CBS News
Most U.S. homeowners hit by Hurricane Helene don’t have flood insurance
Homeowners whose properties were swamped by Hurricane Helene’s torrential rainfall face a serious problem beyond drying out: how to pay for the cleanup.
That’s because most Americans, including in the communities ravaged by the massive storm, lack flood insurance.
As the aftermath of the hurricane’s ruinous and deadly route across the Southeast illustrates, the alarming lack of flood insurance coverage among an overwhelming majority of people impacted serves as a cautionary tale for the rest of us, experts say.
Along Florida’s barrier islands that run from St. Petersburg to Clearwater, mansions, single-family homes, apartments, mobile homes, restaurants, bars and shops were completely destroyed or heavily damaged by the storm in minutes. In hard-hit Pinellas and Taylor counties, victims with storm coverage ranged from 25% to 5%, respectively, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
Outside of the Sunshine State, the picture is even more dire, with just 1% of homeowners who sustained flooding from Helene holding flood insurance, the institute said.
One underlying factor is that flooding is not covered by a homeowner’s policy and must be purchased separately, often from the federal government. Flood insurance is required on government-backed mortgages for homes in areas classified as high risk by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Many banks mandate flood insurance in high-risk zones as well, but that doesn’t prevent some homeowners from dropping their coverage once their mortgage is paid off.
Calculations on how many homeowners are at risk and how many are covered vary, but all are disconcerting.
FEMA estimates only 4% of homeowners across the country have flood insurance, even though 99% of U.S. counties have been impacted by flooding since 1996. The Insurance Information Institute offers a slightly higher count, stating that about 6% of U.S. homeowners have flood insurance, with most, or 67%, covered through the National Flood Insurance Program run by FEMA, and 33% via a private insurer.
People have “a false sense of security”
When buying or renting a place to live, most people’s main consideration in deciding whether or not to buy insurance for flooding is whether the property is in a high-risk zone. But that creates a “false sense of security,” according to Georgina Sanchez, a faculty fellow and research scholar at the Center for Geospatial Analytics at North Carolina State University. “This perception can discourage residents from flood insurance,” as occurred in western and northern North Carolina, Sanchez told CBS MoneyWatch.
Sanchez’s center has coordinated its research with the Brooklyn-based nonprofit First Street, which compiled a flood database that allows people to look up individual locations nationwide to access the present and future risk of property flooding in those areas.
“Many of our homes, businesses and infrastructure are situated within 800 feet, or roughly two city blocks, from the edge of the 100-year floodplain,” areas viewed as susceptible to being inundated by floodwaters and used to set insurance rates, said Sanchez.
A recent nationwide study found 24% of locations where people are building to be located in that buffer zone, or immediately outside the 100-year flood zone. “We all love to live near water,” she said. “But we’re at a point where we have to ask, do we want to keep putting people in harm’s way.”
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has not endorsed Donald Trump, the financial giant said Friday after the former president claimed in a social media post that the executive, America’s most prominent banking industry leader, was supporting him.
“Jamie Dimon has not endorsed anyone. He has not endorsed a candidate,” Joe Evangelisti, a spokesperson for the New York-based bank told CBS News in a statement.
The denial came after the Republican presidential nominee posted a screenshot on his Truth Social account falsely stating, “New: Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has endorsed Trump for president.”
Trump told NBC News he didn’t know about the post, which was still visible on his account as of 5:10 p.m. Eastern Time.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Seemingly coming from a verified account on X earlier in the day, the post swiftly drew attention from various pro-Trump accounts before Trump weighed in.
Before Trump won the Republican nomination for president, Dimon had expressed support for former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley during the party’s primaries.
Friday’s Truth Social post is not the first in which Trump incorrectly suggested winning support by a high-profile person. The former president in August posted AI-generated images claiming that Taylor Swift was backing him. The superstar endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris a few weeks later.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a new way for Americans to look up how high or low levels of viruses like COVID-19 and flu are in their local area for 2024.
This year’s new “community snapshot” is the CDC’s latest attempt to repackage its data in one place for Americans deciding when to take extra precautions recommended in its guidelines, like masking or testing, going into the fall and winter.
It centers around a sweeping new weekly metric called “acute respiratory illness.” The metric’s debut fulfills a goal laid out by agency officials months ago, aiming to measure the risk of COVID-19 alongside other germs that spread through the air on a single scale from “minimal” to “very high.”
“The biggest thing we’re trying to do here is not just to have a dashboard. It’s not just putting a bunch of information in front of people and kind of expecting them to navigate all of that,” the CDC’s Captain Matthew Ritchey told CBS News.
Ritchey, who co-leads the team that coordinates data fed into the snapshots, said the CDC gathers experts from across the agency every Thursday to walk through the week’s data coming from hospitals and emergency rooms, wastewater sampling and testing laboratories.
“All those groups come together, talking through their different data systems and their expertise to say, ‘this is what’s catching my eye.’ And then that’s what we want to tee up for the public,” he said.
Ritchey cited early signs of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, starting to increase this season as expected in Florida, which is called out at the top of this week’s report.
Behind the CDC’s new “respiratory illness” metric
Based on emergency room data, the “acute respiratory illness” metric, grades overall infections in each state or county from “minimal” to “very high.”
That is defined broadly to capture infections from COVID-19 and influenza, as well as a range of other diseases that spread through the air like whooping cough or pneumonia.
A previous definition the agency had relied on called “influenza-like illness” had been too narrow, Ritchey said, with requirements like fever which excluded many patients.
A separate set of standalone levels is still being calculated each week for COVID-19, influenza and RSV.
The formula behind those levels is based on historical peaks and valleys in emergency room trends, which were analyzed from each state.
“We’ve looked over the last couple of years and understand the low points of the year, based on our lab testing, and at that point we say, that’s the baseline or ‘minimal’ category,” said Ritchey.
How to see what COVID variants are dominant
Not all of the CDC’s data made the cutoff to be included on the first layer of the agency’s new snapshot.
For example, while the front page for the general public does mention current SARS-CoV-2 variants like XEC, details about its prevalence remain on a separate webpage deeper into the CDC’s website.
“That whole jumble of lots of acronyms or letters and things like that just don’t overly resonate with them,” he said.
For flu, the CDC is still publishing more detailed weekly updates designed for experts, through the agency’s “FluView” reports.
Those include a weekly breakdown of the “type” – influenza A or B – and “subtype” – like H3N2 or H1N1 – that is being reported to the agency from testing laboratories.
Health authorities closely watch trends in flu subtyping as well, since they can help explain changes in the severity of the virus as well as vaccine effectiveness.
Future changes to come
The snapshot remains a work in progress as the CDC gathers feedback from the public as well as local health departments.
“We have a continuum of users, from the public health practitioner to my parents, providing feedback on how they’re using it. More often, the feedback we get is, ‘hey, I use this to help inform how I work, or talk with my elderly parents,'” he said.
One big change coming later this season is the resumption of nationwide hospitalization data, after a pandemic-era requirement for hospitals to report the figures to the federal government lapsed.
A new rule by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to start collecting the data again for COVID-19, influenza and RSV is due to take effect in November.
“As that data starts to come in again and gets to a robust enough level, the plan is that it would be incorporated on the site as well,” he said.
Another long term goal is to add information specific to other respiratory illness culprits beyond COVID-19, influenza and RSV.
“We want to be able to talk about maybe some of the other things that are not the big three as well, like mycoplasma and some of those other things too, that we know peak during certain parts of the season,” he said.
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