Hurricanes refocus attention to scarcity of flood insurance in high-risk Florida

Many of the million-dollar houses lining South Dundee Street in Tampa’s Sunset Park Isles neighborhood appeared to be hosting one huge outdoor garage sale this week.

Piles of chairs, tables, mattresses, bookshelves, chests of drawers, sofas and other household items sat unattended in the gathering dusk on Thursday evening – but these articles bore no price tags. They had been irreparably damaged by the massive storm surge that engulfed much of south Tampa in late September when Hurricane Helene barreled past the Tampa/St Petersburg metropolitan area, and their owners had stockpiled the discarded furniture for retrieval by sanitation workers.

The double whammy that Hurricanes Helene and Milton inflicted on Florida’s Gulf coast in a span of 14 days has affected Floridians from all walks of life, and hundreds of thousands now face a costly task of repair and reconstruction.

The aftermath of the storms has also refocused attention on the relatively low percentage of people who are covered by flood insurance in the event of such extreme weather events – and whether local and state government officials are doing enough to encourage homeowners to acquire such protection.

“No one in Florida lives more than 70 miles from a coast, but because many people aren’t technically required to have flood insurance, they don’t purchase it,” said Jeff Brandes, a St Petersburg businessman and founder of the non-profit Florida Policy Project, which conducts research on the crises the state is facing on issues such as housing, property insurance and criminal justice reform. “We should provide every incentive to people to obtain flood insurance.”

An estimated 35% of homes in Florida’s high-risk flood zones are covered by insurance policies issued by private and government-sponsored carriers, according to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). Brandes says the corresponding figure for the entire state is closer to one in five residences.

A former state senator, Brandes introduced legislation in 2015 to promote the growth of the private flood insurance market in Florida as an alternative to the Fema-administered National Flood Insurance Protection (NFIP) program. The law has produced some impressive results to date, with the Sunshine state having five times more privately issued flood insurance policies than the neighboring state of Georgia, according to the Bloomberg financial news agency.

One recent flood victim concurs with Brandes. Steve Mastro has lived on South Dundee Street for 20 years, and storm surge from last year’s Hurricane Idalia claimed his wife’s Cadillac Escalade sports utility vehicle (SUV). Helene doubled the toll last month, destroying his Porsche Macan SUV as well as the replacement Escalade he purchased for his spouse.

The 57-year-old automobile dealer is fortunate: he took out an affordable, government-issued NFIP insurance policy when the Mastros bought their two-story house in 2004 and will be compensated for his latest losses. But he worries about younger millennial couples who can’t pay the five-figure flood insurance premiums that private carriers often charge.

“There should be some kind of fund that would allow people to pay into [and obtain coverage],” says the Syracuse, New York, native. “Flood insurance in Florida ought to be subsidized for people who really need it.”

But the current state of the insurance industry in the wake of the twin hurricanes isn’t exactly auspicious.

Just hours before Milton made landfall near Sarasota on Wednesday evening, the ratings agency AM Best warned that the hurricane “poses a significant threat to the Florida property insurance market”, in part because furniture and other debris left outside homes after Helene could become dangerous airborne projectiles.

That view was echoed by another industry analysis agency one day later. Fitch Ratings asserted that losses stemming from Milton, which it estimated to be in the range of between $30bn and $50bn, will “weaken further” the already “precarious position” of the Florida insurance market.

State government officials have sought to downplay the magnitude of the damage wrought by Milton, and those pessimistic assessments drew an angry rebuke from Ron DeSantis.

“How the hell would a Wall Street analyst be able to know?” fumed the Republican state governor at a press conference. “Give me a break on some of this stuff.”

The countdown to the arrival of Milton this week was highlighted by aerial footage of the bumper-to-bumper exodus of motorists scrambling to get out of harm’s way. Spooked by the rising death toll of Helene that eventually surpassed the 200-fatality threshold, large numbers of Gulf coast residents chose to heed the strident warnings of local and state government officials urging them to evacuate as soon as possible.

Some of those folks had ignored similar admonitions in 2022 when Hurricane Ian shattered hundreds of dwellings in and around the city of Fort Myers, while others also remained in place for Helene. Not so with Milton.

It was partly the officials in Manatee county and [the state capital of] Tallahassee saying this is really bad, and they didn’t mince any words,” said Kris Guillou, a retired automotive designer and engineer who left for the Atlanta suburb of Decatur last Tuesday.

“I don’t wish I would have stayed. I was in a shelter for Ian all night long, and the sound and the howling all night long were unnerving.”

That came as welcome news to local emergency management experts. Elizabeth Dunn, the director of Hillsborough county’s community emergency response team, had been dismayed by the complacency that so many residents in Tampa and environs displayed in the face of recent hurricanes that had menaced but never actually struck the Gulf coast’s most populous region.

This time, millions got the message loud and clear.

“I’m encouraged that people took this threat more seriously because it was headed straight for us,” said Dunn, who is an instructor in the school of public health of the University of South Florida. “This put everybody on a state of high alert, and we saw a lot more people evacuate than was the case with Ian and Helene.”

Cover photo: By The Guardian