FILE – Dustin Holmes, second from right, holds hands with his girlfriend, Hailey Morgan, while returning to their flooded home with her children Aria Skye Hall, 7, right, and Kyle Ross, 4, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Sept. 27, 2024, in Crystal River, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, File) The Federal Emergency Management Agency review council’s final report, released May 7, drew headlines for its big structural proposals to replace disaster programs and shift the National Flood Insurance Program toward the private market.
All of that deserves serious debate. But buried inside is a quieter proposal that may matter more to ordinary Americans than anything else. The council calls on FEMA to improve the quality and transparency of flood-risk data and to revise the maps to align with modernized mapping data.
In plain English: Fix the maps. Tell people the truth about where flood risk actually is. It is the right call, and long overdue.
In September 2022, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told CNN’s Dana Bash what every homeowner should have heard: “Our flood maps don’t take into account excessive rain that comes in,” even as “we are seeing these record rainfalls.” FEMA’s maps, she said, “are really focused on riverine flooding and coastal flooding.” Her conclusion: “People need to understand what their risk is.”
She had just confirmed that the government’s official flood-risk tool, which determines who must buy insurance, where development is allowed and how lenders assess exposure, does not account for the rainfall that was, at that moment, impacting Jackson, Miss., and leaving 150,000 people without clean water.
The technical problem is severe and well-documented. FEMA’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps were built as regulatory tools, not as precision risk instruments. Many areas still rely on rainfall data unchanged since the 1970s.
When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration updated its rainfall predictions in 2018, extreme 24-hour events proved 2 to 3 inches heavier than Texas’s 2011 maps assumed, yet the maps never changed. Fewer than half of all mapped miles use modern light detection and ranging elevation; the rest rely on decades-old surveys with 20-foot contour intervals. And less than 1 percent include any forward-looking information on sea-level rise, heavier precipitation or urbanization, despite a mandate in the 2012 Biggert-Waters Act still unmet 14 years later.
The result is a systematic undercount. The First Street Foundation found that FEMA’s special flood hazard areas understate properties at significant risk by more than two-thirds. Almost 30 percent of all National Flood Insurance program claims come from properties the maps classify as low risk.
The cost is paid by families, not bureaucracies. Anyone who has sat through a flood-map hearing has heard it: “I’ve lived here 30 years and we’ve never flooded.” People believe it, and until recently, it was often true. Ask the residents of Pinellas County, Florida, and Buncombe County, North Carolina, how that held up after Hurricane Helene in 2024. Neighborhoods that had never taken on water were inundated by four feet of it. Many had no flood insurance because their flood maps said they didn’t need it.
That is the real cost of inaccurate maps — not an actuarial imbalance, but a family standing in floodwater in a house they thought was safe, realizing the government map they trusted was wrong.
The claims data confirms it. My query of FEMA’s OpenFEMA database showed the National Flood Insurance Program has paid close to 700,000 claims and $21 billion in losses on properties in non-mandatory low-risk zones, from people who bought coverage without a stated requirement. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia estimates that 70 percent of U.S. flood losses, about $17 billion a year, go entirely uninsured. Between 2010 and 2023, flood damage reached nearly $144 billion; insurance covered only about $50 billion of it.
FEMA already has the answer. The data already exists, so updating the maps would cost almost nothing. When FEMA rolled out its new pricing methodology, Risk Rating 2.0, in 2021, it used third-party catastrophe modeling to measure flood risk for every home in the country. FEMA used that data to set premiums, but never to redraw the regulatory flood maps. The result is a government that charges a homeowner for the flood risk it has already measured, while its official map still classifies that same home as low risk.
The obstacle isn’t data. It’s politics. The mandatory community review process that accompanies every revision has become a tool for communities to contest inconvenient risk designations. When FEMA proposed new maps for New York City after Hurricane Sandy in 2015, the city appealed. Eleven years later, the maps still are not final, and the city continues to rely on maps more than 20 years old.
Telling Americans the truth about flood risk is not a left or right issue; it is a property-rights issue and a basic obligation of an honest government. Criswell said it on camera in 2022. The Review Council has now recommended that action be taken. What is missing is the political will to translate what the government knows into what it tells the public and the discipline to keep the review process from becoming a veto.
Americans deserve to know their actual flood risk, and the families who will lose everything in the next hurricane deserve better than a map built for a world that no longer exists.
Trevor Burgess is the chairman and CEO of Neptune Flood, a private flood insurance provider headquartered in St. Petersburg, Fla.
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