FEMA Insurance Policies Promote Poor Land Use

"In the 1980s, 17 of the nation's 20 fastest-growing counties were coastal. Towns such as Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss., Dauphin Island and Gulfshores, Ala., and North Captiva, Fla., exploded with floating casinos, condos, stilt homes, beach mansions, marinas and shopping malls just waiting to be knocked down when hurricanes began increasing in intensity in the 1990s.

...In 1968, FEMA, worried about the disaster risks faced by new beachfront residents, came up with a plan. If homeowners met certain basic safety standards in beachfront construction (like putting houses on stilts), they would qualify for a newly created National Flood Insurance Program. FEMA convinced Congress that this would reduce individual risk while shifting the burden of hurricane disaster relief onto policyholders. It would guarantee a large insurance pool by making the rates so inexpensive that lots of people would buy the policies.

This idea worked for a while â€" about as long as a historic lull in Atlantic hurricane activity persisted through the 1970s and 1980s. But since the early 1990s, this natural 25- to 30-year cycle has both intensified and â€" possibly â€" become supercharged by fossil fuel-fired climate disruption that's heated the world's oceans and raised sea levels more than a foot."