The New York Times has another examination of a central FEMA problem that has long existed but is expected to get much worse in coming years: the cycle of rebuilding flooded homes and infrastructure, only to see those structures flooded again during the next major event. This has long been a problem—current FEMA rules are insufficient to discourage rebuilding in known flood-prone areas—but as the effects of climate change become more pronounced, things are about to get much, much worse.
[T]he Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, recently found that the separate flood insurance program had paid $5.5 billion from 1978 to 2015 to repair and rebuild more than 30,000 properties that had flooded more than once. Claims for those residences and businesses had been submitted an average of five times.
The group’s report estimated that the number of “severe repetitive loss properties” could balloon to 820,000 if coastal sea levels rose three feet by the end of the century, which scientists consider possible.
There is a host of problems here, ranging from picayune local battles to hard-fought struggles by fossil fuel companies and their in-pocket hacks to deny not just climate change, but any issue that might so much as brush up sideways to climate change. Mostly, there is an apparently ingrained human reluctance to recognize that the land changes around us. The marshlands of Louisiana will continue to sink into the Gulf of Mexico; many of the places being washed away and rebuilt now will be open water a century from now. Will we still be rebuilding them all, on their FEMA-required stilts? Will children be rowing to school themselves, or will a big yellow boat with flashing lights and uncomfortable bench seats come round to pick them up?
A one-meter rise in sea levels will render large swaths of America's current Atlantic and Gulf coastlines unrecognizable. It is not a question of putting every beachfront home on columns four feet higher than the ones they are currently on; bridges, highways, sewer systems, and all the rest must be reconfigured. This is no longer hypothetical: the latest climate reports paint an exceedingly grim picture, with catastrophic ocean changes now all but certain unless the world, collectively, takes extraordinary measures immediately.
The current FEMA mandate, in other words, is not sustainable. Rebuilding the same flooded prisons, schools, city halls, and the roads to reach them, only to have them re-damaged after the next major storm is one thing; it will be another as the land currently being rebuilt on slowly becomes, well, not land. Long before the maps get redrawn, it will be storms that make the point clear; even six-inch-higher seas will inundate places that have not been inundated before, each and every time the winds pick up.
Condemning entire Louisiana counties, or even the strips of summer homes on the Carolina Outer Banks, is nobody's idea of a winning campaign slogan; it is likely that our elected policymakers will not utter a peep about it even as it happens. It is unpleasant. It makes people angry. Above all, it depresses property values.
And if anything, we're sliding backwards. You can thank the Grand Idiots of Conservatism for that one.
In August last year, President Trump rescinded an executive order signed by President Barack Obama that required consideration of climate science in the design of federally funded projects. In some cases, that had meant mandatory elevation of buildings in flood-prone areas. Then in March, FEMA released a four-year strategic plan that stripped away previous mentions of climate change and sea-level rise.
At the moment, this is a topic still primarily talked about by climate watchers, the insurance industry, and irritated budget hawks; as the damages done by warmer, wetter. and more powerful storms begin to add up, it's not likely to remain that way. The ocean doesn't give a damn whether the high planners of Washington acknowledge it or not; a hurricane has never needed an invitation.