My home sits on the edge of a flood plain that hasn’t flooded in more than 40 years. My mortgage lender requires me to pay about $700 a year to insure my dwelling against flood damage. I don’t like having to fork over that money each year, but looking at it logically, I see the point.
New Orleans is located below sea level, below river level, and below lake level. It regularly suffers the ravages of tropical storms and hurricanes. Yet the majority of homes and business in the Big Easy never purchased flood insurance. In some Katrina-ravaged areas along the Gulf Coast, fewer than 10 percent of property owners thought it important. With different numbers attached, the same was true of property owners wiped out by the Midwest floods of 1993 and 2001.
Now, as then, thousands of angry people who volunteered to live in a flood zone but declined insurance are screaming for the government to bail them out, figuratively as well as literally.
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