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 They also illustrate the inadequacy of FEMA flood maps, which are updated infrequently and have relied on outdated data that looks back rather than forward at a hotter, wetter Virginia.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.”