Christopher Flavelle

Since 1989, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has bought and demolished more than 43,000 homes in flood-prone areas, a strategy meant to make communities less vulnerable to disasters. But which homes get selected for the buyouts depends as much on the wealth of the affected neighborhoods as on the actual level of danger that those areas are exposed to, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

The findings raise concerns that limited federal funding for adapting to climate change isn’t helping the areas that need it the most, according to the paper’s authors.

“Who benefits?” asked Katharine Mach, a professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the paper’s lead author. “There is a real potential for our responses in a changing climate to make the fat cats fatter, so to speak.”

The paper is the latest evidence that even as the effects of global warming worsen, the United States is increasing its exposure to the dangers that arise from climate change.

In many coastal states, flood-prone areas continue to see the highest rates of home construction. At the same time, the number of Americans with flood insurance has dropped significantly from its peak a decade ago. Economists warn that climate change could pose an even more severe risk to the housing market, and to the economy as a whole, than the recession of 2008.

Federal buyout programs play an important part of the country’s defenses against climate change, by giving homeowners in vulnerable places a way to relocate after a storm. That approach, sometimes called managed retreat, calls for pulling back from dangerous areas rather than continually rebuilding after each disaster, or pouring money into physical defenses such as sea walls and pumps.

But homeowners can’t apply for buyouts directly from the federal government. Instead, they rely on their local officials participating in those programs and deciding which homeowners can participate.

The paper found that while most buyouts take place in areas with high flood risk, that wasn’t the only factor at play. Many areas with equally high risk didn’t receive funding or received far less.

The data show that buyouts were disproportionately concentrated in wealthy and densely populated counties. The reason, according to the report’s authors, is that local officials must request federal funds for buyouts — and then successfully navigate a series of bureaucratic requirements — and wealthier jurisdictions are more likely to have the staff and expertise necessary to do that.

“Buyouts require resources and capacity to administer,” said Caroline Kraan, another of the study’s authors. “Not all governments may be equally able to access the program.”

In addition, once local officials receive the federal funds, buyouts aren’t evenly distributed within those counties nor are they distributed according to risk levels alone. Instead, counties tend to use the money to buy and tear down homes in poorer neighborhoods, the authors found.

There are different possible explanations for that, according to A.R. Siders, a professor at the University of Delaware and one of the paper’s authors.

Officials might feel that the poorer neighborhoods are genuinely the most vulnerable, Siders said. Those officials might also conclude that a given amount of federal dollars can go further purchasing a greater number of low-value homes, rather than buying just a handful of more expensive beachfront properties for the same amount.

Another explanation, she said, could be that local officials “are using the buyouts as an opportunity to get rid of neighborhoods that they don't feel are desirable parts of their community,” Siders said.

The research, however, wasn’t designed to examine which of those motivations was most prevalent. “All of these things are probably occurring,” she added.

David Maurstad, FEMA’s deputy associate administrator for insurance and mitigation, said the agency’s grant programs “are not designed to discriminate or address economic inequalities.”

“FEMA does not choose which properties participate in buyouts,” Maurstad said in a statement. “FEMA’s grant programs are designed to capitalize on the in-depth knowledge that each county floodplain manager and local official has regarding the needs of their communities.”

The new research is not the first to raise questions about the fairness or efficiency of FEMA’s buyout programs. Last month, the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental research and advocacy group, published a paper showing that it takes an average of more than five years between the time a flood strikes and when FEMA completes a buyout project.

As a result, many people give up waiting for the money and rebuild instead.

The reason buyouts take so long is that they require coordinated action by federal, state and local officials, as well as homeowners, according to Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at NRDC and one of the authors of last month’s paper. A delay at any one of those stages compounds the wait.

“You could design a more cumbersome, complex process for buyouts,” Moore said. “But you’d have to think really hard.”

Still, the data also offers reason for optimism, according to Siders. “No matter how difficult managed retreat sounds,” she said, “we know that there are a thousand communities in the United States, all over the country, who have made it work.”

This article originally appeared in

Rich Counties Get More Help to Escape Climate Risk, New Data Show

WASHINGTON — Federal programs to help Americans move away from disaster-prone areas are skewed by the income levels of communities seeking help — rather than being based solely on the risk they face — new data shows, blunting an important tool for helping people cope with climate change.

It even poached a well-regarded urban planner from Los Angeles to help guide a city once famously averse to planning.

Then, two weeks ago, Tropical Storm Imelda hit, flooding at least 1,700 homes in Houston and surrounding Harris County. The scope of the damage raises hard questions: Were the efforts able to make a difference and can cities act quickly enough for what’s coming?

The misfortune of the Houston area, combined with its relative wealth and experience with disasters, has made it a test case for climate resilience. The result could be a model for other places threatened by climate change — or a lesson in the limits of cities’ ability to adapt.

“It’s a race against time,” said Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris County, who talks about the pace of construction projects not in years, but in hurricane seasons. “We’re being battered.”

Imelda hit parts of the county with two and a half feet of rain, killed five people and caused an estimated $8 billion in damage across the region, according to AccuWeather. The storm, which struck two years and two weeks after Harvey, means Harris County has now suffered one 500-year rainfall event and two 100-year events since 2016.

“Things are moving forward,” said Stephen Costello, Houston’s chief recovery officer. “We just obviously didn’t anticipate that you would have something pretty close to a Harvey two years later.”

Houston’s challenge reflects the dilemma facing cities everywhere: As the climate changes, disasters aren’t just becoming more severe, but also more frequent. So even as the amount of damage increases, governments and residents have less time to repair before the next storm hits. And structural changes that might reduce cities’ exposure require years or decades to complete.

“Implementation is going to take way longer than a single hurricane season,” said Shalini Vajjhala, whose company Re:Focus works with local governments to address the physical risks of global warming. “The rains come every year.”

Some of the changes after Harvey happened quickly enough to make a difference this time. Harris County increased by 160% its fleet of high-water rescue vehicles, making it easier to reach people trapped by flooding. That helped keep the number of deaths from Imelda down, Hidalgo said.

But most of the steps weren’t far enough along to matter, according to interviews with current and former city and county officials.

One example: Shortly after Harvey, the county and city each increased the so-called freeboard requirement for homes, which dictates how high a building’s ground floor must be above the height of an expected 100-year flood. But those rules affect only new or rebuilt homes, and so will take decades to ripple through to most houses.

And large-scale infrastructure projects, such as deepening drainage canals or building pits to store rainwater, often take years to complete. In August 2018, Harris County voters approved a $2.5 billion bond to fund such projects. But most are still in the design phase. Then environmental permits must be obtained, as well as the acquisition of property rights. Only then can construction begin.

“You run into environmental permitting timelines that we can’t speed up,” Hidalgo said. “Even though we have 254 projects or so slated, you can’t do them all at the same time.”

The rush of disasters has strained the Harris County Flood Control District, which had finished repairing just one-quarter of the flood infrastructure damaged by Harvey when Imelda hit. And now it has to manage a tenfold increase in spending.

“We will grow from $60 million a year to $60 million a month,” said Matthew Zeve, the flood control office’s deputy executive director. His staff, he said, “just look tired. They look stressed out. It’s not sustainable.”

It’s not just construction projects that move slowly. Officials have sought to buy the homes of some people flooded after Harvey, with the intention of tearing those homes down so they can’t flood again. But the average buyout funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency nationwide takes more than five years, according to data compiled by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In the meantime, many homeowners give up and instead repair or rebuild in place — setting themselves up for future pain when the next storm strikes.

“About 40% of the people that were interested have decided to repair their homes and stay put,” said Costello, Houston’s head of recovery, who is responsible for coordinating post-Harvey recovery efforts and whose job description includes making the city “less vulnerable to the next record-breaking storm.”

Hidalgo, the Harris County executive, said she remains hopeful about the area’s ability to adapt. “We’re not powerless against this,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of smart, dedicated people.”

Still, others noted that even with unlimited funds and political support, there’s only so much anyone can do. “When you get 36 inches of rain right on top of your house,” said Robert Eckels, the county’s top elected official until 2007, “you’re probably going to flood.”

In Houston, a Rash of Storms Test the Limits of Coping With Climate Change

After Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, Houston jumped to the front of the pack in adapting to the threat of climate change. It passed tougher building codes, offered more buyouts for flood-prone homes and budgeted billions of dollars in new funding for flood control.

One of the arriving employees was Neil Jacobs, the head of the agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We’re under investigation,” a weary-looking Jacobs said, a large messenger bag slung over his shoulder. “I can’t talk.”

The investigations are examining an attack on the independence of an agency that, despite its enormous importance to the U.S. economy, typically flies well below the radar. That changed in recent weeks when meteorologists working for NOAA corrected Trump on Twitter after he inaccurately described Hurricane Dorian’s path. The president then ordered the agency to support his version of events, triggering a political clash.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is hardly a household name, yet it plays a significant role in modern life.

One of its main jobs is weather forecasting, producing the data that farmers trust to plant their crops, airlines rely on to design their routes and millions of Americans check obsessively on their smartphones. The agency also studies the world’s oceans, regulates fisheries and operates sophisticated satellites that, among other things, detect threats in space to help protect astronauts.

It “touches every American life every single day, in a constructive fashion that’s generally appreciated,” said Kathryn Sullivan, who was nominated to senior scientific roles by Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and went on to run NOAA under President Barack Obama.

NOAA’s scientific research is also central to the United States’ ability to understand climate change — a role that requires the agency to conduct independent research but puts it at cross purposes with a White House that has repeatedly expressed skepticism of the established science of global warming.

Considering that, it is notable that the clash between Trump and the agency wasn’t about climate science — which Trump in the past has described as a hoax — but over a statement by meteorologists reassuring people in Alabama that (contrary to the president’s assertions) they were safe from Hurricane Dorian.

The White House referred a request for comment to the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency and whose secretary, Wilbur Ross, threatened to fire NOAA employees amid the clash. In a statement, Kevin Manning, a spokesman for the department, said that “Secretary Ross did not threaten to fire any NOAA staff over forecasting and public statements about Hurricane Dorian.”

NOAA’s independence is partly structural, according to current and former staff members. With the exception of the fisheries section, none of its divisions is primarily focused on regulation. So — unlike the case of, say, the Environmental Protection Agency or other government regulatory bodies — there are few industries with a financial stake in weakening the agency or limiting its authority.

The agency has continued to produce a steady stream of climate-related science. It puts out an annual Global Climate Report and told the public just a few weeks ago that this July was the hottest on record.

That stands in contrast to the actions of some other federal agencies.

The Environmental Protection Agency two years ago deleted the climate page from its website “to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump.” At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the head of the Climate and Health Program recently filed a whistleblower complaint alleging retaliation for speaking out on climate change.

NOAA’s ability to continue pursuing and disseminating climate science stems partly from its relative anonymity, even within the federal government. “NOAA is a very small agency,” said Paul Sandifer, the agency’s chief science adviser from 2011 to 2014. With fewer staff members and a slimmer budget than other scientific agencies, he said, it has generally managed to evade scrutiny from the White House.

The agency is actually an amalgam of six separate pieces. The National Weather Service, whose Birmingham office was the target of Trump’s ire, is responsible for forecasting. The Marine Fisheries Service manages the waters off the country’s coasts, and a separate office, the National Ocean Service, produces coastal and oceanic science.

The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research provides “science to better manage the environment,” according to NOAA, and Marine &amp; Aviation Operations runs the ships and planes that gather data. The agency’s satellite service “acquires and manages the Nation’s operational environmental satellites.”

Many industries rely on the climate information produced by NOAA, according to Eileen Shea, who was chief of the agency’s climate services division from 2007 to 2012. They include insurers, agricultural producers and anyone deciding where to invest money in building a new facility.

“There are corporations and lobbying groups with a very big interest in continuing to see climate data be available,” Shea said.

Culture within the agency matters, too. NOAA’s scientists, and the career staff members who oversee them, have a reputation for guarding the agency’s independence. Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists asked more than 63,000 scientists at 16 federal agencies to gauge their perceived independence. Of the scientists at NOAA who responded, two-thirds agreed with the statement that the agency “adheres to its scientific integrity policy.” (For comparison, one-third of EPA scientists felt the same way.)

Friday afternoon, Jacobs sent an all-staff email to try to buck up the troops. “Scientific integrity is at the heart of NOAA’s mission and culture, and is essential for maintaining the public’s trust,” he wrote. “Our work saves lives.”

The agency’s sense of independence partly reflects the fact that, unlike employees of other federal agencies, the agency’s employees tend to live in the places they serve and see themselves as the defenders of those places. “You actually want to tell me to not give my neighbors the best information I have when a storm is bearing down on them?” said Sullivan, describing the typical view of those scientists.

But it also reflects the incentives facing the agency’s staff. Researchers there often have close relationships with universities, collaborating with academics on peer-reviewed papers that can advance their careers, according to Rick Spinrad, who was NOAA’s chief scientist from 2014 to 2017.

The perception that agency scientists are subject to political interference could cause outside academics to stop working with them, he said. “Anything that they view as threatening that relationship is going to induce a pretty visceral reaction.”

Past administrations have at times tested NOAA’s independence, said Terry Garcia, who was the agency’s general counsel under President Bill Clinton. He recounted other agencies pushing NOAA scientists to interpret the Endangered Species Act — which gives NOAA responsibility for protecting salmon and other animals — in a way that would help private landowners. The agency resisted that pressure, he said.

The Dorian episode isn’t NOAA’s first test under the Trump administration.

In 2017, the president nominated Barry Myers, then the chief executive officer of AccuWeather, to run the agency. Myers had previously called to privatize the weather service, a stance that generated opposition both inside and outside NOAA. His nomination has since stalled.

Craig McLean, NOAA’s acting chief scientist, who has filed a complaint with the agency alleging it violated its scientific-integrity policy, said he believes the current problems will dissipate. “We’ve had spurious attacks over time,” McLean said. “We’ve gotten past them.”

Meanwhile on Friday afternoon, the National Hurricane Center, an office of NOAA, was watching a storm of a different kind — so far known simply as “Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine” — move northwest off the coast of the Bahamas in order to start determining when and where it might strike the United States.

Trump's Dorian Tweet Whips Up a Fight Over a Science Powerhouse

SILVER SPRING, Md. — On Friday morning in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., government scientists in khakis and sensible shoes bustled to work — beneath a towering bronze sculpture of a hand releasing seabirds — heading for a small scientific agency caught up in a political mess triggered by President Donald Trump’s tweet about Hurricane Dorian.

As of June 30, the government had spent less than one-third of the $107 billion provided by Congress following the hurricanes and wildfires of 2017 and 2018, federal data show. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which received $37 billion — more than any other agency — had spent less than $75 million.

That money is meant to help cities and states rebuild after a disaster. It is often used to fix roads, drainage systems and other infrastructure, or to repair or elevate houses in low-lying, vulnerable areas.

The funds are being held up partly by laws designed in an earlier age of fewer and less severe disasters. In addition, states and cities already reeling from earlier floods or fires often struggle to meet the federal bureaucratic requirements. As climate change amplifies the disaster risk, the logjam threatens to worsen, with increasingly dire consequences.

“If we had all the money, and everything was flowing, we would be safer,” said Laura Hogshead, chief operating officer for the Office of Recovery and Resiliency in North Carolina, a state now being menaced by Hurricane Dorian. This year, the state created a new office to try to speed up those funds — a model that Dorian could test.

“There’s a lot of suffering while you wait,” she said.

The bulk of the money comes from just two federal offices: the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps communities recover from disasters by funding everything from clearing debris to rebuilding hospitals, and HUD, which helps repair homes, infrastructure and businesses.

The sluggish spending joins a long list of headaches for federal officials trying to protect Americans against climate change. Among them: The shrinking number of people with flood insurance compared with a decade ago; the growing number of homes being built in floodplains; the refusal of many states to impose mandatory, up-to-date building codes; and the emphasis on rebuilding in the same place, rather than somewhere safer.

What sets this problem apart is that it is largely of the government’s own making.

“There are opportunities to make the recovery process faster at every level,” said Marion McFadden, who ran the disaster recovery grants at HUD during the Obama administration. “We’ve got to fix this.”

A FEMA spokeswoman, Abigail Dennis, said that during the past few years the agency has improved its Public Assistance program, which pays for rebuilding infrastructure and other needs, by simplifying the application process and retraining the staff who review applications.

Some delays are unavoidable, disaster experts warn, such as those associated with sprawling infrastructure projects — like building sea walls or deepening ports — requiring complex environmental reviews. But many other delays stem from a bureaucratic process for delivering federal money, coupled with state and local agencies that often lack the staff or expertise to spend it, observers say.

As a result, persuading Congress to provide money for recovery is just the beginning of the struggle for places hit by disasters.

“We build very complex systems in Washington,” said Craig Fugate, who ran FEMA under President Barack Obama. “Then you apply it to a disaster, and it gums up the system.”

At the same time, the growing frequency of natural disasters, amplified by climate change, increases the urgency of rebuilding.

Part of the problem reflects the fundamental tension between speed and oversight, Fugate said. As disaster funding has increased, so has scrutiny from lawmakers wary of fraud and abuse. So FEMA and other agencies have responded by adding more safeguards and layers of review, which slows the process further.

States, too, have increased oversight, fearful of being ordered to pay the federal government back for money that might run afoul of the rules. For example, Florida audits every funding request its local governments submit to FEMA, Fugate said — a level of diligence he said slows recovery.

“Congress wants it both ways: They want it fast, but they also want full accountability,” Fugate said. “It is slowing down the process to a painful crawl.”

FEMA has yet to spend about $8 billion of the $34 billion allocated to it by Congress following the disasters of 2017 and 2018.

The spending rate has been far slower at the Department of Housing and Urban Development: It has paid out less than 1% of its disaster funding from the past two years.

The department, which oversees the nation’s public housing, became involved in disaster recovery more by convenience than design, according to McFadden. After Hurricane Andrew struck Florida in 1992, Congress needed a vehicle for delivering large sums of money to cities and states, so it chose the department’s Community Development Block Grant program.

But the disaster-recovery function was never set up to be permanent. So Congress requires the department to essentially design a new program from scratch each time it receives disaster money, according to McFadden. That means writing new rules for how states and cities can spend that money.

“There is this period of a year or more where the money is just sitting essentially at HUD,” said McFadden, who is now senior vice president for public policy at Enterprise Community Partners, a Washington nonprofit organization. “That period is just lost.”

That problem has caught the attention of both political parties. In July, the House Financial Services Committee voted unanimously in support of a bill that would make the department’s disaster recovery program permanent, helping it get those funds to states and cities more quickly. A companion bill was introduced in the Senate the same month.

This year, Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, acknowledged that the program could be streamlined. “Some of the basic things that have to be done in order to get the grant money out is absolutely the same thing over and over again,” Carson told the House Financial Services Committee in May.

Reforming the federal government’s approach will solve only part of the delay in rebuilding, disaster experts warn.

Even when the housing department has set the rules for each batch of disaster funding, states must submit detailed plans for how they will use that money, and then help cities and counties spend it properly. That work often falls to staff who don’t have the time or expertise required, according to Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Moore offered an example. “Your office is normally handling $2 million a year. You’ve got five people to do that,” he said. But then, “A disaster hits. Suddenly you’ve got $100 million to spend. You’ve got the same five people on your staff. And you’ve still got to do your normal job.”

That tension is now playing out in North Carolina.

The state had not gotten disaster recovery grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development since 2003. Then it was hit by two hurricanes in quick succession: Matthew, in 2016, and then Florence in 2018.

With those disasters came a rush of federal funds. In August of 2017, almost a year after Matthew, the housing department awarded North Carolina $237 million in recovery grants. The state has drawn down less than $20 million of that money. (A spokeswoman for North Carolina, Bridget Munger, said the state has committed $98 million of that money to specific projects, adding that the $20 million figure “does not reflect the hundreds of projects that are in the planning stage or well underway.”)

“Things were not going very quickly,” said Hogshead, at the state recovery office. “And then Florence hit.”

So, this January, North Carolina created the Office of Recovery and Resiliency for that purpose, with money for 45 staff, and hired Hogshead, a former senior official at HUD, to help run it. “Standing up this office is recognition that it just wasn’t going very well,” she said. “The state did not have an expertise in spending this money.”

Keeping pace with the rising tempo of disasters will require more states to build that type of expertise, according to Josh Sawislak, who was a senior adviser for infrastructure resilience to the secretary of housing and urban development.

But it will require many other changes as well, Sawislak said: Not just reforming the housing department’s grant programs, but also integrating the sprawling set of federal programs that fund disaster recovery, and making communities less vulnerable to disasters in the first place by changing where and how we build.

“We have to start preparing for these things,” Sawislak said. “Dorian is the new normal.”

Glacial Pace for Government Aid in an Age of Fast-Developing Disasters

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is sitting on tens of billions of dollars in unspent recovery money meant to help Americans recover from disasters, leaving people less able to rebound from the effects of Hurricane Dorian and other storms.

Officials in California, Washington, Montana and Colorado are getting more complaints from people whose insurance companies have refused to renew their coverage. The complaints follow years of record-setting wildfires in both size and cost, a trend that scientists expect to continue as global warming accelerates.

“I think that we are not far away from a lot of weather-related events being too expensive for most people to purchase comprehensive coverage,” said Carolyn Kousky, executive director of the Wharton Risk Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “What happens then is the big question.”

On Tuesday, California’s Department of Insurance issued a report quantifying that pullback. For the ZIP codes most affected by the wildfires in 2015 and 2017, the number of homeowners dropped by their insurance companies jumped 10% between 2017 and 2018.

In the 10 California counties with the most homes in high-risk areas, the number of homeowners’ policies written by major insurers, whose rate increases must be approved by state regulators, fell by 5% between 2015 and 2018, the department said.

Another way of measuring the growing reluctance of insurers is the increase in demand for the state’s FAIR plan, which is effectively prohibited from turning away customers but typically charges higher premiums as a result. In those same 10 highest-risk counties, the number of homeowners getting coverage through that plan increased 177% while staying flat statewide.

“By not being able to find insurance, you then in turn can’t sell your home. If you can’t sell your home, then it affects the local property taxes,” said Ricardo Lara, California’s insurance commissioner. “This is really creating chaos.”

The trade group representing insurers said the fires of the past two years had compelled companies to reduce their exposure. Whether that pullback is temporary or permanent depends on what the state does next, according to Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California.

Frazier said the state should allow insurers to raise rates to better reflect the full cost of wildfire risk. He also called for more aggressive forest management, such as controlled burns to remove trees, brush and other fuel for wildfires, as well as requiring homeowners to keep more space between their houses and the vegetation around them.

The alternative — continuing to build homes in dangerous areas, combined with worsening fire conditions and premiums that do not reflect the true risk of wildfires — is “not the recipe for a healthy market,” Frazier said.

Versions of that trend are playing out across the West. In Washington state, officials have been receiving more complaints from people in wildfire-prone areas about insurance companies, according to Mike Kreidler, the state’s insurance commissioner.

“Some companies are starting to reevaluate their position in certain geographic areas, largely driven by eastern Washington right now, or at least we think so,” Kreidler said.

In response to that concern, his office sent a request to insurers in July, asking for information about whether and how those companies have reduced their coverage in fire-prone areas. He gave companies until early September to report back.

“Are they continuing to insure at the same levels?” Kreidler asked. “Are they backing off on the number of policies they’ll write?”

In Montana, insurers have changed the way they evaluate wildfire risk, according to Bob Biskupiak, the state’s deputy insurance commissioner.

Decisions that were once made based largely on how quickly a fire department could reach the property now involve third-party analytics companies, Biskupiak said. Those companies examine everything from the surrounding timber and grass conditions, the slope of the ground, where the prevailing winds come from and the conditions on nearby land.

“It’s not necessarily the property that’s being evaluated,” Biskupiak said. “It’s about where the fire could potentially start.”

Insurers have used that information to be more discriminating about what they choose to cover. “Company A, B or C has insured me for 10 years — I’ve never had a loss,” Biskupiak said, recounting the type of complaint he’s heard. “And then all of a sudden this year they’re nonrenewing me.”

This month his office issued a public notice warning companies against refusing coverage just because of a wildfire elsewhere in the same ZIP code or county.

“The state auditor’s office has recently received several phone calls and heard from local officials in Lewis and Clark County that some insurance companies are denying coverage for homes, cars, and boats due to the North Hills wildfire, even though the properties weren’t located anywhere near that fire,” the department wrote.

Colorado has also seen an uptick in complaints, according to Peg Brown, the state’s deputy insurance commissioner. She said her office was considering instructing insurers to provide more data on how many people are being dropped so it can measure the change.

“It’s a significant issue,” Brown said. “We’re trying to get a little bit ahead of it.”

The question is whether insurers will move back into those areas if their financial reserves recover and the memory of damage fades, as has sometimes happened after previous large-scale disasters, according to Kousky of the Wharton Risk Center.

She said there’s reason to believe this time is different.

“These perils are changing,” Kousky said. And if the pullback by insurers proves lasting, it would require a greater role for governments in financing reconstruction after disasters, while compelling a shift in where and how we build homes. “There’s not one solution that would nicely solve this,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/climate/fire-insurance-renewal.html" id="40bbf825-530b-3fd4-acfd-4a9c436901b2">The New York Times</a>.

As Wildfires Get Worse, Insurers Pull Back From Riskiest Areas

WASHINGTON — Insurers are quietly reducing their exposure to fire-prone regions across the Western United States, putting new pressure on homeowners and raising concerns that climate change could eventually make insurance unaffordable in some areas.

The study, by Climate Central, a New Jersey research group, looked at the 10-year flood risk zone — the area with a 10% chance of flooding in any given year — and estimated the zone’s size in 2050. Then the group counted up homes built there since 2010, using data from Zillow, a real estate company.

For eight states, including Connecticut, Rhode Island, Mississippi and South Carolina, the percentage increase in homes built in the flood zone exceeded the rate of increase in the rest of the state.

There are many reasons construction persists despite the danger. In some cases it is urban sprawl, in others it is a desire among government officials for property-tax revenue. But whatever the reason, this kind of building activity will “come back and bite,” said Benjamin Strauss, president and chief scientist of Climate Central, which produces and publishes research on the effects of global warming.

The researchers’ objective was to examine “the riskiest of the risky places” — those that “actually would predictably flood multiple times in the course of one mortgage,” Strauss said. “Even in a time of growing climate change awareness, lots of towns are building fastest in the riskiest places.”

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that rising temperatures will increase the frequency and severity of coastal flooding caused by hurricanes, storm surges, heavy rain and tidal floods. At the same time there is the long-term threat of rising seas pushing the high-tide line inexorably inland.

“America’s trillion-dollar coastal property market and public infrastructure are threatened,” said a report last fall from 13 federal agencies. “Many individuals and communities will suffer financial impacts as chronic high tide flooding leads to higher costs and lower property values.”

The data used for the study is limited in that it relies on what counties classify as new construction. For example, in some cases a county may identify as newly built an existing home that has in fact only been elevated, according to Peter Girard, a spokesman for Climate Central. But that is likely to account for a small share of homes in the report, he said.

Building in the very areas that will predictably flood creates two problems, according to Larry Larson, senior policy adviser with the Association of State Floodplain Managers. The first is financial: As flooding eventually exceeds what the houses were built to withstand, homeowners will face rising insurance costs.

“Their flood-insurance premiums are going to skyrocket,” Larson said. “It’s not going to be pretty.”

The second problem is safety, both for residents and emergency workers. “If that water rises, they’re going to have to send rescuers in there to get them out,” Larson said.

Beyond the seemingly universal appeal of waterfront living, the continued coastal construction reflects a variety of local factors, according to state and city officials, as well as homebuilders.

In Connecticut, where the number of homes built in high-risk areas increased at more than three times the rate elsewhere in the state, out-of-state buyers are buying older homes then tearing them down and building new structures in their place, according to Diane Ifkovic, the state’s coordinator for the National Flood Insurance Program.

When the state has instead tried to acquire some of those flood-prone homes itself, with the purpose of reverting the land to open space, local officials have resisted, she added, fearful of losing the property tax revenue. “We tried this after Sandy,” Ifkovic said. “There is a lack of political will.”

In Mississippi, where homes went up in high-risk areas at more than twice the rate as in the rest of the state, the construction reflects the passage of time after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, according to David Saulters, president of the Home Builders Association of Mississippi.

“In 2006, 2007, you can’t get anyone to build there. The pain is too strong,” Saulters said of the state’s coast. The housing crash and economic downturn that started in 2008 further slowed that recovery, he said, decreasing demand for homes.

But since then, the economy has recovered. Over the same period, people’s memories of Katrina have ebbed, replaced by the enduring appeal of being by the water.

“Living in that coastal environment, and that lifestyle, outweigh the possibility of that major storm,” Saulters said. “That pain begins to fade.”

In Galveston, Texas, which has the third-highest number of homes built in the high-risk zone of anywhere in the country since 2010, the explanation is a little different, according to local officials. Yes, people like living by the water. But in this part of the country, they are also responding to urban sprawl.

“The whole of the Houston metro area has, and continues to be, growing,” said Tim Tietjens, executive director of development services for Galveston, which is 50 miles from the center of Houston.

So in Galveston, unlike in the Northeast, builders are erecting houses on lots in the island’s West End where they’ve never existed before. Those houses are becoming second homes to people in Houston and other parts of the state.

Tietjens said the city is already experiencing the effects of climate change. “We’re starting to see more and more inundation during sunny days, and high tide events in low spots around the island,” he said.

But he said the city has been able to deal with the encroaching water, through the installation of pumps and other infrastructure upgrades.

“You can build around it, at least for the circumstances of today,” Tietjens said. “It’s really not affected the vitality of things here on the island at all.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/climate/climate-change-new-homes-flooding.html" id="4cfe0785-fc23-3331-a080-5002527e9668">The New York Times</a>.

Homes Are Being Built the Fastest in Many Flood-Prone Areas, Study Finds

In many coastal states, flood-prone areas have seen the highest rates of home construction since 2010, a study found, suggesting that the risks of climate change have yet to fundamentally change people’s behavior.

Less than one-quarter of FEMA’s trained disaster workforce of 13,654 people is available to be deployed to Barry or any other emergency, agency documents show, with the rest either already deployed elsewhere or otherwise unavailable. That’s down from 34% of staff who were available at this point in 2018, and 55% two years ago.

“I’m worried,” said Elizabeth A. Zimmerman, who ran FEMA’s disaster operations during the Obama administration. “That’s of concern, to make sure that there are enough people to respond.”

It’s a particular concern given that the high season for hurricanes and forest fires is only getting started.

In testimony last month before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Peter Gaynor, FEMA’s acting administrator, estimated the agency remains short by more than 2,000 people. “It has been a struggle for FEMA to make sure that we have enough disaster responders in reserve,” Gaynor said.

FEMA’s strained staffing levels are all the more notable after federal watchdogs rebuked the agency for not having enough people to respond to the disasters of 2017. “FEMA’s available workforce was overwhelmed,” the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concluded after that year’s storms.

The staff shortages that year forced the agency to move people into jobs they were ill-suited for, the office found, delaying the time it took to get assistance to survivors. At one point in 2017, more than half of FEMA staff were serving in roles that the agency itself had not designated them qualified to perform.

Chris Currie, who leads the accountability office’s work on emergency management, said he is worried about what would happen if FEMA were again faced with a sequence of events similar to 2017, or even a single major catastrophe. “They’re already stretched,” he said.

The increase in disasters has outpaced the agency’s efforts to bring on more people.

In a statement, FEMA spokeswoman Abigail Dennis said the agency has increased its ranks of disaster responders by more than one-quarter since Hurricane Harvey in 2017. She added that FEMA can draw on staff from other federal agencies, as well as military personnel.

“Our goal is to always ensure staff are fully trained and prepared to deploy to the right place at the right time whenever a disaster may strike,” Dennis said.

The effects of a staffing shortage for one storm could ripple across the country. If the agency doesn’t have enough people available to respond to a new disaster, it will typically take personnel away from recovery efforts elsewhere in the country, according to Zimmerman, who is now a senior executive adviser at IEM, a private emergency-management firm.

FEMA’s staffing challenges are the result of several factors. First among them is the accelerating frequency and scale of disasters: When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in 2017, FEMA was managing 32 open major disaster declarations. Today that number is 65. And those disasters are larger than before, requiring more FEMA staff and for longer periods of time.

FEMA still has about 2,400 employees working on the recovery from Hurricane Maria, the agency said. Another 650 people are still working on the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, and 1,150 on this spring’s Midwest floods. (The agency said those numbers include local hires, contractors, and personnel from other federal agencies.)

In addition to straining FEMA’s existing workforce, the growth in disasters has made it harder to find new people. State and local governments, as well as volunteer and charity groups, have all been forced to seek additional emergency management staff, Zimmerman said, creating a labor shortage.

“Trying to find people to come do these jobs is difficult,” she said. “It takes a special kind of person.”

But the problem is also of the federal government’s own making, according to Steve Reaves, president of the American Federation of Government Employees’ Local 4060, which represents FEMA employees. Reaves pointed out that the government shutdown earlier this year further delayed the agency’s efforts to hire and train new staff.

“It’s insane,” he said. “Hurricanes, they don’t care if we’re short or not.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/climate/barry-storm-fema-staff.html" id="7086469b-9365-30da-a758-d44c72765baf">The New York Times</a>.

Data shows FEMA's staff is stretched perilously thin

WASHINGTON — Three years of crushing natural disasters have left the Federal Emergency Management Agency with even fewer staff available than usual, potentially straining the agency’s ability to help victims of Tropical Storm Barry.

<h1>WASHINGTON — As disaster costs keep rising nationwide, a troubling new debate has become urgent: If there’s not enough money to protect every coastal community from the effects of human-caused global warming, how should we decide which ones to save first?</h1>

After three years of brutal flooding and hurricanes in the United States, there is growing consensus among policymakers and scientists that coastal areas will require significant spending to ride out future storms and rising sea levels — not in decades but now and in the very near future. There is also a growing realization that some communities, even sizable ones, will be left behind.

New research offers one way to look at the enormity of the cost as policymakers consider how to choose winners and losers in the race to adapt to climate change. By 2040, simply providing basic storm-surge protection in the form of sea walls for all coastal cities with more than 25,000 residents will require at least $42 billion, according to new estimates from the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy group. Expanding the list to include communities smaller than 25,000 people would increase that cost to more than $400 billion.

“Once you get into it, you realize we’re just not going to protect a lot of these places,” said Richard Wiles, the center’s executive director. “This is the next wave of climate denial — denying the costs that we’re all facing.”

The research is limited in that it considers only sea walls, and not other methods for minimizing flood risk that may be more practical in some places, such as moving homes and shops away from the most flood-prone areas. The figures also don’t include the additional and costlier steps that will be required even with sea walls, such as revamping sewers, stormwater and drinking water infrastructure.

Still, the data provides a powerful financial measuring stick for the tough decisions that countless communities — large and small — are starting to confront.

In March, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a $10 billion project to protect a slice of lower Manhattan from flooding, asking the federal government to pay for it. In April, the Army Corps of Engineers said the levee system around New Orleans, upgraded after Hurricane Katrina at a cost of $14 billion, is sinking and could become inadequate in as little as four years. In May, officials in Charleston, South Carolina, held a public meeting on where to find the estimated $2 billion the city needs to prepare its drainage and water infrastructure for climate change.

The cities that are quick to adapt to climate risks “are going to attract the jobs and the factories of the future,” said Eric Smith, president and chief executive officer for the Americas at Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies. “There’s going to be communities that I think will be left way, way behind.”

The new research identifies 241 cities of 25,000 people or more that will require at least $10 million worth of sea walls by 2040 just to protect against a typical annual storm.

Many cities, especially small ones, will not be able to meet the costs facing them.

Those that can’t will depend on federal funding; the Trump administration is expected to soon unveil the details of two new large spending programs to fund disaster mitigation. The design of those programs could help determine which places are best able to withstand the force of climate change.

The administration is working on rules governing $16 billion in grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help cities and states protect themselves against the effects of future natural disasters, the largest such award ever made by the department. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is also preparing rules for grants to pay for climate-resilient infrastructure.

A FEMA spokeswoman, Abigail Dennis, said the agency is asking governments, businesses, academics and “vulnerable and at-risk populations” to provide input on the design of its new grant program, called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities.

“The increasing frequency, impact and cost of disasters demands that we invest in mitigation and reduce disaster suffering,” Dennis said by email. The program “will support measures to reduce the vulnerability of communities and public infrastructure before a disaster strikes.”

New research offers one way to look at the enormity of the cost as policymakers consider how to choose winners and losers in the race to adapt to climate change.