When Jaime Byrd opened her art gallery in Asheville, North Carolina, she chose to join the dozens of artists who work and display their art in the city's River Arts District known as a hotspot for galleries and small businesses. Sure, the business was in a flood plain, but the risk of flooding was judged to be 1% in a given year.
Her home, 13 miles away in Fairview, was considered even less at risk, less than 1%.
And yet, both were ravaged by Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm that ripped through the Southeastern United States in October. The catastrophic hurricane ravaged Western North Carolina in particular, bringing with it strong winds and historic flooding, leaving businesses and houses in literal shambles, and even washing some structures away.
Businessowners and homeowners now are not only dealing with the loss of their property, belongings and in some cases loved ones, but they’re facing a harsh reality: Many did not have flood insurance, and so they are responsible for paying for the water damage.
“Why would you get flood insurance?” Byrd asked. “It’s like having hurricane insurance in California or Arizona, you just don’t do it.”
It’s not an experience unique to Asheville or Western North Carolina, or even Hurricane Helene victims.
In the United States, 90% of natural disasters involve some level of flooding, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. But, despite warnings from the National Flood Insurance Program that “where it can rain, it can flood," only about 4% of homeowners have flood insurance, data from the U.S. Government Accountability Office showed.
Federal flood insurance
More homeowners are finding themselves in such a situation — facing flood damage without the proper insurance coverage — especially as the risk for inland flooding worsens.
The typical homeowner's insurance policy might protect against disasters such as hurricanes, lightning, hail and fire, but not for floods, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
Instead, flood insurance is a separate policy that can be purchased through the federal government or a private insurer. That’s because flooding is considered a common peril, and much more likely to happen than other kinds of catastrophes, according to Jeff Jackson, interim senior executive of the National Flood Insurance Program and acting assistant administrator of the Federal Insurance Directorate.
Flooding “is a super common and devastating risk,” Jackson said in an interview. “It’s the hazard that any of us is most likely to face as an American.”
For a long time, there was no way to offer insurance for flood damage because of the cost of such coverage. There was no entity willing to take on the risk to just lose money. That is until 1950 when the federal government decided to establish its own flood insurance known as the National Flood Insurance Program.
Any property owner is eligible for flood insurance from the NFIP so long as the designated community they live in is a member of the program — meaning local regulators have collaborated with the federal government and FEMA to establish floodplain maps that evaluate flood risk throughout the area.
“The federal government will sell insurance, flood insurance, to any person in that community, without regard to risk concentration, at a price that they decide is reasonable,” Jackson said.
The NFIP also offers communities access to federally funded grants to reduce the likelihood of flooding in the future, according to Jackson.
“Anybody who wants to can buy, and we’ll never turn you down. It will never go away,” Jackson said.
The program is currently awaiting congressional reauthorization after President Biden signed a temporary extension that lasts through Dec. 20, and leaders are asking federal legislators to “reduce the complexity of the program” and strengthen its “financial framework.”
Growing hazards
One of the biggest challenges FEMA and the NFIP face is combating misinformation. For example, some property owners think that just because flood insurance is optional, they don’t need it, Jackson said.
Another issue is conveying the very real risk of flooding.
“Many more people need it than buy it, and part of that is people, historically, just don’t see themselves as at risk of flooding as they actually are,” he said. “And then that’s only compounded by the changing climate and as risk becomes more intense.”
The maps used to determine flood risk are dynamic, living things that have to be updated and maintained, a FEMA spokesperson said in a statement. Communities in the NFIP can submit suggestions to change those maps based on scientific data, construction projects, natural events that have changed floodplains and more.
While the maps help regulators evaluate flood risk and set the cost of coverage, the maps don’t determine where it will flood, and they aren’t just a recounting of where it’s flooded in the past, the spokesperson said.
In other words, though the government has established a means to provide insurance coverage for flood damage to property owners, determining how that coverage is distributed and priced is an ever-changing process. That fundamental challenge was exemplified in Asheville.
For example, in the River Arts District, aptly named because of its proximity to the French Broad River, water rose more than 20 feet in some areas when Hurricane Helene struck. Byrd’s studio, once separated from the waterway by train tracks and a collection of warehouse-sized buildings, was almost consumed by water. Other businesses near the studio were completely flooded, their contents destroyed.
Properties along the River Arts District’s main thoroughfare, where Byrd displayed her colorful, contemporary oil paintings in a light-filled studio, are deemed at “high” risk of river flooding by the North Carolina Flood Risk Information System. But that translates to just about a 1% chance of flood damage this year. And over the next 30 years, there’s a less than 30% chance of flooding.
It’s a similar story in Bryd's Fairview neighborhood. Though several creeks and streams course through the community, most residential properties have a “low” chance of river flooding hazard, according to the state’s flood risk system. That means that over the next 30 years, there’s an expected less than 1% chance of flooding.
Except this year, that small chance happened. Entire groups of houses were swept away. At Byrd’s house, the downstairs flooded, causing between $60,000 and $70,000 worth of damage to the guest bedroom, garage and Byrd’s at-home studio. The destruction was severe enough that the property was uninhabitable for a few days, she said.
'Risk was always there'
This isn’t the first time Asheville has experienced devastating flooding. In 1916, two tropical storms converged over the mountains causing the French Broad River to flood, bursting dams and leaving 80 people dead, according to the city of Asheville. And in 2004, a similar scenario unfolded, when more than 20 inches of rain poured onto the region. Eleven people died, 140 homes were destroyed and more than 16,000 were damaged.
“The risk was always there,” Jackson said.
Western North Carolina is home to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Roads are carved into cliffsides, houses on stilts teeter over gorges and city skylines are backed by the blues and purples of the mountaintops. And though its terrain is scattered with small bodies of water such as lakes, ponds, creeks and streams, flooding doesn’t occur often, and many homeowners don’t have insurance coverage for that kind of damage.
“We’ve had minor flooding, of course,” said Byrd, who has lived in the area for more than two decades. “But the devastation of what really happened throughout the whole region … is just unbelievable.”
Even so, in Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, only about 1% of residents had coverage from the NFIP when Hurricane Helene hit, an Insurance Information Institute analysis found. As of 2023, the county was home to nearly 276,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“We weren’t supposed to have this happen,” Byrd said. “We’ve lived here for 25 years in the same home in Fairview and, you know, the feeling of a disaster happening was never ever something that we would consider because we live so far away from any kind of hurricane stuff.”
Cost barriers
Another “fundamental tension” in the NFIP is the price of flood insurance, according to Jackson, who said the average property owner faces a roughly $1,000 annual payment for coverage.
Even with price tags like that, the program can’t cover its costs and has a 10-year earnings projection in the negative tens of billions, he said.
Byrd said it was a challenge she faced when she tried to insure her studio in the River Arts District.
“It’s cost-prohibitive,” she said. “It literally was so expensive, and they barely covered anything. And so, we were like, I don’t know how we can do this.”
When he heard about Byrd’s situation, Jackson explained, “people want it to be inexpensive, but they also want it to pay for itself. And both of those things can’t be true.”
Instead, he suggested that any buyer get a quote for flood insurance for any property they’re considering buying. If it’s a reasonable annual cost, somewhere in the hundreds maybe, then it might be worth just taking on the cost. But if it’s, say, in the four digits and far out of budget, it might be a signal that the property’s risk is too high.
As for Byrd, for now, she and her husband plan to use loans to cover the damage to both of their properties. Her studio is set to reopen Dec. 6, but she was less clear on the timeline for repairs to her house.
“We have the ability to get a loan, not that we want to get a loan, but at least we have that ability so that we could rebuild. And a lot of people can’t even do that,” she said. “I feel fortunate that we’d be able to do that, but it is going to be a hardship for us financially”