Executive Session
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, this evening, the leader or someone standing in for the leader is going to come and close out the floor with a number of unanimous consents. One of them will be a unanimous consent to push consideration of the National Flood Insurance Program-- to reauthorize it--a week down the road.
I will not object to that unanimous consent request, but I do want to speak to the predicament of the National Flood Insurance Program. For coastal States, this is a very big deal, and this is a program that is now completely out of step with the conditions that coastal States see before them, so we have to get this fixed.
The liability of the National Flood Insurance Program ran up to $30 billion after Hurricane Harvey. It borrowed $30 billion from the U.S. Treasury. That is its borrowing limit. It basically maxed itself out. In October, Congress forgave $16 billion. We moved that from a liability of the National Flood Insurance Program to a liability of the United States, in effect putting it on our national credit card. That allowed NFIP to pay out claims for Harvey, Irma, and Maria. At this point, that leaves the program $20 billion in debt. We are not sure, completely, because claims are still being processed from the 2018 hurricane season, but CRS says as of September, the NFIP has only $9.9 billion of remaining borrowing authority.
CRS also points out that repetitive loss and severe repetitive loss properties over the history of NFIP have totaled about 30 percent of all claims--a grand total of around $17 billion--which is almost a perfect match with the $16 billion we had to forgive.
If you look at the properties NFIP now insures, the repetitive loss and severe repetitive loss properties are about 2 percent by number, but they account for about 16 percent of all claims. So it is a pretty big piece of our National Flood Insurance Program liability. It is about $9 billion.
We can keep going forward and funding these repetitive losses time after time after time after time, but there are some real problems with doing that. One is that back in the old days, before sea levels were rising, when you expected the weather on the coast to revert to status quo after a big storm, they made then what seemed a sensible rule that you had to rebuild just what was there. We weren't going to fund improvements and modifications with Uncle Sam's dollars on a flooded house. You had to rebuild what was there. The problem is, maps are changing, sea levels are rising, storm vulnerabilities are pushing inland, and to rebuild in place now no longer makes sense. You have to at least be able to rebuild higher and out of the way of storm surge or you have to be able to relocate. To rebuild every couple of years and get wiped out by a new storm really makes no sense, but the NFIP encouraged people to do just that because it is hard to get paid out to relocate.
The relocation rules of the National Flood Insurance Program has to be triggered by a State or municipality doing its own buyout. If you are, let's say, a small Rhode Island municipality, you have a pretty strong interest in not doing a major buyout of flooded properties because as soon as that happens, they are torn down--it takes a long time to get there just for one thing, these are slow processes--but the property gets torn down, the property goes to public space, and the town loses tax revenue from the ownership of that property. So it is a shot to the municipal budget to go down that road, and it is not a decision made by the homeowner. The homeowner is stuck waiting for the municipality in the State to make that decision.
So the NFIP program--we have to get it stood up again, we have to get it reauthorized, and we have to allow flexibility consistent with rising seas so homes can be lifted if necessary. If it makes no sense to rebuild in that place because it is just going to be washed out again, we have to help make sure this program allows homeowners the choice to simply take their final payout and go elsewhere rather than in order to stay in the program we have to rebuild and rebuild and rebuild a house the taxpayers continue to have to pay for.
For anybody who complains that there is a subsidy in here for coastal homeowners, let me say, the $16 billion in forgiveness--this big, one- time forgiveness that we did--must be compared to $44 billion in crop subsidies from the years 2015 through 2017. If we are going to help inland Midwestern and other farmers with $44 billion in crop subsidies, there is no reason to deny coastal homeowners some protection as well. We can help a lot if we can change these rules in a sensible way.
The States that are being hit are getting hit pretty hard. Florida, it has been estimated by the Union of Concerned Scientists, has the most homes and property values at risk from sea level rise--64,000 homes may see flooding every other week by 2045. Those are going to be a lot of claims on national flood insurance. Half of those claims are in South Florida, so those counties and municipalities are going to take a heck of a hit.
In Georgia, king tide flooding regularly floods St. Mary's, Brunswick, and lower portions of Savannah, according to an article in Atlanta magazine. The road out to Tybee Island flooded a record 23 times in 2015, and it is expected that with just 1 foot of sea level rise, it will be underwater 100 times annually--again creating enormous risk.
(Mr. KENNEDY assumed the Chair.)
It is terrific to see the Senator from Louisiana taking the President's chair right now because the fourth National Climate Assessment highlights Louisiana as facing some of the highest land loss rates in the world.
``Between 1932 and 2016, Louisiana lost more than 2,000 square miles of land.''
I am not even going to talk about what 2,000 square miles means in my small State of Rhode Island, but it is a big deal, and it is due in part to high rates of relative sea level rise.
Getting the National Flood Insurance Program right--getting it reauthorized and adapting it for people who are going to be swept off of their lands by sea level rise--is very important. I do want to commend Senator Kennedy for his persistence and leadership in trying to solve this problem.
North Carolina--according to an article published by the Weather Channel, one beach near East Seagull Drive in Nags Head ``has been eroding at about six feet [back] per year.'' If a beach is eroding at 6 feet per year, a lot of homes are going to be wiped out. We have to get the Flood Insurance Program adapted to that.
North Carolina itself has predicted a rise of 1 meter of sea level rise by 2100. Data compiled and analyzed by NOAA shows the worst-case potential twice that at 2 meters.
According to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, flood events in Charleston, SC, have been increasing, and by 2045, Charleston, SC, is projected to face nearly 180 tidal floods per year--there are going to be a lot of properties making claims against this program--180 tidal floods per year compared to 11 in 2014. This is getting worse, and it is getting worse fast.
In Texas, Rice University and Texas A&M compared flood damage from the storms that hit Houston between 1999 to 2009, and they found that FEMA's flood risk maps only captured about 25 percent of the actual damage. So if you are a municipality, in addition to the problems that you have trying to deal with protecting your tax base and of having people flee valuable coastal property as sea levels rise, you also have the problem that when you look to the Federal Government to figure out what your risk is and which are the problem areas, the FEMA maps are wrong. The FEMA maps are misleading.
We saw this firsthand in Rhode Island as well. We had to do a lot of State-level work to get correct mapping so that our coastal municipalities could have a true assessment of their risk. Those homeowners need to know those facts. Homeowners who are now relying on FEMA maps are being misled. We have to fix that problem as we fix the NFIP problem.
More than half of the homes damaged by Hurricane Harvey were not listed in any flood risk areas, so they didn't have flood insurance. That is another problem. Not only is there going to be a big load of new claims on the National Flood Insurance Program because of sea level rise, not only are we going to have to adapt the way claimants can make their claim so they can raise their homes to survive the next storm or clear out because they can't survive the next storm, but we are also going to have to deal with this problem of homes that aren't covered by flood insurance because FEMA's maps are wrong, and homeowners are then left stuck without insurance.
For a lot of reasons, my patience is wearing out with this continued kicking down the road of the NFIP program. I have been working on this--I hope in a constructive way--and I intend to continue working on it--I hope in a constructive way--but, again, my patience is wearing out with our inability to agree and make these changes.
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