By then, the severity of Hurricane Florence will be known. The duration of the rainfall and the trajectory that the storm eventually takes will be key to the flooding risk, according to James Belanger, a senior meteorological scientist at the Weather Company, a unit of IBM. The current trajectory “is really worst case scenario for rainfall and flooding impact of the central part of North Carolina as well as Virginia,” Belanger said in an interview.
Although there are more than 444,000 NFIP policies in force in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, the vast majority of those policies are for properties located in the Special Flood Hazard Areas on the NFIP Flood Insurance Rate Maps, with very little flood insurance being obtained in flood-prone areas outside the mapped flood plains, Samantha Medlock, head of North America capital, science and policy for Willis Towers Watson, said in an email.
This means that many families will suffer uninsured losses, since standard homeowners insurance policies do not cover flood damage, she said.
FEMA’s public affairs office did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Currently, the National Flood Insurance Program has about $10 billion in borrowing authority remaining, and Hurricane Florence isn’t likely to consume all of the funding, said R.J. Lehmann, director of finance, insurance and trade policy, for the R Street Institute, a Washington think tank.
“They are prepared to handle this storm,” Lehmann said. “But if we multiple storms -- there are others out there in the Atlantic Basin -- things could get a little more dicey.”
This article provided by Bloomberg News.