The Flood Insurance Guru Podcast Episode 29: What We Learned from Hurricane Dorian

Today, we're discussing Hurricane Dorian on this podcast episode. We want to go through the impacts on the Bahamas and some lessons we've learned from it. We can check on the things we can use for disaster preparedness and flood preparedness to really better protect ourselves in times of an emergency. We also want to talk about two things that people are starting to talk about when it comes to flood insurance.

Since we're already starting to get some historical data on the 2017 hurricanes we had we can see how these two things will impact flood preparedness and disasters moving forward: rising sea levels and climate change.

Hurricane Dorian

Dorian immediately took the title of the second strongest Hurricane in Atlanta basin history which begs the question, why are these hurricanes getting so much stronger? It's important to note that Hurricane Dorian came into Freeport, Bahamas, and just sat there for thirty hours dumping a ton of rain. It created a huge storm surge of more than twenty feet on an island where some communities don't sit more than thirty feet above sea level.

Is climate change really impacting the rise of sea levels?

What We've Learned

Well, most of you should know that this is already a fact. Climate change had been melting glaciers and ice that's going into the oceans and thus affecting the sea levels. According to numerous reports and research, the state of Maine's sea levels might rise more than nine feet in 2091. 

We've also seen climate change not just in hurricane seasons, but by looking at all the flooding going across the country in 2019. Natural disasters are becoming much worse and you can see that flooding's becoming and heavy rainfalls get a lot worse. I think that we really should reconsider changing these coastal zones further inland since these floodings really don't know when to stop. It can get further inland compared to the previous years. 

Now, you might say that the flooding in the Bahamas is somewhat expected since it's basically a high-risk flood zone all over, but if you look at 2018, the Mexican Beach was destroyed. The same goes for when Harvey hit Texas and Hurricane Matthew impacting the East coast. Now, these storms are creating a lot more inland coastal flooding. Even areas like Puerto Rico can learn from what happened to the Bahamas especially after they're still recovering from a natural disaster a couple of years ago. Now, the U.S. didn't really have much of an impact from Dorian compared to what the Bahamas got, but we can learn a lot from it when looking into protecting property owners across the country.

Climate Change and Flood Insurance

We really need to address these climate changes and rising sea levels as we start to look at new flood insurance rates especially with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) NFIP 2.0 coming out at the time of writing. 

The National Flood Insurance Program update or NFIP 2.0 will focus their flood insurance rate maps on individual addresses. This means that each person will have a different flood insurance premium compared to other ones, but we can expect that these coastal areas will get higher premiums.

Although many people may not agree with this change since it's going to put a lot of communities in the high-risk flood zones, this will do a better job in protecting these coastal areas that may not sit directly beside bodies of water.

Learning from Dorian can also mean we may get to improve our efforts in flood mitigation and how to react to an emergency like this. Disaster response will also be improved once we looked into what happened because most like Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is going to use this historical data to improve on minimizing the risk of flood across the country.

Remember, we have an educational background in flood mitigation and we want to share this knowledge with you. Reach out to us by clicking the links below and you too can be prepared through flood education and awareness.