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Flood insurance reform: A year of 500-year floods, senatorial dithering and delay

Flood reform is on many wish lists, but it doesn't look as though Santa will be bringing any significant changes this year.

By Craig Poulton | Updated on December 19, 2017
Homeowner Sohail Soomro, center right, accompanied by his family dumps flood damaged furniture on his front yard in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey on Sept. 7, 2017, at the Canyon Gate community in Katy, Texas. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

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.

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