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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2660 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The real villains in Harvey flood: urban sprawl and the politicians who allowed it

    Wildfires are a natural necessary part of forests, and we spend tons of money not only building in wildfire areas, but also preventing those fires from happening, which builds up all the dry dead shit in the forest, which makes situations for wildfire worse when one does finally happen.

Go figure.

    Were these people made aware that they were on a flood plain when they were building or buying?

A mortgage for a house on a floodplain requires mandatory flood insurance. FEMA helpfully publishes these maps in an easy-to-find sort of way; this one is just north of the Astrodome. Oddly enough it used to be available as a .kmz but apparently they deprecated that without telling anyone.

The argument as to why this got so stupid is something like this:

1) FEMA requires mortgages on floodplains to carry insurance.

2) Most insurers won't insure floodplains because they're going to flood.

3) The government ends up subsidizing flood insurance.

4) This lowers the cost of building on a floodplain to the point where the government effectively pays people to live there.

Apparently the federal flood insurance still owes the government $12 billion... from Katrina.