If the floods do not stay where the Feds tell them, can we arrest Mother Nature?
Seriously, the flood maps are very out of date, but so are the regular maps. Why isn't the profit from this program used to update the maps? Is it because the program is failing and costing billions more than expected? Just a thought.
Federal government maps predict in parcel-by-parcel detail where the water will travel when a megastorm hits.Those maps anticipated that I-20 would remain high and dry, when flooding actually closed the highway down. The projections envisioned nothing more than a big puddle in the Food Depot parking lot in Austell, but what developed around the store was more like a lake.
And what the maps foresaw as a contained overflow of Cobb County's Noonday Creek became a surge of water that filled the living rooms of homes blocks away.
Relying strictly on federal flood maps to determine whether a property merits flood insurance can lead to financial disaster for homeowners, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found in an examination of the National Flood Insurance Program.
Many property owners whose homes were ruined had no idea that their standard homeowners insurance policy would not cover damage caused by a massive flood. Those who did understand the policies probably had no ink-ling that a property located outside the flood zone still faced a significant chance of getting hit.
"Who would think we need flood insurance, especially in landlocked Atlanta," said Jennipher Ward, whose Austell home was swamped last week.
The current system that relies on homeowners to understand the complexities of flood risk doesn't make sense, said Birny Birnbaum, a former insurance regulator who is a consumer representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
"It's really analogous to telling a consumer, when you go get a health insurance policy it's your responsibility to pick the illnesses you are insured for," Birnbaum said. "It's crazy."
Companies don't cover it
Insurance companies sell flood insurance for the federal government. But they have long refused to take on the risk of covering flood damage because of its potentially catastrophic nature. "The risk from an event like that is too great for any carrier to take on," said Justin Tomczak, a spokesman for State Farm Insurance.
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