FLOOD INSURANCE:
Few Houston-area homes have it, spurring new calls to rethink floodplain maps
It took less than an hour for floodwaters to nearly swallow Jordan Morales’ home in a neighborhood where homeowners are not required to buy flood insurance because the area rarely, if ever, floods.
It is one of the largest financial assets to his name and it looked as if it had been shipwrecked: Mud smeared the walls, furniture piled on itself and doors broke apart or swelled shut.
“The water was up to 5 feet. The entire place was just destroyed,” the 28-yearold Houston firefighter said of the home near Spring that he has owned for two years. “Flood insurance shouldn’t be optional. It should be mandatory.”
More than a million homes in Harris County are not insured for floods, leaving thousands of area homeowners with unthinkable repair costs while, in most cases, they’re still on the hook for their mortgages.
The National Flood Insurance program insures only 15 percent of Harris’ 1.5 million structures. In Brazoria
County, where a levee breach sent residents fleeing from floodwaters raging through Houston’s southern suburbs, only 26 percent of more than 118,000 homes are covered by flood insurance.
Among the 18 Texas counties included in President Donald Trump’s Harvey disaster declaration, only 16 percent of households have insurance through the program, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts.
About those flood maps
Experts say Harvey’s extreme rainfall, which shocked a region accustomed to floods, raises questions about whether federal flood maps, which banks use in determining whether mortgage holders should have flood insurance, were an accurate reflection of the stormwaters that can flow through the region’s bayous and streets.
“A lot of the Houston area is not an identified flood area by Federal Emergency Management Agency,” said Larry Larson, a senior policy adviser at the Association of State Floodplain Managers. “But they got hammered anyway.”
Many Spring-area residents like Morales were not required to buy flood insurance because their homes are out of the 100-year floodplain, the basis banks use to require flood insurance for mortgage holders. Morales’ neighbors had never seen the area flood. But when Tropical Storm Harvey hit Spring, floodwaters from Cypress Creek rose up through the FEMAdesignated flood zone and beyond, inundating homes high above the banks. The city’s stormwater system is designed to handle 2 to 3 inches of rain an hour, but rainfall at the peak of the storm was falling at almost 7 inches per hour, said Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District.
Lindner hopes that Harvey was an exception — that flood maps could never accurately capture a storm of this magnitude, and that they would never need to again. But the past three years of major floods in Harris County suggest otherwise.
“Some people say ‘I’ve never flooded before,’ and I always say the day you get 20 or 25 inches of rain on your street, your house is probably going to flood,” he said. “And that day just came.”
Although Harris County’s floodplain maps were updated last year, FEMA will examine the maps’ accuracy in the wake of Harvey, said Roy Hughes, director of the National Flood Insurance Program run by FEMA.
Meanwhile, federal government and local officials are assessing the extent of Harvey’s flood damage along Texas’ Gulf Coast. On Thursday, Harris County officials said that at least 136,000 structures have been destroyed — an unknown number of which are uninsured.
While Harris County clearly could use more flood insurance, it has more homes insured by flood insurance than any other county in the nation.
Despite a growing sense that violent storms have been increasing in frequency and intensity, the number of active flood insurance policies has been on the decline. The number of active flood insurance policies peaked at 5.7 million in 2009, four years after Americans watched as floodwaters ravaged New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, according to FEMA data.
Since then, the number of insured has fallen to less than 5 million households nationwide. Over the past five years, the number of federally backed flood insurance policies in Harris County declined by 9 percent, according to FEMA. That was slightly below a larger national decline of 10 percent.
The reasons for not buying are numerous. Some homeowners don’t live in recognized floodplains and never thought to buy insurance; still others are renters, who aren’t required to purchase flood insurance even in areas where it is mandatory for homeowners.
From bad to worse
Kennen Bedinger was among those who had been certain his home in Friendswood south of Houston was covered. But after the floods came, and the Bedingers and their two young daughters had to be rescued by boat, bad news got worse: No flood insurance. The family’s two-story, fivebedroom house got about 15 inches of water on the first floor.
“I just have to assume we’re probably looking at $100,000 or something, mainly because of the flooring and kitchen cabinetry, and the bath. And the washer and dryer, I don’t know if they’re working,” Bedinger said. “It could be more than that.”
More than 95 percent of flood insurance sold in the United States is backed by the federal NFIP to provide coverage for calamities private insurance companies have long avoided. Those insured are entitled to up to $250,000 to help them rebuild their homes after flooding and another $100,000 to replace their personal possessions.
For those without flood insurance, there is little recourse beyond applying for a federal loan and hoping for a FEMA grant to cover up to $33,000 of damage, nowhere near enough to repair severely flooded homes.
As Harvey’s waters subside across Houston, thousands of people are ripping out drywall and carpets, airing out spaces and calling their insurance companies. But people like Melissa Buchan, whose uninsured home was partially destroyed, know that recovery will be especially hard without a financial buffer.
Buchan, a 36-year-old fertility care practitioner, was rescued Tuesday from floodwaters that swirled into the first floor of her home on Forest Garden Drive in Houston’s Kingwood neighborhood. Two strangers — who had driven seven hours from Baton Rouge, La., to help in rescue efforts — pulled Buchan, her three kids and two dogs to safety.
On Thursday, when the flooding had receded and Buchan returned home to survey the damage, she was thankful that her family was safe and that her neighbors had survived. But she also was overwhelmed. Everything on the first floor had been destroyed — from antique furniture to a book her son wrote in the third grade.
As Buchan’s front lawn piled high with mangled cabinets, waterlogged mattresses and upended tables, she took care to document every loss.
“We have to piece our lives back together,” Buchan said. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”