By John Schwartz and Richard Fausset Sept. 12, 2018

Insurance companies will insure them they will continue! Why is there TRILLIONS of dollars worth of property on the East Coast alone with more being added by the day...MOST OF WHICH WILL BE WORTHLESS in 75-100yrs if not much sooner!?!?!?

I don’t see the point in continuing to pour billions into rebuilding infrastructure alone everytime a wealthy seaside community &/or people’s summer homes homes or rentals gets wiped off the map. Well, I do, there is always a local economy & jobs but at what point do we the tax payer say enough is enough?

It seems to me that is yet another government expense that overwhelmingly benefits the upper middle class to extremely wealthy...Like TRUMP’S Mara-a-Lago, right?

Anyway, thanks for the link.

Don't bother reading it..so full of ads..difficult to get thru it!!! I will never understand - ocean front property??? Over rated....I'm waiting for the reports of rivers to start flowing pink from the pig farm pools...ewwwwww

Imagine that horrible stuff soaking into your floors and walls. 🤢🤢🤢

Because they like it there.

And you get these really pretty river views.

Because there are always going to be uninformed people who are more enticed by show than deterred by the warnings.

Their response is always the same... because we like it. Can’t fix stupid

Where my parents live is not a flood plain, but because of several tree removals, and some local construction, diverting tributaries, a flood plain was created, which caused their house to have to be "reclassified" as being in an area prone to flooding.

But first, many 100-, 200- and even 500-year floodplains are off limits unless there's flood mitigation measures taken (like raising the effective height of the building's foundation). A lot of the problem is that we built in floodplains in the past 300 years and nobody has the political will to tell people, "Sorry, scram, your loss, too bad" or cough up the money for buying them out.

That said, a lot of cities were built on the coast or on rivers. Meaning they were built in floodplains because that was preferable to building outside of floodplains. Now that we have less river traffic we can re-evaluate things. Still, if you want a harbor you're going to build in what amounts to a storm surge zone and do so intentionally--whether that's NYC, LA, Houston or Miami.

A lot of floodplains weren't recognized as such for different reasons. For example, Houston's flooding problem is much worse now than 80 years ago because so much more's been paved over. It's altered floodplain maps. Moreover, some of the Harvey flooding was in areas that wouldn't have flooded if not for flood detention plans and release of built-up water. Then there's the whole "we've lived here for 80 years, let's evaluate the risk of a 1000-year flood happening" problem. You just don't have the data, and even once you know the topography really well you *still* don't have crucial data unless you know what water flow and absorption rates are upstream. For which see the previous two points--paving over land and human-induced floods. As well as what the rate of intense storms that could trigger flooding is--these things show both human-induced and natural variability, and every estimate of the human-induced portion relies crucially on being sure about the limits and nature of natural variability.

People making the maps and working out insurance rates know that they're talking probabilities. In fact, most of the time (these days) to avoid confusion among those who misunderstand they refer to floodplains in terms of probability. No more "100-year floodplain," instead "area with a 1% chance of a flood happening any given year." Of course, that's a predictive statistic and comes with calculated and systemic error.

People like living on the water. Having a house on the lake/river/ocean is a status symbol in most places, flood zones be damned. Some people never learn.

(I mean, we had no idea about that at the time; we've discovered it since then.) But all of the Post-WWII expansion was in a period when hurricanes were less intense and less common than they became later.

As in everyone, you and me. The government offers tax payer subsidies for flood insurance. Private insurers won't insure in those areas because they don't want to lose money. If government had the same policy then people would not build there.

summers at Point Lookout, the beach owned by the Town of Hempstead. During the summers, our family would vacation at a lake. So, I love the beach and I love lakes.

We chose to retire on a lake and vacation at the beach (I prefer the Caribbean). We "rent" the beach so we don't have the headache of paying for insurance or dealing with hurricanes, damage, rebuilding, etc.

We cannot and will not flood where we are. Appalachian Electric Power owns the lake and moderates the lake level. All homes must be built above the 803' contour line to prevent flooding.

A few years ago, FEMA contacted us and said we needed to have flood insurance. We disputed this and won - someone made an error when they drew a new flood map and showed our house below the 803' contour. If the lake level ever got higher than 803' above sea level, water would flow through the spillway.

Lake living is wonderful - beautiful water year round!





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Mountain_Lake