Homeowners affected by Hurricane Helene face the grim task of rebuilding without flood insurance

A week after Hurricane Helene battered the southeastern US, the hardest-hit homeowners are grappling with how they might pay for flood damage from one of the deadliest storms to hit the continent in recent history.

The Category 4 storm that first hit Florida’s Gulf Coast on Sept. 26 dumped trillions of gallons of water across several states, leaving a catastrophic trail of destruction hundreds of miles inland. More than 200 people have died in what is now the deadliest hurricane to hit the continental US since Katrina, according to statistics from the National Hurricane Center.

Western North Carolina and the Asheville area were hit particularly hard, with flooding that destroyed buildings, roads, utilities and land in a way no one expected, much less prepared for. Inland areas in parts of Georgia and Tennessee were also washed out.

South Asheville’s Oak Forest neighborhood lives up to its name, with trees towering over 1960s-era ranch-style homes on large lots. But on Sept. 27, as the remnants of Helene swept across western North Carolina, many of those trees fell, sometimes landing on homes.

Julianne Johnson said she was coming up from the basement to help her 5-year-old son pick out clothes that day when her husband started screaming that a giant oak tree was falling diagonally across the yard. The tree mostly missed the house, but still crumpled part of a metal porch and damaged the roof. Then, Johnson said, her basement flooded.

On Friday, there was a blue tarp held up to the roof with a brick. On the side of the house, waiting to go to the landfill, is a wet carpet that the family has ripped out. Without cell phone service or Internet access, Johnson said she couldn’t file a home insurance claim until four days after the storm.

“It took me a while to make that call,” she said. “I don’t have an adjuster yet.”

Roof and tree damage is likely to be covered by the average home insurance policy. But Johnson, like many homeowners, doesn’t have flood insurance and isn’t sure how she’ll pay for that portion of the damage.

Those recovering from the storm may be surprised to learn that flood damage is an entirely separate thing. Insurance professionals and experts have long warned that home insurance typically does not cover flood damage, even though they argue that flooding can happen wherever it rains. That’s because flooding isn’t just seawater seeping into the ground – it’s also water from the banks, as well as mudflow and torrential rain.

But most private insurance companies do not carry flood insurance, leaving the National Flood Insurance Program, run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as the primary provider of this coverage for residential homes. Congress created the federal flood insurance program more than 50 years ago when many private insurers stopped offering policies in high-risk areas.

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North Carolina has 129,933 such policies in place, according to the latest FEMA data, though most of the protection will likely be focused on the coast rather than the Blue Ridge Mountains, where Helene caused most of the damage. damages. In comparison, Florida has about 1.7 million flood policies in effect nationwide.

Charlotte Hicks, a North Carolina flood insurance expert who has conducted flood risk training and educational activities for the state’s Department of Insurance, said the reality is that many survivors of Helene will never recover. Without flood insurance, some people may be able to rebuild with the help of charities, but most others will be left to fend for themselves.

“There are absolutely going to be people who are financially devastated by this event,” Hicks said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Some may go into foreclosure or bankruptcy. Entire neighborhoods will probably never be rebuilt. There was water damage everywhere, Hicks said, and for some, mudslides even took away the land their home once stood on.

Meanwhile, Helene is proving to be a fairly manageable disaster for the private home insurance market, as those plans generally only serve to cover wind damage from hurricanes.

That’s a relief for the industry, which has been under increasing pressure from other intensifying climate disasters such as wildfires and tornadoes. Nowhere is the shrinking private market due to climate instability more evident than in Florida, where many companies have already stopped selling policies — leaving the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, now the state’s largest home insurer.

Mark Friedlander, a spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, said Helene was a “very manageable loss event” and estimated insurer losses to range from about $5 billion to $8 billion . This is compared to insured losses from Category 4 Hurricane Ian in September 2022, which were estimated at more than $50 billion.

Friedlander and other experts point out that less than 1 percent of inland areas that experienced the most catastrophic flood damage were protected with flood insurance.

“This is very common in inner-city communities across the country,” Friedlander said. “Lack of flood insurance is a major insurance gap in the US, as only about 6 percent of homeowners have coverage, mostly in coastal counties.”

Amy Bach, executive director of the consumer advocacy group United Policyholders, said the images of North Carolina’s flood devastation shook her, despite decades of seeing a difficult recovery faced by victims of natural disasters.

“This is a pretty serious situation here in terms of people being disappointed. They’re going to be disappointed by their insurers and they’re going to be disappointed by FEMA,” Bach said. “FEMA cannot match the kind of dollars that private insurers are supposed to contribute to the recovery.”

This week, FEMA said it could meet Helene’s immediate needs, but warned it does not have enough funds to get through the hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, although most hurricanes typically occur in September and October.

Even if a homeowner has it, FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program only covers up to $250,000 for single-family homes and $100,000 for contents.

Bach said that along with homeowners educating themselves about what their policies cover and don’t cover, the solution is a national disaster insurance program that does for homeowners insurance what the Affordable Care Act did for health insurance.

After Hurricane Floyd in 1999, the state of North Carolina began requiring insurance agents to take a flood insurance class so they could properly advise their clients about the risks and available policies, Hicks said. The state also requires home insurance policies to clearly disclose that they do not cover flooding.

“You can’t stop nature from doing what nature is going to do,” Hicks said. “For us to think it will never get this bad again would be a dangerous assumption. Many people underestimate their flood risk.”

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Associated Press writers Jeff Amy in Asheville, North Carolina, Lisa Leff in London and Paul Wiseman in Washington contributed to this report.