Unnatural disasters

For the third time in just two years, the residents of Topsail Island, N.C., are cleaning up after a hurricane. Really cleaning up.

Hurricanes Bonnie, last week, and Fran and Bertha in 1996 caused about $125 million in damage to homes, roads and man-made dunes on this 26-mile spit of sand in the Atlantic. Luckily for the 3,200 who live there, American taxpayers, doing business as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, are picking up the tab in the form of cash grants, low-interest loans and subsidized flood insurance.

With such a no-questions-asked guarantee, rebuilding again and again on an island that’s in the path of just about every hurricane that tracks up the Eastern Seaboard doesn’t look quite so foolish.

The 1968 legislation that created the current disaster-relief program clearly was intended to aid communities in recovering from once-in-a-lifetime storms and other natural calamities. Instead, it has helped finance — and re-finance — risky developments from the landslide-prone hillsides of California to the floodplain of the Mississippi to the barrier islands of the East Coast.

And it’s not all FEMA’s fault. It is required by Congress to rebuild infrastructure, such as roads and water lines, once they’re already built and it does not have the option of raising premiums on flood insurance — a bargain at $300 to $500 a year for homeowners — in regions proven to be especially high in risk. That’s why, for example, one Topsail Beach building has been totally rebuilt twice and substantially repaired six times in the last 15 years at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $460,000 — more than its assessed value.

FEMA does come in for some blame here. After seeing ample evidence that its disaster-relief program was, in fact, encouraging a floodplain building boom, Congress in 1982 enacted additional legislation to restrict federal spending in areas deemed certain to flood. FEMA officials now admit that in the aftermath of Fran and Bertha, they caved to local pressure and funneled about $4 million into a restricted part of Topsail, money that was used to expand local roads and to enlarge a sewer system, thus allowing further development.

In the last five years, the federal government has spent $40 billion on flood relief, more than twice what it spent during the previous 10 years. And it is estimated that as much as $15 billion of that went to rebuild flooded buildings that had been rebuilt on the taxpayers’ dime at least once before.

Beachfront living is the dream of many Americans but Topsail Island, like many low-lying coastal areas, was long uninhabited because people just plain knew better than to build there. Common sense reforms, such as charging flood-insurance premiums that truly reflect the risk and denying coverage altogether in areas certain to flood, are needed if the country’s disaster-relief program is to help genuine victims of catastrophe and not just bail out those who engage in wishful thinking.