Despite floods of near biblical proportions, the U.S. Senate will likely turn the page on 2017 without correcting the errors they inserted into the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 and without taking any action on flood insurance reform at all. This is particularly disturbing in a year in which the Federal Emergency Management Agency felt the financial sting of not just one natural disaster, but three monstrous back-to-back hurricanes pounding the Southeast and the Caribbean while a number of wildfires left hundreds of thousands of acres in the West burned to the ground.
Congress passed only a series of temporary extensions of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) monopoly, the private flood insurance market remains alive and growing – hoping for a technical correction to previous legislation that will remove the threat of insurance regulation by federal lending regulators.
Related: Does federal flood data underestimate risk?
|The year in flood
With the 2017 hurricane season ranked as one of the top 10 for the U.S. by scientists at Colorado State University, most observers thought action on correcting flawed language relative to private flood insurance, as well as improving the NFIP would have been a slam-dunk for this Congress, but no such luck. The House of Representatives has made meaningful efforts in this regard only to be inexplicably rebuffed by the Senate.
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