Last month’s winter storm brought severe coastal flooding to Massachusetts. Since the storm hit, 7News has found out just how costly those floodwaters can be for taxpayers when they hit the same homes again and again.
It was the fiercest of January storms. From the Seaport to Sandwich and Scituate – all inundated in an instant.
Now, 7News has discovered Massachusetts homes that flood over and over are costing taxpayers big.
“The water was pretty much covering this,” said Cathy Berry, as she pointed out how high the floodwaters reached at the home in Scituate she just moved into in October.
She showed 7News pictures she took during the storm – her first taste of the flooding that’s all too common in her neighborhood.
“We decided to live here knowing that that’s a possibility,” Berry said.
But on her street, another home has been repaired ten times since the late 1970s. It has received $198,000 in federal insurance payouts for a home worth $241,000.
Another nearby home on Oceanside Drive has flooded eleven times. It has received more than $1 million in repairs, even though it is worth less than $350,000.
All of that money comes from the National Flood Insurance Program, which is virtually the only source of flood insurance nationwide. Homeowners do pay premiums. But the program is more than $20 billion in debt and recently had to be bailed out by taxpayers.
“We’re talking about billions and billions of dollars that go to helping rebuild some of the same homes over and over again,” said Joel Scata, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group.
The NRDC recently obtained the most detailed federal flood insurance data ever released. 7News broke it down and found that over the past few decades, more than 400 homes in Massachusetts have flooded repeatedly. Thirty-two homes have filed more than ten claims each, while 108 have received more in federal insurance payouts than the home is even worth.
Deanna Moran, Director of Environmental Planning for the Conservation Law Foundation, a Boston-based nonprofit, said the program is example of taxpayer waste.
“It would actually be more responsible – fiscally responsible – for us to buy out properties and relocate people,” Moran said.
That’s exactly what state Sen. Marc Pacheco wants the State of Massachusetts to do – as long as homeowners want to leave.
“We would have less damage and certainly less insurance payouts,” Pacheco said.
The federal government has bought 31 repeatedly flooded homes in the Bay State since 2001. But critics say that the process takes too long and doesn’t have enough money behind it.
“People can feel trapped — that they have no other choice but to rebuild,” Moran said.
The head of the National Flood Insurance Program said that it’s working to speed up the homebuying process. The program is also pushing a new policy which would force the most extreme cases to either flood-proof their homes or lose federal insurance.
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