When Hurricane Florence reached Belhaven, North Carolina, last weekend, the flooding that followed was unlike anything Ricky Credle, the mayor of the tiny coastal town had ever experienced.
“I’ve been here 45 years,” Credle said in a phone interview. “I’ve never seen this much water.”
For federal taxpayers, however, the flooding in Belhaven was all too familiar.
Since 1978, 120 homes in the town of 1,600 people have cost federal taxpayers $13.4 million in National Flood Insurance Program payouts, according to data the Natural Resources Defense Council obtained from the Federal Emergency Management Agency; 36 received more money than their total value. Five of those homes have gotten federal flood insurance payments ten times or more, including one that received money 15 times.
The result: homes that flood keep getting rebuilt with public money, only to flood again. That leaves people living in vulnerable areas who might rather receive money to move away -- and the flood insurance program, already more than $20 billion in debt, going deeper underwater.
“We spend all this money to rebuild these homes, and we spend very little money helping people get out of these homes -- even when that’s what they want,” said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Efforts to help move people move somewhere safer are seen as a last option, instead of a first option.”
Encouraging people to keep rebuilding in vulnerable places reflects the design of the flood insurance program. Not only does it subsidize people’s premiums, it imposes no limit on the number of times a homeowner can make a claim. At the same time, federal programs designed to pay people to move out of flood-damaged homes often take years to result in offers, by which time many people have repaired their homes and moved back in.
There are more than 1,100 so-called severe repetitive loss properties across North Carolina, the NRDC data shows. The federal government has paid out $163.9 million in flood insurance for those homes, which is almost 60 percent of their combined total value. More than 400 have gotten more in federal insurance claims than the home is worth.
One home, in Nags Head, received flood insurance payments 28 times before it was torn down.
Severe repetitive loss properties account for just two percent of all flood insurance policies, but as much as one-third of all claims, according to R.J. Lehmann, director of insurance policy for the R Street Institute, a Washington think tank.