FEMA Assistance Available for Camp Mystic Flood, AP Reports on NFIP Implications
CSFI and other experts were interviewed for background purposes to inform the Associated Press (AP)’s coverage of the tragic Camp Mystic flood. DR-4879-TX occured on July 2 and was declared a disaster on July 6. To date, 1,371 applications totalling $11.8M in Individual & Households Program Dollars have been approved by FEMA. FEMA reminds victims that they can continue applying for assistance: “Survivors with homeowners, renters’ or flood insurance should file a claim first. By law, FEMA cannot duplicate benefits for losses covered by insurance. If your policy does not cover all your damage expenses, you may then be eligible for federal assistance.”
In the recent story, “FEMA removed dozens of Camp Mystic buildings from 100-year flood map before expansion, records show,” AP demonstrates how flood risk expands beyond flood zone boundaries. In response to appeals, “FEMA in 2013 amended the county’s flood map to remove 15 of the camp’s buildings from the hazard area. Records show that those buildings were part of the 99-year-old Camp Mystic Guadalupe, which was devastated by last week’s flood. After further appeals, FEMA removed 15 more Camp Mystic structures in 2019 and 2020 from the designation. Those buildings were located on nearby Camp Mystic Cypress Lake, a sister site that opened to campers in 2020 as part of a major expansion and suffered less damage in the flood.”
Sarah Pralle reviewed the amendments for AP and “noted that some of the exempted properties were within 2 feet (0.6 meters) of FEMA’s flood plain by the camp’s revised calculations, which she said left almost no margin for error. She said her research shows that FEMA approves about 90% of map amendment requests, and the process may favor the wealthy and well-connected. A study she published in 2021 with researcher Devin Lea analyzed more than 20,000 buildings that had been removed from FEMA flood maps. It found that the amendments occurred more often in places where property values were higher, more white people lived and buildings were newer.”
Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications at First Street, “said FEMA’s flood insurance map underestimates flood risks. That’s because it fails to take into account the effects of heavy precipitation on smaller waterways such as streams and creeks. First Street’s model puts nearly all of Camp Mystic Guadalupe at risk during a 100-year flood.”
In response to the AP, FEMA wrote, “Flood maps are snapshots in time designed to show minimum standards for floodplain management and the highest risk areas for flood insurance. They are not predictions of where it will flood, and they don’t show where it has flooded before.”
In his 2024 report, Senator Cassidy (R-LA) explained Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs): “Even though FEMA is required to ‘assess the need to revise and update all floodplain areas and flood risk zones’ every five years, they are updated less frequently in reality. Because FEMA does not have a uniform system of monitoring changes in topography, the pace of updates has varied with disparate results. Most FIRMs are estimated to be between fifteen and twenty years old, with some last updated in the 1980s. Since the implementation of Risk Rating 2.0, the use of flood zones for calculating premiums has discontinued although flood maps are still used for floodplain management purposes, namely in identifying flood zones. However, there is evidence suggesting that the problems of using FIRMs for pricing purposes extend to identifying flood zones. Case in point, the inconsistency surrounding FIRMs could explain why a relatively high percentage of NFIP claims have originated from areas not originally designated as SFHAs.”