Flood money: How Congress is botching the effort to climate-proof insurance

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http://grist.org/politics/flood-money-how-congress-is-botching-the-effort-to-climate-proof-insurance/

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Congress appears to be on the brink of undoing a remarkable piece of legislation that reformed the outdated and hopelessly underwater National Flood Insurance Program. It’s a pretty weird situation, as I wrote in a post earlier this week: Some of the lawmakers who championed the reforms (including the representative for whom the law is named) have become its most incensed critics.

But the irony doesn’t end there. First, the push to undo the flood-insurance reforms comes, in part, from the victims of Hurricane Sandy — a storm that revealed beyond a doubt just how broken the old system really was. And second, the reforms, while bold, were only a small first step; if coastal residents think these changes hurt, wait ’til they see what’s coming.

Let’s start with the Sandy victims. One of the more obvious results of the insurance law — it’s called the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, and Congress passed it in the summer of 2012 — was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency got orders to stop subsidizing flood insurance for second homes and businesses, and for properties that had been swamped multiple times. It was a necessary move: The subsidies were encouraging people to build (and rebuild) in risky places, and Hurricane Katrina and other storms had left the program tens of billions of dollars in debt. But as a result, less than a year after being broadsided by Sandy, many residents of New Jersey and New York received notices that their flood insurance bills would be going up, in some cases dramatically.

It makes sense, really. If you get in a car wreck, your insurance company is probably going to raise your rates. But in this case, it felt like FEMA was hitting coastal residents with the rate hike while the family truckster — or in this case, the family home — was still smoldering.