I hope the city will require houses to be elevated when rebuilt.
Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
101–110 of 217 posts
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is always considerable political pressure to low-ball the estimates. That is hinted at in this article, and it happened in New York, where the first post-Sandy flood zone maps provoked widespread opposition from those in the newly-expanded zones, and they were rapidly scaled back. There is, of course, some uncertainty in the estimation, but it seems likely that the official maps will be, at best, based on the m…
Because, crucially, your mortgage may require you to buy insurance in flood plains. And it can be quite expensive. see also https://qz.com/1063985/hurricane-harvey-why-85-of-homeowners... There's gonna be lots of screaming when homeowners in Houston realize how much flood insurance is going to cost them in the future. We all got a preview of this in coastal Florida.
Pretty much everyone knows it's a good idea to get flood insurance in Houston.. We still get lots of localized downpours, floodplane or no, which can easily overwhelm local drainage, etc. Whether they actually do it or not is another idea
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that isn't why. I worked in insurance. Not homeowners insurance, but I had a certificate and processed claims. The reason is that most human settlements occur in flood plains because we cannot live without water. We drink it. We bath in it. We irrigate crops with it. Flood plains have fertile soil. We use rivers and oceans for essential cargo transit. Insurance is about risk management. It is a form of betting. A…
I find this a little confusing, because one can also purchase life insurance, and mors certa, hora incerta .
A lot of life insurance is term insurance. So the bet is "will you die during the years that your policy is in force?" Whole life is much, much more expensive.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#104A similar thing has happened on the Mississippi river, which has had '500 year floods' in at least 2011, 2009, 2008, 1993 and 1927. I may be missing a few. Assigning probabilities to rare events is meaningless unless you a) have data over a much longer time period than the recurrence time and b) the mechanism causing flooding is not changing. Neither of these holds in the case of Mississippi flooding, for which we on…
Should any land be required to have flood insurance? The NFIP supposedly reduces taxpayer cost (with the shaky risk management you mention), but it currently has huge potential liabilities compared to the premiums it collects (and owes the government a bunch of money from past payouts).
Hey we've got a legal mandate to fund insurers now with our 'public private partnership' healthcare system.. pick this up as your issue and you might have a lucrative career in lobbying lined up..
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that isn't why. I worked in insurance. Not homeowners insurance, but I had a certificate and processed claims. The reason is that most human settlements occur in flood plains because we cannot live without water. We drink it. We bath in it. We irrigate crops with it. Flood plains have fertile soil. We use rivers and oceans for essential cargo transit. Insurance is about risk management. It is a form of betting. A…
That reasoning fails in the face of there existing earthquake insurance in the Bay Area.
Major earthquakes are less frequent than major flooding. If the time frame is large enough and the timing uncertain enough, it can still make sense as a bet.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is part of the reason few private insurers offer flood insurance. They understand they there isn't enough information to properly price the risk. The historic data is spotty, we don't understand the geography well enough, you have to understand how construction and urbanization affects water absorption over long distances. If everyone who claimed to know what a 500-year storm looked like had to pay out every tim…
No, that isn't why. I worked in insurance. Not homeowners insurance, but I had a certificate and processed claims. The reason is that most human settlements occur in flood plains because we cannot live without water. We drink it. We bath in it. We irrigate crops with it. Flood plains have fertile soil. We use rivers and oceans for essential cargo transit. Insurance is about risk management. It is a form of betting. A…
You wouldn’t be provided with a fixed lump sum, but rather your costs would be covered up to a limit.
So it’s about determining the expected value of losses for a given risk. You’re right that given a long enough time, there is a near-certain chance of a flood, but the question is more about how much that’s likely to cost.
That is entirely insurance.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find this a little confusing, because one can also purchase life insurance, and mors certa, hora incerta .
A lot of life insurance is term insurance. So the bet is "will you die during the years that your policy is in force?" Whole life is much, much more expensive.
Could you then have the same kind of structures for flood insurance policies? I had to pay every year to renew my renter's insurance policy, it only covered losses during the course of that year, and the insurance carrier had discretion to adjust the premiums or not to renew it.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Of course, the "once in 500 years flood" may also be an inaccurate probability as well I suspect that's it. Of course I may be falling into the same birthday paradox here, but a similar thing happened when it flooded where I lived now. The x in "x-year Flood" kept increasing (I'm inclinced to blame that on sensationalizing news for ratings), but people kept comparing it to the 3 or 4 similar floods that happened i…
>. It would seem the probably has gone up due to climate change That probably has a small reason to do with the increase, but your next line highlights the issue. > or that we're noticing the floods more now because there's more damage to be caused to more things that have been built up No, not exactly. The more stuff you build, the faster water runs off. Unincorporated land has a pretty high water slowing capability…
Sounds like an effective, cheap solution would be water butts on every gutter.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of life insurance is term insurance. So the bet is "will you die during the years that your policy is in force?" Whole life is much, much more expensive.
Could you then have the same kind of structures for flood insurance policies? I had to pay every year to renew my renter's insurance policy, it only covered losses during the course of that year, and the insurance carrier had discretion to adjust the premiums or not to renew it.
In the US, flood insurance is provided by the government. And the premiums still jump insanely sometimes.
It gets handled this way for the same reason our government provides welfare et al: it makes no sense as a business, but the cost to the nation to do nothing is a bigger problem.
Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
#110The fundamental takeaway from this article is about half way down. Major flood events are occurint more frequently. What was once likely to hit a city every 500 years is happening to more cities on a planetary scale more frequently.
I know it's easy to blame climate change for anything and everything, but that's simply incorrect. The actual takeaway is that our data is wrong, these floods occur more often than we thought. With only 150 years of good data, it's impossible to calculate "500 year" events accurately. You would need around 5,000 years of data to do that, and we don't have it. So we ended up significantly underestimating how often the…
You can see in graph that floods are occurring more often and that clouds are able to absorb more water as temperatures rise. This hurricane would have happened. But this flooding is worsening because of climate change that is irrefutable.