Many people tend to discount a flood can happen to them since they aren’t in a 50 or 100-year flood plain. But as many Houstonians can attest in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, that may not count for much!
Here are 10 little known facts about flooding & flood insurance worth knowing!
The sun peeked out Wednesday afternoon for a few minutes over west Houston reminding everyone briefly that it still is there. This was followed by heavy rains stretching from Houston to almost New Orleans as Tropical Storm Harvey moved back onshore and headed in a northeasterly direction. The end of the rain may be in sight but it will take weeks or months before all the floodwaters in Houston and elsewhere recede and dry ground reappears.
Homeowners whose homes have been flooded, will be anxious to review the damage as quickly as possible. Here are some guidelines from FEMA I believe is important to share.
The Dallas / Fort Worth area recorded the wettest May on record with 16.97 inches of rain. We also survived the second wettest spring on record with 25.04 inches of rain from March through May. According to the National Weather Service, parts of D/FW have received between 16 and 24 inches over the past 180 days.
I received an email from one of my commercial insurance companies on Tuesday. It informed all their independent agents of an immediate moratorium on writing new policies in Baltimore, Maryland after Monday night’s rioting.
I helped several people with their home insurance last week. They all own or are buying homes in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. In each case I discussed what their new home policy covers, but one seasoned home owner asked me something different and that was what does his policy not cover.
The rain started falling in Colorado on Wednesday, September 11th. It rained, and rained, and continued to rain over the next several days. The rain on the 12th was particularly heavy when 4 to 6 inches of rain fell in less than a 12 hour period. In some places over 15 inches of rain fell during the multi-day storm. The creeks and streams rose and rivers overflowed their banks. According to the Colorado Division of Water Resources, water in many of the rivers and creeks had flows of over 1,000% than normal levels at the height of the flooding.
?On Friday, January 25th, an earthquake measuring 4.8 on the Richter scale occurred in the east Texas town of Timpson. Timpson is about 172 miles south east of Dallas. The earthquake occurred at 1:01 a.m. and was felt in east Texas, southwest Arkansas and western Louisiana. No injuries or damage were reported.
?Last Monday’s blog post was, “An introduction to flood insurance.” If you missed it, here’s the link for it http://50.87.248.161/~wiseinsu/an-introduction-to-flood-insurance/. It provides a good foundation of flood insurance. I thought I’d share some interesting tidbits of information I learned in writing that post as I always learn something in every blog I write!
?There are always an interesting set of numbers about any storm like Sandy. Here are some of the ones I thought to be interesting,
– 932 – The number of miles across / wide for the storm. This distance is about the distance from New York to Jacksonville, Florida. At its largest, Sandy would have covered almost 1/3 of the United States.
– 13.88 – The height in feet for the storm surge that occurred from the wind pushing the water that high.
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