Homeowners Be Aware

What's Flood Got to do With It with Rebecca Jones

• George Siegal • Season 2 • Episode 114

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December 19, 2023

114. What’s Flood Got to Do With It with Rebecca Jones

What if the house you're about to close on has a hidden secret that could turn your dream home into a nightmare? Join me and my guest Rebecca Jones, owner of EcoAdapt Strategies LLC, for an enlightening conversation that might save your biggest investment from falling victim to flood risks. From understanding your flood zone to asking the right questions when buying, we're pulling back the curtain on the often-overlooked aspect of homeownership, the flood risk.

Here’s how you can follow Rebecca:

Website: https://ecoadaptstrategies.com/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-jones-mba-cfm-960980210/

Some highlights from this episode:

  • 8:12 Improving Flood Mapping and Disclosure
  • 20:28 Floodplain Administration and Disclosure Laws
  • 27:50 Improve Flood Disclosure Laws and Insurance

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Here's the link to the trailer for the documentary film I'm making: Built to Last: Buyer Beware.

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Thanks for listening!

George Siegal:

Thank you for joining me on this week's Homeowners Be Aware podcast. Here's an important question for you to answer. Do you understand all the flood risks where you are living or where you're thinking of buying or renting a home? If you answered yes, pay attention to this episode because you'll realize there's a bunch of things you probably never considered. If your answer was no, you really need to listen because you are probably risking your biggest investment and the lives of you and your family. My guest today is Rebecca Jones. She's the owner of EcoAdapte Strategies LLC. She's going to share flooding information that every homeowner needs to be aware of. I'm George Siegal, and this is Homeowners Be Aware, the podcast that teaches you everything you need to know about being a homeowner. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me today.

Rebecca Jones:

Thanks, george. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm.

George Siegal:

Rebecca Jones, I'm from the Connect. We met at the New Jersey Association of Floodplain Managers. We had a great conversation and you said a lot of stuff that opened my eyes, because I was fascinated to hear the stuff you were talking about. Tell us about your expertise in the area of flooding, and then I want to talk about what homeowners should learn from this.

Rebecca Jones:

I worked for years for the Department of Environmental Protection in New Jersey and I have my own business now. I'm still working with New Jersey Association of Floodplain Management on a regular basis. Once you get into this flood thing, it's very hard to extract yourself. As you know, I took an interest in flood disclosure. I feel like there's some things missing from state to flood disclosure and there are things that people should be aware of.

George Siegal:

Yeah, sadly most people are not until it's too late. I know here in Florida I've mentioned this many times the seller is not required to tell the buyer that the house is flooded before. When you look at the country as a whole, do most people have to disclose it, or it's just every jurisdiction is different.

Rebecca Jones:

Well, they're getting. More and more states are putting it in place, but the quality of what they put in place is very subjective. They're not telling anybody about substantial damage and improvement law, which I find sad. They're not making real penalties for the owners to disclose. There are owners that don't know anything about flood history. They know it might have flooded, but then they don't really give complete information so they have plausible deniability. There's a lot of good that comes of it, but there's not a lot of teeth and there's nothing that gives you the actual NFI fee flood insurance quote, because FEMA will not let a regular person get flood insurance quotes.

George Siegal:

Yeah, it seems like the odds are stacked against the individual who's buying a house from the very beginning. Because you're already taking a risk, you're making a big investment, you're relying on other people helping you out. If we can educate the person buying the house to ask more questions and do more due diligence, we can probably save a lot of people grief.

Rebecca Jones:

I would say now what I would recommend to people. If you're buying a house, make your offer conditional on that owner getting the NFI fee insurance quote, because that will tell you whether it's been repetitively law, repetitive law structure, because it's going to be a higher rate than most. Yeah, also everybody should automatically.

George Siegal:

If you ask them, then it's a whole different ball game. If they don't tell you, they don't have to tell you. But if you specifically ask in your offer, then at least you're establishing a trail. That's a record that you wanted to find out, that information.

Rebecca Jones:

Yeah, I would ask them for that. I would ask them if they're paying a policy right now. And then there's such a thing called a glide path. That was put in place so that your policy will only go up 18% a year until it hits its full risk rate maximum. If you ask them about it, then you can maybe transfer over the policy and stay on that glide path and the rate won't go up quite as high as fast. If you just buy it and you don't ask to transfer the policy, it goes up to the full risk rate level. You're paying more money out immediately.

George Siegal:

I would ask a million questions until they told me to shut up just because of past experience. The first thing on your list of stuff, because you gave me some great things that we discussed. All this would be a three-hour podcast, but you got to know your flood zone, don't you?

Rebecca Jones:

Definitely, definitely. That's a requirement of most disclosure laws. They're going to tell you whether you're in an A, a Z, an A or a V zone. You're going to find that out from that, but that doesn't really tell you a whole lot, because the maps are based on a rainfall amount from maybe 30 years ago.

George Siegal:

Even people who think they're in an area that never floods. Surprise, surprise, they built a town a couple miles away and now where's all that water going? And it ends up right in your yard. How do you find out if the flood maps are bad and I'm already at a disadvantage because somebody's going to not tell me something? How do I really determine the flood zone?

Rebecca Jones:

Well, you can go on FEMA's website, look at the National Flood Hazard Layer and it will give you you punch in your address and it'll tell you whether you're in or out of a 100 year or a 500 year flood zone. With their latest mapping, that they've done.

George Siegal:

And then to take it a step further. It's crucial to know the flood history. So they may have that map, but I encourage people, walk around the neighborhood, talk to people that live there, find out what happens when they have a big rain. At least get a sense of what goes on, because we've found houses. When we were looking to buy a house where the water previously had come up to the front door, our realtor didn't tell us that. We had to find out from somebody walking by the house.

Rebecca Jones:

Yeah, how deep it is is not a factor of these flood maps that FEMA puts out. They also don't tell you like my sister lives in Florida. They don't say anything about hey, down the street from you is a pump station, and if the pump station goes out you're probably going to have more water than you would ever know you'd have.

George Siegal:

Now, one of the other things on here that caught my eye really early on was understanding early in the process whether you'd be required to carry flood insurance as conditioned of your mortgage. A lot of people are cash buyers now, so if they're buying a house with cash and nobody requires that, you still want to have coverage, don't you? I mean, you're betting at all that nothing bad is going to happen.

Rebecca Jones:

Definitely want to have coverage. You aren't going to know that you're in a mandatory purchase area, but if you know your flood zone and you're in a hundred year, you're in a mandatory purchase area. You should look at different types of policies. Having some insurance, even private insurance, is better than having no insurance at all. So there's different types of insurances. I'd encourage you to get somebody on that talks specifically about how that works. But yeah, you are all in. And the other thing if you're a buyer and you're buying a property and you know you're going to close in 30 days, apply for your insurance 30 days before you're going to close, because with the NFIP insurance, what they didn't want was people not carrying insurance until they knew it was going to flood and then buying the policy. So they have a 30 day freeze out period. So if you have a hurricane that comes within the first day 30 days of owning the property and you didn't ask for your insurance so that it'd be in effect at the day of closing, you're out of luck too.

George Siegal:

Yeah, and that's a horrible feeling when you're watching a storm that looks like it's headed in your direction and you don't have proper coverage Using the flood elevation certificate. That's important also.

Rebecca Jones:

Definitely and I would recommend to people. You could make getting a certificate a condition of sale, just like you would a home inspection. Have a surveyor go out there and survey your lowest floor that you're going to live on and get it, and he could do your elevation certificate. You'd be paying for it, but for a thousand fifteen hundred bucks you can get a more accurate understanding of what your risk is and what your premium would be.

George Siegal:

Now I kind of went past it because I thought we briefly touched on it, but I want to bring it up again. Knowing the past history of a property, if I'm buying your house and you're just you know it's not necessarily on your disclosure papers how do I find out if your house is flooded before other than asking Well, you can ask in our state.

Rebecca Jones:

It hasn't fully gone into effect, but they're supposed to put it out on a form. You know, in different states we'll have different forms and people will sign off on it. But I think a lot of this accuracy is going to be subject to case law. At the end of the day, if you think somebody lied to you, you're going to have to prove they lied to you.

George Siegal:

Well, we met a woman when we were filming for Bill Tulasp buyer. Beware, we were over in St Pete. We're a neighborhood over there. Eight hundred houses flooded during Hurricane Idalia and we met this one young lady who did not want to go on camera, and so you know I respect that, although it would have been a great interview. She bought her house and she found out after this flood that it had flooded previously. When it flooded previously, that owner was told to change the front door and upgrade certain things. They didn't do, it dumped the house to her and now she has to do it. Have you heard of that kind of stuff?

Rebecca Jones:

I haven't really heard about changing the front door so much. But when I worked for the state I would get people calling me up and they'd be a realtor saying, hey, my client wants to buy this house, but I understand that the local government is making me elevate the house before my buyer goes in and does all these kitchen upgrades and things like that. And I'm like, yeah, well, they're probably considered substantially damaged and you're going to have to elevate the house and that elevation or that determination, once it's made, is final. You're substantially damaged. You got to substantially improve the house before you pull another building code permit. It's also going to have to include elevation and ideally what should happen is maybe you go to the town and you find out if they have a substantial improvement or damage determination on the house and you use that as leverage and undercut the house, the value of the house, so that you can afford to elevate the house. These things should be done at sale.

George Siegal:

Yeah, it's doable, but it's expensive to elevate a house.

Rebecca Jones:

It is, but up in the Northeast here we had failing septic systems, and when the septic systems fail, people know it. It's a fact. Things are not up to the code and as a condition to sale the buyer will do it, or they're sold as is and the seller changes the septic system around. And those are not cheap. They're probably like $40,000, $50,000.

George Siegal:

Yeah, as a buyer, you don't want to get somebody kicking the can down the road, so it's your problem. I mean you can end up with a lot of expenses. You say we need better mapping. That seems like it's going to be a tough one. I mean, if they're so far behind, how do we get better maps?

Rebecca Jones:

Well, I think you need better maps for a lot of reasons public safeties, roadways where you park your car, all of that, and it's out there. But I think we really need to go to our legislators and say enough with giving planning money. You need to give us mapping money and we need to see modern, upgraded three-dimensional mapping that shows depth, water depth and can look at it over a variety of different rainstorms and events.

George Siegal:

Yeah, you would think that would be doable with all the technology that we have today.

Rebecca Jones:

Oh, it's doable, it's doable, it just isn't invested in.

George Siegal:

Now you brought up something else that I honestly can say I've never thought of, even though I've heard stories or seen stories about it, and that's we're always talking about elevating things, but people buy properties that are below flood grade, and it's led to some tragic circumstances. People have lost their lives. So are disclosures different about things that are below grade?

Rebecca Jones:

Basements. So Ida hit New York, new Jersey, a couple of years ago and 15 people died and there are videos of basements collapsing. If you're going to rent something that's below grade in a flood zone a known flood zone you should be aware of it. There should be disclosure of that. I had one construction official tell me that a basement which had blown out twice in the last five years but the house was worth so much money it's not being elevated and the basement's not being filled. But the lady was down in the basement and the basement collapsed and she was trying to get out and her husband and her son are upstairs trying to claw through the floor with a claw hammer to get her out through the floor. She's trying to breathe. It was horrible, absolutely horrible. The danger of a basement in a flood zone. When those things fail, the water comes in fast and violently.

George Siegal:

Aren't there local warnings for things like that? Because I know we're told when there's mandatory evacuations, do people just get caught off guard with that? How do people end up in a basement at a time of potential flooding?

Rebecca Jones:

They're probably trying to save whatever's stored down there, and your possessions are not worth it, and that's a sad thing.

George Siegal:

That is. That is extremely sad. So real time roadway vulnerability tools. They always hear a turnaround don't drown. There's always people in a storm that try to drive through something, but sometimes it might not be a major storm. There might just be water on the roadway for something. How do we improve this, Because a lot of people lose their lives with this.

Rebecca Jones:

Well, people have to keep in mind six inches your car is gonna. Your car is either gonna flood or it's gonna stall out. If it's a car a foot, your car is gonna float Two feet. Your car, your SUV, your truck, they're gonna wash away. I mean, so we're talking depth and depth maps. Within about three miles of my house, in the last two years, 10 people have died.

Rebecca Jones:

That big event in July where a family was washed away it was not very far from here, In a watershed that wasn't very big. They got a torrential rainstorm and it hit the emergency responders. They were very unprepared. But if you dump a whole bunch of rain in a very small watershed and you have culverts next to the road and the culverts overflow, it doesn't take much in the way of water at a current to wash things and people away.

Rebecca Jones:

What this new mapping, which is called Base Level Engineering, can do is it looks at the topography that's put together by a LiDAR technology, laser technology, and you can run flood models. Engineers can say, okay, here's where the bridges are, the culverts are. We're going to model this and figure out how deep the water's going and how fast the water's going, and I believe I read that FEMA was funding this in Kentucky, in these very narrow watersheds, to figure out what happens when you get a cloud burst and I'm talking an intense, short duration rainstorm. Because if you can model that in an area that has this Base Level Engineering technology, you know in advance where to close your roads, you can make people stay put, you can make them not try to drive away from a high area, you know just having the signals go out over your phones where your phones start beeping flash flood warning. People need more directed knowledge.

George Siegal:

Yeah, I mean that, and I think we've gotten to the point where a lot of times, we just ignore it because we just go ah, it's just one of those warnings, but it's not going to affect me, and it can lead to deadly consequences. If FEMA has this type of mapping technology, why aren't they using it more?

Rebecca Jones:

Well, it costs money, it requires an investment, it's. It takes leadership, it takes people saying this is important and it needs to be done, and you need to make an investment. This is a whole level of technology, greater than what they've done since the mid-70s. But they seem to put a lot of money into planning. And the problem with planning is you can make a planning requirement or a zoning requirement, but you got to back it up with science, and this is the science that allows that. And it's not just for how deep the flooding is, it's also for water quality or for storm water modeling. You know, if you're going to put a big building in somewhere, it'll tell you where's that water going to go.

George Siegal:

Yeah, I'm not one of those people that likes the federal government telling me really much of anything, but it seems like with disclosure laws that's kind of a no-brainer. Why can't that be a national thing? I mean, there's certain things that are national and for something like that that's such a life or death thing. Why should a local government be able to be sloppy and not do it when it could be done just on a national basis?

Rebecca Jones:

Well, I think disclosure itself is a different story. The mapping the mapping's got to be a federal thing. People don't have the money or the expertise of the contracting for that. But as far as the disclosure, fema really can't tell you what to do at the local level. Fema does not control land use and the only reason why the national flood insurance requires towns to adopt ordinance ordinances that have land use management is because of a concept called cooperative federalism. Basically, I'll give you the money, I'll cover your insurance laws, but you got to do floodplain management in return. So that's the cooperative federalism side.

Rebecca Jones:

But the 10th amendment says hey, we don't control land use, that's the states. So that's why all these flood disclosure laws are done by states. You're gonna have 50 different ones and you're not gonna get down to the real meat potatoes of how do you deal with climate change, increasing precipitation and how deep is the flooding? How fast is the water gonna go by my house? You're not gonna get any of that with these laws and you're not gonna get disclosure of insurance very well through these laws, either Insurance laws.

George Siegal:

A lot of this stuff goes way over my head. Why should flood disclosure include substantial damage and substantial improvement language? What does that mean?

Rebecca Jones:

Well, in these local ordinances they say if your property is damaged more than 50% or you improve your property more than 50%, you've hit the tipping point where you need to elevate your house or retrofit your house and these homeowners are gonna buy this property and they're not gonna know that. That's even a thing, that's not even in a disclosure law and it's in most people's ordinances.

George Siegal:

So what do we do about this?

Rebecca Jones:

You include a statement saying your property is subject to substantial damage and substantial improvement requirements. If you are in a municipality that's adopted a floodplain ordinance, you just keep it real simple. People who are shocked and they're like how can the government tell me what to do with my property? Well, the government can you know.

Speaker 3:

it's just why it's important, especially if you want them to help pay for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

George Siegal:

It would always not take the money. That's not really a solution.

Rebecca Jones:

It's a fraud thing. I mean, you know, when some of these towns in Tennessee were not in the flood insurance program until they got hit with these torrential storms and they were so desperate that FEMA said okay, we know you aren't in the national flood insurance program, We'll give you six months to adopt an ordinance and then we'll cover all your costs. So there's like no penalty for these towns and they end up joining later.

George Siegal:

Yeah, that's tough, because who are you really punishing? I mean, yeah, you could punish the town, but it's the people in the town. It's always us that end up paying for somebody else's negligence, it seems, or somebody else not doing their job.

Rebecca Jones:

Well, I get where people go with that. They're like, oh, one more regulation that we'd have to enforce. So I get where they go with it. But at the same time, this is happening in places that never happened before, where there's never been development before.

George Siegal:

You say floodplain administration, people or floodplain administration is never a popular thing. Is that because we just don't know how important it is?

Rebecca Jones:

Well, I think it's because after an event, you got to go to people that are devastated to say, yeah, I know you want to rebuild and get in as fast as you can, but you've had so much damage you now have to elevate your house above the base flood elevation and that's going to cost a lot of money, and insurance is going to cover it all, and even FEMA's subsidy, for that is only $30,000, which doesn't cost the cost of elevating. So yeah, they're not popular people.

George Siegal:

Although I did have several people tell me when we were doing interviews that a good thing when you're moving into a new community and you're looking for property, is to call the local floodplain manager, because these people will talk to them and give them what could be really good advice.

Rebecca Jones:

Absolutely. But I will also tell you, working for the state, I've also gone to towns and sort of like an enforcement mode saying hey, who's your floodplain administrator? And they're like I don't know. I said let's see your ordinance and your ordinance will say who it is. Usually it's a construction official. The guy's like I don't do that. I actually heard that from somebody. I don't do that, it's not my job, it's not my responsibility. So I mean some towns are good about it and some towns are not good about it.

George Siegal:

So maybe, if the town's not good about it, that might not be the place to live.

Rebecca Jones:

Hard to know. It's hard to know.

George Siegal:

Well, I think, knowing that we know what kind of damage occurs and what kind of problems there are, that if you don't feel you're going to get any local support, I think it takes a risky proposition to make it even more risky.

Rebecca Jones:

Yeah, yeah, generally, the towns that are better about this are the ones that are in the community rating system, which gives discounts, because they have to be very diligent about what they do and about trying to prevent flooding in the future.

George Siegal:

Now you said that people who want to put in new kitchens, baths, windows, siding, all those things. So when they go to do that, that's when they find out wow, if you're going to spend that money, that house has to go up higher. Yeah, yeah, so is there a way you could ask that question in the looking for the house process by. So that's where your investigation comes in and you find out what's been done, up to the point where you would be buying.

Rebecca Jones:

Yeah, yeah, that's good. Go talk to the floodplain administrator, because some of these ordinances have what's called cumulative, and they look at how much in the way of improvements or damages happened over the last 10 years and then they'll tell you they'll keep an accounting of how much work has been done. Some people go up to like 49% of the value of the improvements and stop, and so people come in and they're like, eh, I really don't like that kitchen, I want to rip it out. They go in for a permit, and that's when they find out.

George Siegal:

Now, is there a time period where that then the meter starts over, or is that for the life of the property?

Rebecca Jones:

It depends on how your ordinance is written in the town. So I think the other thing people should do is go read your flood ordinance and see what isn't allowed.

George Siegal:

Yeah, I bet you most people are going to say I'm not going to do that. I wouldn't understand that. Most people have never read their insurance policy. Now, house flippers do work and they don't always get permits. And then you buy the house and then you want to do something and there's no permit. So that's another thing people need to do. Their due diligence on when they're buying a house is to ask for that, to see what was permitted and what wasn't.

Rebecca Jones:

Absolutely. I would definitely go and ask. Sometimes the floodplain administrator catches these people doing this work without permits and then gives them a stop work order, but other times, sometimes it doesn't require a construction permit, so nobody's really looked at it. But people will say well, I know you did the roofing and siding and now you want to do the kitchen. Well, that heads you over the amount.

George Siegal:

So after a disaster does permitting sometimes get a little lax. So all those contractors that come in from out of town end up fixing things, but they are not getting permits.

Rebecca Jones:

That could possibly happen. Yeah, I think FEMA's tried to combat that a bit by offering the towns get post-disaster money for a declared disaster so they can get some extra help in. They didn't do that for years and years and they're doing it now, so that's been a helpful thing.

George Siegal:

And one of your other questions is why is it that most flood disclosure laws don't require NFIP flood insurance estimates?

Rebecca Jones:

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if you're going to have a risk rating system that goes around the whole country and tells you you can punch it into a system and get an answer for regular insurance, why can't you do that? For the federal government it's not a thing, and so when they put out their guidance document, they never said, oh, maybe you should get an estimate of this, but what? I would tell people whether or not your flood disclosure law says that. Ask the seller to get one for you. Find out what you're dealing with. Yeah.

George Siegal:

I think we need to make sellers do a lot more things. That could avoid a lot of problems. How do we go about enacting better disclosure laws If you're in a community where it's not very good? I mean, getting government to do anything seems like hurting cats. You don't see significant change happen very often. Any advice how people can make that happen?

Rebecca Jones:

Well, people like me work with the New Jersey Association of Floodplain Management. They go on podcasts like this. They just increase the general awareness. But I think really what's going to happen is you're going to get several iterations of these flood disclosure laws. People are going to say, hey, wait a minute, I bought this house. I didn't know it was substantially damaged. Why is that not in there, you know? Or I bought this house and these people are. Why are you not? You know I have to sue people. Why can't you put some teeth behind this, you know?

Rebecca Jones:

I think the other thing that's kind of not talked about is you should talk to your floodplain administrator, and I think people are going to go do that and I think they're going to use the floodplain administrator to say, hey, I was lied to where this person should have known. But I think it's going to end up being grassroots up. I, you know, I really. I really also think that consumers are going to have to ask the feds to change the privacy laws around flood insurance policies, and here's why the NFIP is $20.5 billion in debt to the federal treasury. We are paying $1.7 million in interest a day for this subsidized insurance policy and that's everybody which comes out to $2 a year per person that we're paying for this insurance program. And the insurance program isn't ensuring people, it's not healthcare, it's ensuring properties. So at some point we need to drop the mask it's not really helping anybody and let the chips fall where they may, because the property can't be moved. It's going to have the risk it's going to have, and just be clear about it.

George Siegal:

Okay, tell me if this is a completely stupid idea. Wouldn't it be great if houses had like their own Wikipedia page where the history could be recorded by people. I know that house flooded. I know this house had a fire. I know this house just a way that when you're looking on Zillow or realtorcom or any of those sites, that it's more than just eye candy but it's actual information that would help us make a smart purchase.

Rebecca Jones:

Well, there is. I think realtor is doing it, zillow is not, but realtor will at least tell you what zone you're in and they'll give you a risk from one to 10. I look at them and I'm not so like thrilled with them, but it's an attempt. And it's an attempt on privately using companies that do a lot of insurance risk modeling that FEMA also uses but doesn't make public. So yeah, there's better ways out there.

George Siegal:

Yeah, I think that would be interesting. So I mean it could also be. You could have crummy neighbors that just want to tag your house as being garbage just to punish you.

Rebecca Jones:

It's not. It's really kind of misleading, especially along the coast, because depending where the eye of a hurricane hits, you may get a lot of flooding or may not get much. You know, and that's the problem, like you're relying on a neighbor talking about a hurricane that didn't hit like 50 miles south of you on the coast and it affect you. But the next hurricane, you know, may be a dead hit, dead on hit and it may, and they're all different. They have surge or rainfall, or they have surge and rainfall. So you can't really go by that on the coast. Riverine areas it's a little more accurate, but not in, not along the coast.

George Siegal:

It sounds like transparency is really the big thing here. It's like we need more information and we get more information on things that are probably insignificant purchases. You know that you're just. If you're buying toys from the next door, you're buying something. People might ask more questions than they will on that $500,000 house they're buying.

Rebecca Jones:

It's hard to say. I think people are going to look at what's easiest, and we need simpler tools that are more informative. If we live in a three-dimensional world, we need to know how deep flooding is going to be or how deep storm surge is going to be, and make our decisions accordingly.

George Siegal:

Now, when I was talking to you at this event, I got the feeling and tell me if I'm wrong you seemed a little frustrated by the system in that sometimes you're banging your head against the wall. How do we turn that around? How can we make this better?

Rebecca Jones:

I think people need to be consumers and they need to be telling their legislators that, hey, we need better information and we're not getting enough information. The people that you interview that is a big part of this. It's the human stories to say. Here's how I'm impacted by it. As far as the roadway deaths, my neighbor is a fireman. He went out during Henri when it hit up here and he came back 40 minutes later. Why? Because the person they were talking to on the phone. By the time they got out to where this person was, the card floated and flipped and they could no longer get a signal. He came home. That's the kind of stuff In this day and age. It has a very big impact.

Rebecca Jones:

We can tell the human stories.

George Siegal:

We hear a lot If you don't evacuate right when they tell you leaving at the last second. We talked to a guy who, in this neighborhood that flooded, he was walking through holding his two dogs, swimming through his neighborhood, feeling jolts of electricity from the utility poles and everything. It sounded awful. When you wait till the last second to get out, all bets are off.

Rebecca Jones:

Yeah, yeah, it's tragic People dying in basements, people dying in roadways, people dying in manufactured homes that are not going to handle living in a hollow in Kentucky or being on Captiva Island or Sanibel Island.

George Siegal:

Sanibel was unbelievable. We were just down there and it's just different now, forever. I think it's going to take a long time the path back for some of the people we've talked to. Some people never recover from these disasters, do they?

Rebecca Jones:

No, no. I would say that people in manufactured homes have the worst of it because they're not considered houses, they're considered cars for insurance purposes. Fema does their best to try to work three different ways of trying to give them the most money to get them relocated or someplace else. It's affordable housing, but once you get flooded it's unaffordable to come back.

George Siegal:

Yeah, that's just tragic If you had to give some takeaway a bit of advice on the dismount here. What's the main thing people should do when they're going to buy a house? I don't want to say going to sell a house, because it's too late to fix it, but if you're going to buy a property, what's the number one thing people should do?

Rebecca Jones:

Know whether you're in or out of a flood zone 100 year, 500 year and then go inland or go as high as you can go.

George Siegal:

That seems to be a common theme, in that we went to this place called Babcock Ranch, which was down where the hurricane hit when Ian hit, but it's at 35 feet elevation, nowhere near the water, and they had no flooding and they built in a way that they had almost no damage. It's great to live right on the beach, but when you see people lose everything, maybe living 45 minutes inland is a smart choice.

Rebecca Jones:

Well, I would always tell people during the pandemic when I work from home. I'm living 60 feet above the river and I'm looking at it. Now, why do I subsidize insurance for people that don't want to elevate their houses and lower the risk? I would talk to floodplain administrators that would complain about it. I'm like understand. This is a serious thing. Hey, it touched me when I was a little kid. We had a rental house. It got hit in Hurricane Agnes 50 years ago. The house needed to be put back up on its foundation. It was never elevated. It's flooded a couple of times since. It's now commercial property. My dad spent an entire summer rehabbing the house and I was a little kid and I was bored. When you smell the combination of diesel fuel, sewage, mildew and rot in a house and you have to come back from that, that's an everyday reminder of it. Unless you've gone through it, it's hard to say I want to go through this again.

George Siegal:

People really need to hear the stories of victims and what they go through, because you never want to be in that position To have to deal with flooding, to have to deal with your house getting destroyed and if you are struggling to begin with, if your financial means aren't great, that's just life altering.

Rebecca Jones:

I'm not saying, hey, everybody's got to evacuate the coast. I'm just saying if you want to live there, you've got to spend the money and you can't build to the lowest building standard possible by law, which is what you're building to I'm going to put a plug in for your last house standing but you've got to be able to afford commercial construction, basically to live in these areas. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm not saying I will never visit a coastal area, because I do. I understand that the shore is going to look very different. For the ocean, for the beach and other people call it another part of the country it's going to look very different. It's going to be built differently. We're still going to have fun, we're still going to enjoy it, but it is going to be for people to have more means to be able to have resilient buildings and survive.

George Siegal:

There's a big difference between visiting it or owning property there, because when you visit it, you can go home at the end of the day. When you own the property, those people are going to be living in a nightmare for a long time. Yeah. Hey Rebecca, I'm so glad we finally got to get you on the podcast. We both had some scheduling challenges. Thank you very much. This is great advice and I think people are going to get a lot of great information from you.

Rebecca Jones:

Thank you. I hope it helps people. I really do. It's devastating. Flooding is devastating. I'm glad you're shining a light on people's stories, because the stories are really what makes it real and makes a difference.

George Siegal:

All right, Thanks. The best ways to reach out to Rebecca are in the show notes. If you have a story about your home, good or bad, I'd love for you to share it with me. There's a contact form in the show notes. Reach out to me and you might be a guest on an upcoming podcast. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.

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George Siegal

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