18 December 2019
Do the Farmers In Kansas Know They Are Paying the Flood Insurance Premiums on Million Dollar Beach Houses?
Posted by Dan Satterfield
They are.
Not all of the premium, but a good portion of it and not only that, they are helping to rebuild the house and in many cases have paid to rebuild it more than once when the ocean/river swamped it again. It’s called the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and as sea levels rise and hurricanes get wetter, it has gotten some much-needed attention. Still, unless you buy a home in a flood plain, you probably don’t know much about it.
The articles I linked to above show that something has to change with the NFIP, and the rising sea level and increase in extreme rain events are causing that change to become more urgent every year. These are the kind of things you see when you are undergoing a slow disaster like climate change. You can read a nice brief on the situation from the Environmental Law Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council here.
The average taxpayer who lives thousands of miles from large rivers and the ocean is paying for climate change already, and most of them have no idea they are doing so. Those with homes and businesses in a flood plain are paying for climate change and they will very likely be paying a lot more soon. When Farmer Joe finds out he is helping to rebuild million dollar beach properties (and he will), that premium may go even higher.
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.
Do New Yorkers know they pay for Kansas rural electrification and broadband? Probably not. This is what the government does so we all share responsibility for those things deemed necessary — even if only Kansans benefit. That’s why we’re a nation, not just 350 million individuals.
But, is rural power and broadband the same as private property insurance?
Most of the problem in those East Coast areas is not due to “unnatural”, much less human caused, flooding, but rather to greed and stupidity.
The sand of the barrier islands along the coast naturally gets moved southward due to wave and current action. Thus what was an island one century frequently has become an inlet and/or bay the next. It was only when rich people started building expensive, permanent structures on these migrating islands that “flooding” became a problem. E.g. In the 1920s a hurricane created land where there had previously been an inlet along the coast of Maryland. This was developed into the summer resort town of Ocean City. By the 1970s it became obvious that the ocean was moving the sand of the Ocean City beach southward. In the 1980s the politically connected property owners were getting the US taxpayers to eat the $12million yearly bill for the US Army Corp of Engineers to pump sand from off shore to replenish the beach. As the task became ever greater – due not to rising sea level, but to cumulative effect and need to go ever further off shore to get sand – the Corp of Engineers told the state they would no longer provide that service. So, the Ocean City property owners (most of whom rent out their properties for big profits) got the Maryland government to stick the Maryland taxpayers (most of whom never get near the ocean, and the westernmost of whom live in impoverished places and circumstances resembling those of their nearby West Virginian neighbors) with almost all of the bill which now sometimes runs as high as $35million or $40million a year, while the OC property owners who get the benefit kick in a paltry $1million or $2million from local taxes. Disrupting the natural migration of the barrier islands, and much more so mining huge quantities of sand off shore, deepening the water in which the currents flow and the waves form, undoubtedly causes greater erosion and flooding further south along the Atlantic coast. So its not imaginary “global warming” or the slight natural fluctuation in sea level causing the problems, its people having built in unsuitable places, and then trying to thwart the forces of nature trying to reclaim them. This is an excellent illustration of what the “global warming”, “man-made climate change” is all about; justifying taking money from poor people to subsidize the lifestyles and money making activities of rich people. But then, that is what government has always been about, and the willingness of so many people to not only accept it, but become fanatical supporters of it, is why the majority of people throughout the majority of history have lived in some form of slavery.