Virginia
Insurance payments to repeatedly flooding Va. properties continue to rise • Virginia Mercury
When it comes to protecting against flooding, the National Flood Insurance Program is increasingly underwater in Virginia, especially in Hampton Roads.
A new analysis and online tool created by the Natural Resources Defense Council reveals that nearly 7,000 Virginia properties had repeated claims for flood damage over 10 years. And the program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will keep paying out. Only 554 of those properties mitigated their flood risk through methods like basement filling, house raising, or replacing it with a structure that can better withstand flooding, according to the NRDC research.
“One of the most frustrating things about the flood rebuild model that we’re following in the United States is that there is currently no requirement for property owners to mitigate their property to reduce the likelihood of repeat flood damage,” said Mary-Carson Stiff, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a nonprofit based in Norfolk that helps create resilience and adaptation solutions.
In the past, FEMA has declined to provide details about flooded properties and while individual addresses are not included in the data, the new analysis includes key information about payouts, flood mitigation, and zip codes.
NRDC’s data shows that the number of repetitive loss properties continues to rise as storms grow more intense and more frequent in a warming world. They also illustrate the inadequacy of FEMA flood maps, which are updated infrequently and have relied on outdated data that looks back rather than forward at a hotter, wetter Virginia. But those maps continue to guide developers, engineers, banks, local land use officials, and homeowners when deciding where to build and finance a project.
“The cost of flooding is increasing every single year with every big storm event and small event,” Stiff said.
In Virginia, three-quarters of the repetitive loss properties are in Hampton Roads. Of those, 841 are severe repetitive loss properties, which have reported four or more claims of more than $5,000. The vast majority — 689 — have not been mitigated against future flooding. They accounted for 1% of the Virginia claims but 21% of the payments. According to NRDC, 10% of them are outside FEMA-designated flood zones. Nearly 3,000 of the properties whose owners have been paid claims in Virginia no longer have flood insurance.
Virginia Beach had 128 severe repetitive loss properties paid more than $20 million. That’s an average of more than $150,000 each. Of that, 114 were not mitigated. Norfolk had 125 severe loss properties paid $18 million with 93 not mitigated. Hampton had 110 properties paid $18.2 million with 91 not mitigated. Poquoson, a city of about 12,500 on a peninsula on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, had 50 severe risk loss properties paid nearly $6.6 million.
The NRDC data illustrates the co-dependent flood and payout cycle it calls “losing ground.”
In some cases, the damage payouts exceeded the property’s value. In Norfolk, one single family home received $173,736 over seven claims, but had a value of $104,400, according to the database. It was not protected against future flooding. A Virginia Beach home worth $149,400 received $243,502 in payments and while it’s still insured, it is not mitigated against flooding. A single-family home in Portsmouth, insured and mitigated against flooding, received $250,558 in two claims, but is worth $239,380. One Richmond property in the database, labeled non-residential, received nearly $1.4 million in payouts but has a value of $211,750. It is no longer insured or protected. An insured single-family home in Poquoson worth $155,300, according to the database, received five claims totaling $480,010.
The relatively new FEMA insurance rates, called Risk Rating 2.0, attempt to take a more realistic and equitable look at flood insurance. Most policyholders saw their premiums either drop or increase by no more than $10 per month in its first year. Under the law, no premium can increase by more than 18% annually.
But in a column last year, Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, agreed with Stiff that flood hazard mitigation measures needed to be credited and that FEMA needed to be clearer about which mix of mitigation would translate into reduced premiums.
“When we talk of the NFIP, we often talk about it as a four-legged stool: floodplain management, flood mitigation, floodplain mapping, and flood insurance,” he wrote. “However, it’s become clear to the floodplain management community that the new rating system has severed those first two legs and as a nation we still haven’t prioritized flood mapping the entire U.S. to better reflect flood risk.”
Stiff noted the present system leads to “the active bankrupting of the National Flood Insurance Program. We’re all on the hook to bail them out.”
Communities, she added, can track cumulative damage to a property and, when it reaches the FEMA threshold of more than 50% rebuilding, require the owners to bring it up to the latest flood protection standards. But that’s not an option Virginia cities have embraced.
“It is a higher standard that local governments can elect to use in their communities, and if they do, then they receive credit through the community rating system, which will lower flood insurance policies annually for every policyholder in the local government,” she added. “There are ways in which our communities can be proactive against this issue, but our communities are choosing not to take these additional measures because it’s politically unappetizing.”
The NRDC’s recommended solutions for the repeated payouts echo her comments and include:
- Update building codes and land use standards for development in floodplains.
- Ensure flood-risk maps are updated and account for future risk.
- Make flood insurance more affordable for low and moderate-income households.
- Give home buyers and renters the information to understand their risk.
Anna Weber, senior policy analyst for environmental health at the NRDC, noted that Virginia is one of many states that do not require sellers to disclose a property’s flood history. Only seven states require tenants to be notified, according to a new paper in the Journal of Land Use.
“Virginia is effectively a buyer-beware state,” she said. “There’s very little that you are guaranteed a right to in terms of that information. So, when we talk about flood disclosure, we think it’s important that people have a right to know not just what it says about your home on a FEMA flood insurance map, but what specifically has happened in the past at that property. Has it flooded before? Have there been flood insurance claims? How much did those claims cost? How many times has the home flooded?”
While Weber and others call the FEMA maps inadequate, they also note they are often out of date. They’re required to be updated every five years, but often are not. Norfolk’s map, for instance, has not been updated since 2017.
Flooding, Weber noted, has multiple causes that call for multifaceted solutions.
“Some of that looks like thinking hard about our land use choices. Some of that looks like improving and strengthening our building codes so that we’re building in a smarter way,” she said. “Some of that has to do with long-term community planning. What do we want our coastal communities to look like in 50 years?” she said. “In 100 years, we may not be able to live in the same places in the same ways as we have in the past.”
Michael Gerrard, the founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, recently published a paper examining the legal tools to combat what he called a growing crisis of urban flooding. He endorsed many of the same solutions proposed by the NRDC.
“It makes no sense to continue to rebuild the same house at government expense,” he said, adding that there needs to be a reckoning with the costs of the climate crisis”The overall problem is that people and governments are unwilling to pay for the cost that climate change is imposing,” he said. “And that will just get worse over time as the climate worsens.”
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The Virginia Cavaliers (9-10, 2-6 ACC) snapped a five-game losing streak by defeating Boston College (9-10, 1-7 ACC) at John Paul Jones Arena 74-56 on Tuesday night. Here are our five takeaways from UVA’s second ACC victory of the season:
Coming into Tuesday’s matchup riding a five-game losing streak, Virginia desperately needed a win over Boston College, who sits right next to the ‘Hoos at the bottom of the ACC. For Virginia, they did more than just grind out a victory at JPJ. The Cavaliers looked far better than the Eagles for nearly all forty minutes Tuesday night as they cruised to a near twenty-point win behind an excellent shooting performance. Coming into the game as the worst shooting team in the ACC (42.9 %), Virginia turned in an efficient offensive attack – they finished 52% from the field, and even more impressively, 11/20 from three. Though Virginia’s tournament hopes remain distant, this victory will at minimum serve as a morale boost as the thick of ACC play continues.
The Virginia Cavaliers produced an elite twenty minutes of basketball on their home court in the first half Tuesday night. Ron Sanchez described the fast start as an “injection” of energy that translated to the defensive end as well.
Behind the injection was Isaac McKneely, who scored 12 first-half points and connected on all of his first four three-point attempts. Andrew Rohde and Elijah Saunders both turned in excellent first halves themselves with ten points apiece, with Rohde going into the halftime locker room 4/4 from the field. In tandem, Rohde, Saunders, and McKneely scored 32 of the 41 first-half Virginia points on a ridiculously efficient 12/16 from the field en route to a season-high 19-point halftime lead.
It’s little secret that McKneely is one of the better shooters in the ACC, and certainly the best shooter on this Virginia team – although Andrew Rohde’s improvement from deep deserves credit. McKneely is a career 41% three-point shooter for the ‘Hoos, but connected on just one of his 11 three-point attempts in the last two Virginia losses. The Cavaliers needed McKneely to find himself from beyond the arc to instill any sort of confidence in this ACC-worst offense, and Isaac did just that. He came out and started red hot, connecting on his first four three-point attempts en route to twelve first half points. McKneely finished with 21 points on 7/10 shooting and 6/9 from three-point range.
Virginia has struggled all season in the turnover department, but Tuesday’s game was a step in the right direction with the ‘Hoos finishing with 11 turnovers. Virginia came into JPJ tonight 16th out of the 18 ACC teams with a -1.72 turnover margin, BC is right there at #15 and looked particularly sloppy on offense in the face of a balanced Virginia defensive presence. Boston College finished with 15 turnovers on the night, ensuring the double-digit halftime lead was never threatened during the second half of the Cavalier victory.
The third-year guard from Milwaukee, Wisconsin is certainly not the flashiest, but in a difficult year for the Virginia basketball program, Andrew Rohde has stepped up and taken advantage of the opportunity to receive extended minutes and offensive touches. While McKneely’s stellar night from deep will be the story from this victory, Rohde’s performance was arguably the best in Tuesday’s win; he finished with an efficient 16 points on 5/6 shooting and 2/2 from beyond the arc to go along with a game-high six assists.
Up next, Virginia takes on Notre Dame (8-10, 2-5 ACC) at John Paul Jones Arena this Saturday, January 25th at 6:30pm ET on the ACC Network.
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Virginia
‘Trump is going to deport your a–’: Virginia man accused of racist attack at Miami Beach bar
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – An out-of-state visitor’s $130.81 tab turned into a more than $5,000 bond after Miami Beach police said he went on a racist tirade during a drunken attack on staff at a bar, leading to his arrest on a hate crime charge.
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Police said the incident happened just before 11:15 p.m. Sunday at Norman’s Tavern, located at 6770 Collins Ave. on North Beach.
Authorities said it all began when a bartender asked Michael John Nixon, 42, of Arlington, Virginia, to pay his bill. Police said he replied by saying, “I won’t pay s—.”
An arrest report states he then knocked over and broke a glass cup, said he “won’t pay” and threatened to break more items.
As the bartender stood in front of Nixon, police said he began to make a series of “Hispanophobic” remarks.
“Hola. English, motherf—er,” Nixon is accused of saying. “I live in America. You speak English.”
Authorities said Nixon then repeated “English, b—-,” four times before saying, a little more than 12 hours before the presidential inauguration, “F—ing Trump is going to deport your a–.”
They said he then reached around the bartender and punched an employee on the side of his face.
After seeing Nixon’s “increasing(ly) aggressive behavior,” the bartender “began to back up” to allow him to leave to “prevent further physical assaults,” the report states.
However, police said as Nixon moved to leave, he “intentionally struck” the bartender by “forcefully moving his body forward, specifically his left shoulder, towards (him).”
The bartender defended himself by punching Nixon in the face, police said. Authorities said Nixon left, but later came back to the bar as officers were at the scene.
Officers arrested Nixon on a felony charge of battery with prejudice, along with misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief, defrauding an innkeeper and disorderly conduct.
After a Miami Beach police officer testified in a court hearing Tuesday that the victims were Latino and the attack was racially-motivated, Miami-Dade Judge Mindy Glazer found probable cause for all four charges and ordered Nixon held on a $5,450 bond.
He remained in the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center as of early Tuesday afternoon, jail records show.
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Morgantown, WV – No. 23 West Virginia hosts the Arizona State Sun Devils (10-7, 1-5) Tuesday night for the first ever meeting between the two programs.
The Mountaineers (13-4, 4-2) picked up their biggest win of the season Saturday night after knocking off then second-ranked Iowa State. Javon Small recorded a game-high 27 points and carried West Virginia to the finish line in the last two minutes, scoring 12 of the final 13 points for the Mountaineers to secure the upset.
He made some big-time plays,” WVU head coach Darian DeVries said.
“Like a lot of great players, you can tell when they’re in that zone and you could see it in his eyes he wanted to take that game over,” DeVries added. “I’ve seen Javon in practice and in games, when he gets in a zone, he’s really, really good.”
West Virginia forward Amani Hansberry has hit double figures in back-to-back games for the first time since Thanksgiving weekend as part of a four-game stretch of 10 or more points. The sophomore has provided a spark off, shooting 7-13 from behind the arc for the last two games for a combined 28 points.
Arizona State comes into the matchup riding a four-game losing streak, while freshman guard Joson Sanon, a potential first round NBA Draft pick, has been dealing with an ankle injury and missed four of the last five games. Additionally, the team’s leading scorer, senior guard BJ Freeman (13.2 ppg), was landed on during the loss at Cincinnati on Saturday but gutted it out and finished the game with 12 points.
“I just look at it like, you just play the next game in front of you and that’s all you can do – that’s all you can control,” Arizona State head coach Bobby Hurley said. “We can’t go back in time and change anything that happened in overtime against Baylor or UCF or this game. All you can do is try to learn from it. Hopefully, the guys continue to refuse to want to lose and have the season go sideways and then they come out and step up and then we find ourselves and that’s just how we’ll look at it going into Tuesday.”
Freshman forward Jayden Quaintance recorded 10 blocks the last two games. He is currently the only player in the nation averaging at least 10.0 points, 8.0 rebounds, and 3.0 blocks. Quaintance is averaging exactly 10.1 points, 8.6 rebounds, and a conference-high 3.2 blocks per game.
West Virginia and Arizona State will tip-off at 9:00 p.m. EST and the action will broadcast on CBSSN.
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