US Government Accountability Office on Flood Insurance described FEMA’s special flood hazard areas designation as “an ‘in or out’ line that unintentionally gives consumers the false perception that because they are not required to purchase flood coverage, they are not at risk of flooding and do not need the coverage.”
The report notes that while FEMA considers properties outside of hazard areas to be at low-to-moderate risk of flooding, they accounted for about 20% of National Flood Insurance Program claims from 2006 through 2015. The accountability office cited a 2006 study that found only about 1% of consumers outside of hazard areas purchase flood insurance.
David Maurstad, head of FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, said it’s important to recognize what FEMA’s flood insurance rate maps (FIRMs) are and what they are not.
“The FIRMS are not predictions of where it will flood, and they don’t just show where it’s flooded in the past,” Maurstad said. “The FIRMS are snapshots in time of risk designed to show minimum standards for floodplain management and the highest risk areas for flood insurance.”
He noted that community officials can submit scientific or technical data to FEMA for local map revisions. A FEMA spokesperson said the agency is working with some communities to identify future risk and plans to draw from organizations like NOAA to develop tools conveying future conditions like sea-level rise and adaptation options — but they won’t be regulatory like its floodplain maps.
The spokesperson added that the agency has a Future of Flood Risk Data initiative seeking to develop a more
comprehensive understanding of flood hazards and flood risk across the nation.
“Flooding events do not followlines on a map,” Maurstad added. “Where it can rain, it can flood.”
‘The entire landscape is going underwater’
Residents in Shady Side, Oyster Harbor and Selby-on-the-Bay told The Capital they think they’ll be dead by the time flooding makes their homes unlivable, making it someone else’s problem. Many of them lived through Tropical Storm Isabel in 2003, a 100-year storm that left some residents thinking it would be the worst flooding event of their lives.
After Isabel, Tom Cagle in Oyster Harbor said flooding is “nothing you can’t live with,” even when roads around his house are sometimes under eight to 10 inches ofwater.
“People plow through it,” he said. “It might be an inconvenience for a few days of the year, but not enough to pull up stakes and leave.”
In Shady Side, Jim Foster watches the roads around his home flood at least once a month. The community has one road in and out, which often floods so much during hurricanes that residents are cut off from entering or leaving Shady Side.
Foster, president of the Anacostia Watershed Society in Washington D.C., knows the flooding will only get worse. But he just can’t leave.
“Sometimes I think tomyself, ‘Oh gosh, I should sell while I still can or while the price is decent,’” Foster said.
“But I certainly do love watching the sunrise in the morning and watching the moon rise in the evening. Watching the boats go by and the birds. It’s a siren song. It’s hard to pull yourself away fromit.”
Flood risk awareness is important for residents like Cagle and Foster, but Myers warned it is evenmore vital for prospective homeowners who lack the tools to understand the future of their investment.
“When people buy a house, sometimes the first thing they do is look at the school district,” Myers said.
“Well, I don’t have kids so I could care less about that. But I know exactly how high the storm drains are in my neighborhood.”
Unless prospective homeowners know where to look for flood maps based on future flooding predictions, they’re likely to be shown FEMA’s floodplain maps.
Realtor.com started including Flood Factor on their site as of August, but real estate agents in AnneArundel saidFEMA’s flood maps are the standard for assessing a home’s flood risk.
“I believe that is the most comprehensive map to use,” Shady Side agent John Tarpley said. “I can’t even think of another company or resource youwould use.”
Tarpley, who also lives in Shady Side, holds no illusions about his town’s flood risk.
“I always tell peoplewe live in a swamp. It’s a very nice swamp but it’s a swamp,” he said. “People have been historically nervous about buying in Shady Side.”
He’s hopeful knowing many of the town’s homes are still standing after 60 years.
“Isabel was the worst storm we’ve ever had,” he said. “If you made it through that — that was a 100 year flood — you’re going to beOK.”
But scientists like Myers say it’s only a matter of years before things won’t be OK and town becomes an island.
“Shady Side will flood all over with the storm drain network before the actual shoreline,” Myers said. “The entire landscape is going underwater. That kind of situation there’s not an engineering solution for. Those people are going to have to bug out.”
“Unfortunately a lot of states have poor flood disclosure laws. Maryland is one of them.” —Joel Scata, an attorney on the National Resources Defense Council’s water and climate team