AMERICANALMANAC (Alex Tanzer) - FEMA flood maps leave millions of homeowners exposed, and the agency knows it
Experts say FEMA's publicly available flood maps give homeowners a false sense of security about their actual flood risk, a gap that left fewer than 1% of homes in one hard-hit North Carolina county carrying insurance when Hurricane Helene struck. Liz Barker woke to a flash flood emergency alert on her phone the morning of […] The post FEMA flood maps leave millions of homeowners exposed, and the agency knows it appeared first on American Almanac .
Experts say FEMA's publicly available flood maps give homeowners a false sense of security about their actual flood risk, a gap that left fewer than 1% of homes in one hard-hit North Carolina county carrying insurance when Hurricane Helene struck. Liz Barker woke to a flash flood emergency alert on her phone the morning of September 27, 2024. A mandatory evacuation was already in place for her home in Swannanoa, North Carolina, a small community just outside Asheville. She grabbed her teenage daughter and their dog and left. When the water from the Swannanoa River finally dropped days later, Barker came back to find her house had been submerged to the attic. It was uninhabitable. She had no flood insurance. Barker was not alone.…Open