A week after Hurricane Helene deluged the southeastern U.S., homeowners hardest hit are struggling with how to pay for flood damage from one of the deadliest storms to hit the continent in recent memory.
The Category 4 storm that first hit Florida’s Gulf Coast on September 26 dumped trillions of gallons of water across several states, leaving a catastrophic trail of destruction stretching hundreds of miles inland. More than 200 people were killed in what is now the deadliest hurricane to hit the US mainland since Katrina, according to statistics from the National Hurricane Center.
Western North Carolina and the Asheville area were especially hard hit, with flooding sweeping away buildings, roads, utilities, and land in a way no one expected, let alone prepared for. Inland areas in parts of Georgia and Tennessee were also washed away.
The Oak Forest neighborhood in south Asheville lives up to its name, with trees on large lots towering over 1960s ranch-style homes. But on September 27, as Helene’s remains passed through western North Carolina, many of those trees fell, sometimes landing on houses.
Julianne Johnson said she came upstairs from the basement that day to help her 5-year-old son pick out clothes when her husband started screaming about a giant oak tree 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, a blue tarp was held on the roof with a brick. The soggy carpet the family had torn out lay on the side of the house, waiting to go to the dump. With no cell phone service or internet access, Johnson said she wasn’t able to file a home insurance claim until four days after the storm.
“It took me a while to make that phone call,” she said. “I don’t have a claims adjuster yet.”
Damage to roofs and trees is likely covered by the average home insurance policy. But Johnson, like many homeowners, doesn’t have flood insurance and she’s not 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 something else entirely. Insurance professionals and experts have long warned that home insurance generally does not cover home damage from flooding, even though they say flooding can happen anywhere it rains. That’s because floods aren’t just seawater seeping into land – it’s also water from shorelines, but also mudslides and heavy rainfall.
But most private insurance companies do not offer flood insurance, leaving the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Flood Insurance Program as the primary provider for that residential coverage. Congress created the federal flood insurance program more than 50 years ago, when many private insurers stopped offering policies in high-risk areas.
North Carolina has 129,933 such policies in place, according to the latest data from FEMA, although most of that protection is likely to be concentrated on the coast rather than in the Blue Ridge Mountains area where Helene has done the most damage. By comparison, Florida has about 1.7 million flood policies statewide.
Charlotte Hicks, a North Carolina flood insurance expert who has led flood risk training and education for the state’s Department of Insurance, said the reality is that many Helene survivors 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 will absolutely be people who will be financially devastated by this event,” Hicks said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Some may go bankrupt or bankrupt. Entire neighborhoods will probably never be rebuilt. There has been water damage across the board, Hicks said, and for some, mudslides have even taken over the land where their homes once stood.
Meanwhile, Helene is proving to be a fairly manageable disaster for the private home insurance market, as those plans typically only cover wind damage from hurricanes.
That’s a relief for the sector, which is increasingly under pressure from other rising climate disasters such as wildfires and tornadoes. Nowhere is the shrinking private market due to climate instability more apparent than in Florida, where many companies have already stopped selling policies, making the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corporation the largest home insurer in the state.
Mark Friedlander, spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, said Helene is a “highly manageable loss event,” estimating insurers’ losses will range from about $5 billion to $8 billion. That 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% of the inland areas that suffered the most catastrophic flood damage were protected by flood insurance.
“This is very common in communities in the interior of the country,” Friedlander said. “The lack of flood insurance is a major insurance gap in the U.S., as only about 6% of homeowners have this coverage, especially in coastal counties.”
Amy Bach, executive director of the consumer advocacy group United Policyholders, said the images of the devastating floods in North Carolina shocked her, despite seeing decades of challenging recovery faced by victims of natural disasters.
“This is a pretty serious situation here when it comes to disappointed people. They will be disappointed in their insurers and they will be disappointed in FEMA,” Bach said. “FEMA cannot match the kind of dollars that private insurers should contribute to the recovery.”
This week, FEMA announced it could meet Helene’s immediate needs, but warned it does not have enough funding to weather the hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, although most hurricanes typically occur in September and October .
Even if a homeowner does have this, 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 policy does and does not cover, the solution is a national disaster insurance program that does for property 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 policies available, Hicks said. The state also requires that home insurance policies clearly state that flooding is not covered.
“You can’t stop nature from doing what nature is going to do,” Hicks said. “If we think things will never be this bad again, that would be a dangerous assumption. Many people underestimate the risk of flooding.”
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Associated Press Staff Writers Jeff Amy in Asheville, North Carolina, Lisa Leff in London and Paul Wiseman in Washington contributed to this report.
