‘Flood. Rebuild. Repeat.’
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Nearly 8,000 Texas homes are considered at risk of repeat flooding. But, only one in five of those homes have been raised, moved or mitigated, according to FEMA data analyzed by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
By Ted Oberg and Sarah Rafique
Published Sept. 23, 2020
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Staring at her son's Pearland home surrounded by flood water, Vickie McRay said she hasn’t gotten much sleep.
“Every time it rains I worry about them,” McRay said.
She isn’t alone.
In the Trinity Gardens area, one Houston home has flooded 29 times. In South Houston, a property flooded 27 times, and a Cypress home has flooded 22 times. Statewide, at least 446 homes have flooded 10 or more times, according to FEMA data analyzed by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Only 30 percent of those homes that flooded more than 10 times received some sort of mitigation to prevent future flooding, according to the data.
“The way the flood insurance program tends to operate is this cycle that we call the ‘flood, rebuild, repeat cycle,’” said Anna Weber, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “A lot of the time what happens is a home will flood. The homeowner, if they have a flood insurance policy, will get the payout for their claim and the claim will just pay the amount needed to bring the home back up to where it was in the first place and that doesn't address the underlying risk because.”
In Texas, that means thousands of homes are at risk of repeat flooding, costing taxpayers millions in federal aid.
Statewide, 7,868 homes are considered severe repetitive loss properties, meaning they’ve filed at least four separate flood insurance claims for more than $5,000 each or filed two or more claims where the payments exceeded the value of the property, according to the data.
“We have these large flood events year after year,” Weber said. “We're going to be adding more and more properties to the list and behind each of the data points is a household or a family that's just experiencing these floods over and over again.”
Harris County not only has the most flood-prone properties in Texas, but also leads the nation with the most severe repetitive loss properties.
Only one in five of the homes currently on the list of flood-prone properties has been raised, moved or received some other type of mitigation, according to the data. The rest just received funds to cover the cost of flood damage repairs.
The National Flood Insurance program has paid $10 million in building costs for insurance claims since 1979. On average, taxpayers have spent $262,000 to rebuild each of the nearly 8,000 repeatedly flooded Texas homes.
“Oftentimes it takes so long to receive this assistance that you'll actually flood again while you're waiting,” Weber said.
About 61 percent of the state’s most flood-prone properties are in Harris County and experts say not enough is being done to prevent the homes from flooding again.
“It's clear from this data set, that our current system just isn't cutting it,” Weber said. “We also need to be thinking about entirely new ways to address flooding and ways that we can not only just protect against flooding so our communities can survive, but also how they can thrive in these new environments.”
Weber said homeowners can reduce the risk of continuous flooding by elevating their homes. Government buyouts that allow homeowners to relocate or build homes in better locations that aren’t as prone to flooding in the first place can also help prevent repeat flooding. But, she said, that’s not what’s happening.
Weber said although flood insurance is important, more needs to be done to address flood mitigation so that repeat flooding events don’t occur.
“The idea behind mitigation is it's a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach, because while it's great to have the safety net of flood insurance, having insurance doesn't keep your home from flooding,” Weber said.
In Texas, the state received $4.3 billion in federal grant funds, specifically for mitigation. The funds were appropriated by Congress in 2018 for mitigation projects in areas affected by flooding in 2015, 2016 and 2017, when Hurricane Harvey caused devastation in Harris and surrounding counties.
The General Land Office is currently in the process of establishing four regional Citizen Advisory Committees to help advise the state agency on how the mitigation funds will be implemented.
“This year is a great example where we've had so many tropical storms and hurricanes approaching the U.S. and making landfall and it's not just the winds of the hurricanes that are the most damaging in a lot of cases. It's actually the water, whether it's from the storm surge up on the coast, or just rainfall in inland areas,” Weber said. “A lot of our stormwater infrastructure was just not built to accommodate this much rain in such a short amount of time.”
Weber said there hasn’t been an opportunity in Congress to pass any “meaningful reform” that would help with mitigation. But, she said flood policy on the state level has been improving.
“In Texas, for example, the legislature recently passed a new flood disclosure law that's in place and so more people have access to information about the flood history of their property when they're moving into a new home,” Weber said. “These flood disclosure laws are important so people can make good decisions about where they want to live.”
This week, rainfall totals from Tropical Storm Beta exceeded 10 inches during a 48-hour timeframe in parts of Harris County. Some communities still were experiencing flooding Wednesday morning after the storm subsided.
Now, residents are left to wait and see if their homes will flood during the next storm.
“Flooding is a traumatic experience, but so often the recovery process is even more traumatic than the actual event,” Weber said. “It’s the long period of learning what kind of assistance you can get, whether you can get it, how long it's going to take, are we going to flood again before the assistance comes? All of that just compounds the experience beyond the actual event of flooding.”
INTERACTIVE: Is your neighborhood prone to repeat flooding? 13 Investigates mapped out FEMA data obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The larger the dot, the more times the home has filed a flood claim.
PLEASE NOTE: This map includes FEMA data analyzed by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The locations on this map were plotted by 13 Investigates using 5-digit or 9-digit zip codes, depending on which was available. It does not show exact locations for homes that flooded.
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