Homeowners hit by Hurricane Helene face the grim task of rebuilding without flood insurance

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A week after Hurricane Helen tore through the southeastern United States, homeowners of the hardest-hit homes are grappling with how to pay for flood damage from one of the deadliest storms to hit the mainland in modern history.

The Category 4 storm that first hit Florida’s Gulf Coast on September 26 dumped trillions of gallons of water across several states, leaving a catastrophic trail of devastation extending hundreds of miles inland. More than 200 people died in what is now the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina, according to a tally by the National Hurricane Center.

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Western North Carolina and the Asheville area were particularly hard hit, with floods destroying buildings, roads, utilities and land in a way no one expected, let alone prepared for. Inland parts of Georgia and Tennessee were also washed out.

The Oak Forest neighborhood in South Asheville lives up to its name, with trees rising above large tracts of 1960s-era ranch-style homes. But on September 27, as Helen’s remains swept across western North Carolina, many of those trees snapped, sometimes landing on homes.

Julianne Johnson said she was coming from downstairs to upstairs to help her 5-year-old son pick out clothes that day when her husband started screaming that a giant oak tree was falling diagonally across the yard. The tree mostly missed the house, but it broke off part of the metal porch and damaged the roof. Johnson said her basement was flooded.

On Friday, there was a blue tarp stuck to the brick roof. The wet carpet that the family had torn up was lying on the side of the house waiting to go to the landfill. With no cell phone service or internet access, Johnson said she couldn’t file a home insurance claim until four days after the storm.

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“It took me a while to make that call,” she said. “I don’t have an officer yet.”

Roof and tree damage will likely be covered by the average home insurance policy. But Johnson, like many homeowners, doesn’t have flood insurance, and she’s unsure how to pay for that portion of the damage.

Those recovering from a storm may be surprised to learn that flood damage is a completely separate matter. Insurance professionals and experts have long warned that home insurance typically does not cover flood damage to a home, even as they believe floods can happen anywhere it rains. This is because floods are not just seawater seeping into the land, but also water from banks, as well as mudflow and heavy rain.

But most private insurers don’t carry flood insurance, leaving the National Flood Insurance Program administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as the primary provider of that coverage for residential homes. Congress created the federal flood insurance program more than 50 years ago when many private insurance companies stopped offering policies in high-risk areas.

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North Carolina has 129,933 such policies in place, according to the most recent Federal Emergency Management Agency data, though most of those protections are likely concentrated on the coast rather than in the Blue Ridge Mountains region where Helen caused the most damage. By comparison, Florida has about 1.7 million statewide flood policies.

The reality is that many of Helen’s survivors will never recover, said Charlotte Hicks, a North Carolina flood insurance expert who has led flood risk training and educational outreach for the state Insurance Department. Without flood insurance, some people may be able to rebuild with the help of charities, but most others will be left to fend for themselves.

“There will certainly be people who will be financially harmed by this event,” Hicks said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Some may go into foreclosure or bankruptcy. Entire neighborhoods will likely never be rebuilt. Water damage occurred throughout the area, and for some, mudslides swept away the land where their home once stood, Hicks said.

Meanwhile, Helen has turned into a somewhat manageable disaster for the private home insurance market, because these plans generally only serve to cover wind damage from hurricanes.

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This is a relief for the industry, which has been under increasing pressure from other intense climate disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes. Nowhere is the contraction of the private market due to climate instability more evident than in Florida, where many companies have already stopped selling insurance policies — making state-backed Citizens Property Insurance now the largest home insurer in the state.

Mark Friedlander, a spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, said Helen is a “very manageable loss event,” and estimates that insurer losses will range from about $5 billion to $8 billion. This compares to insured losses from Category 4 Hurricane Ian in September 2022, which were estimated at more than $50 billion.

Friedlander and other experts point out that less than 1 percent of the inland areas that suffered the most catastrophic flood damage were protected by flood insurance.

“This is very common in boarding communities across the country,” Friedlander said. “The lack of flood insurance represents a significant insurance gap in the United States, as only about 6% of homeowners carry coverage, mostly in coastal counties.”

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Amy Bach, executive director of the consumer advocacy group United Policyholders, said she was shocked by the images of flood devastation in North Carolina despite decades of seeing the difficult recovery faced by victims of natural disasters.

“This is a very dangerous situation here in terms of people being disappointed. They’re going to be disappointed in their insurance companies and they’re going to be disappointed in FEMA,” Bach said. “FEMA can’t match the kind of dollars that it’s supposed to That private insurance companies contribute to the recovery.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced this week that it can meet the immediate needs of Hurricane Helen but warned that it does not have enough funding to get through hurricane season, which lasts from June 1 to November 30, although most hurricanes typically occur in September and October.

Even if the homeowner owns it, FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program only covers up to $250,000 for single-family homes and $100,000 for contents.

Besides educating homeowners about what their policies cover and what they don’t, the solution is a national disaster insurance program that does for property insurance what the Affordable Care Act did for health insurance, Bach said.

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After Hurricane Floyd in 1999, North Carolina began requiring insurance agents to have a flood insurance category so they could properly advise their clients about the risks and policies available, Hicks said. The state also requires home insurance policies to clearly disclose that they do not cover floods.

“You can’t stop nature from doing what nature is going to do,” Hicks said. “For us to think things will never be this bad again would be a dangerous assumption. Many underestimate the risks of flooding.”

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Associated Press staff writers Jeff Amy in Asheville, North Carolina, Lisa Leff in London and Paul Weissman in Washington contributed to this report.

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