Pastor Aaron Trigg was at home when the water arrived in Rainelle. It had been raining hard all day, filling the creeks and rivers that run through southern West Virginia. In the past, such intense downpours would only last a few hours. But this storm brought wave after wave of torrential rain.
“You could hear the water up in the mountains just crashing trees,” Trigg remembers.
Rainelle is a small town in a steep valley. When the creek near downtown jumped its banks on the evening of June 23, 2016, the water immediately flooded into every home on Trigg’s block.
Trigg’s house was one story tall, so there was nowhere to escape. He took shelter on the second floor of his neighbor’s house and waited as the water kept rising. As it got dark, he could hear people screaming for help. He wondered if he would survive the night. “I did a lot of praying that night,” he says. “Not so much for myself, but for the people I could hear.”
Trigg was rescued by boat the next morning. But the home he and his wife lived in was destroyed, as were almost all the other homes on their block. In all, at least 23 people died in the 2016 West Virginia floods, and an estimated 1,500 homes and businesses were ruined.
Rainelle is one of hundreds of small towns where climate-driven flooding potentially poses an existential threat. Sea level rise and heavier rainstorms driven by global warming are sending more water into residential neighborhoods from the Gulf Coast to New England to Appalachia to the Pacific Northwest. And new data make it clear that many households and communities cannot afford the mounting costs.
More than 4 million houses and small apartment buildings across the contiguous U.S. have substantial risk of expensive flood damage, according to data released by the First Street Foundation, a non-profit research organization that studies flood risk and housing. The cost of flood damage to homes nationwide will increase by more than 50% in the next 30 years, the First Street Foundation estimates.
“These properties are going to face a significant economic loss over this 30 year period, and it’s something they’re just not built to defend against,” says Matthew Eby, executive director of the First Street Foundation.
Residences at risk for expensive flood damage are concentrated on the coasts and in Appalachia. But there are hotspots across the country, including in parts of the West that are also increasingly threatened by wildfires.
Poorer people stand to lose the most to flooding as the climate changes, and the federal government is ill-prepared to address the problem through the current federal flood insurance program.
A looming insurance disaster
The federal government provides the vast majority of residential flood insurance in the U.S. Most policies are underpriced relative to the actual cost of flood damage.
The new data show that flood insurance rates would need to more than quadruple to keep up with the costs of climate-driven flooding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is already preparing to raise insurance premiums in many places later this year in an effort to save the National Flood Insurance Program, which has accrued more than $36 billion in debt.
FEMA warns that the First Street Foundation’s analysis is only an estimate, and that the agency didn’t provide the research group with details about the new flood insurance pricing scheme, known as Risk Rating 2.0.
For homeowners who are currently underpaying for flood insurance, FEMA says it plans to raise rates by up to 18% each year until the price is accurate, according to a January report by the Congressional Research Service. The agency will begin rolling out the new pricing in October.
As the cost of insurance goes up, many people who need flood insurance will likely be unable to afford it, leaving them to face lasting damage. Research has found that disasters can erode family stability and exacerbate mental and physical ailments when people don’t have the money they need to repair their homes.
“If you don’t have the finances you need to recover, then families have to make really difficult trade-offs, like maybe forego spending on medical expenses because otherwise you don’t have a safe home,” says Carolyn Kousky, the executive director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
When large numbers of people don’t have insurance or savings after a disaster, the effects can ripple through the community. Towns like Rainelle are a bellwether for that future. Here, flood insurance is already unaffordable for many residents, and climate-driven flood damage has already exceeded local resources. About a third of Rainelle residents live below the poverty line, and the cost of repairing the 2016 flood damage was insurmountable for many families.
Pastor Trigg’s displaced congregants would call him, hopeless, in the months after the flood. “A lot of people in Rainelle were poor, and they didn’t have any insurance. They didn’t have any way to have any backup plan,” he says.
With no money for repairs, many people took what they could salvage and left Rainelle for good. “It affected the spirit of the town,” Trigg says. Nearly five years later, a lot of homes are gone, or only partially repaired. Trigg says all but one of the families on his block left. The city government saw a ten percent decrease in water utility customers, a proxy for population loss.
Still, Wyatt is an optimist of sorts when it comes to the town’s future. He’s running for mayor, and he imagines Rainelle hosting an Appalachian music festival and attracting hiking tourists. “This town has so much to offer,” he says. But, if there’s another big flood, he adds, “I can’t see our town surviving.”
The cost of flood damage to homes in the U.S. will increase by more than 50 percent in the next 30 years, the First Street Foundation estimates. In places where people are living paycheck to paycheck, the cost to rebuild after a flood can be insurmountable.
Flood damage is also skyrocketing in wealthier parts of the country. But the financial calculus there is different, because homeowners can afford flood insurance — at least up to a point. And municipal governments are able to invest in expensive flood mitigation projects.
In Alexandria, Va., flash floods after rainstorms and high tide flooding have damaged dozens of homes and affected hundreds of residents in recent years, according to the city government. Climate change is largely to blame for the rapid increase in damage in the waterfront suburb of Washington, D.C.
The First Street Foundation data suggest that in one particularly hard-hit area of a neighborhood called Del Ray, the cost of flood damage will increase by 76 percent in the next three decades.
Fixing one problem, creating another
The details of who wins and who loses when it comes to flood insurance could be useful for Congress and FEMA as they address climate risks. President Biden has said that helping Americans adapt to a hotter Earth in an equitable way is one of his priorities.
When FEMA begins to raise flood insurance rates later this year, it plans to begin factoring home value into its calculations so that people who own more expensive homes pay monthly premiums that reflect their actual risk of flood damage. Those changes could help address the current race and income disparities in the cost of flood insurance.
FEMA’s changes could also help reverse a decades-long trend of overdevelopment in floodplains. Artificially cheap federal flood insurance has incentivized developers and residents to build in places that are more and more likely to be under water.
But new flood insurance prices would also create a massive affordability crisis, the Congressional Research Service report notes.
FEMA doesn’t have the power to fix the affordability problem it is creating. Matt Eby of the First Street Foundation says it’s up to Congress to pass legislation to help people afford flood insurance. “This is only going to be a bigger problem in the future,” Eby says.
