FEMA to Florida cities hit by hurricanes: Rebuild higher or lose your flood insurance

MIAMI — The Gulf of Mexico invaded thousands of homes on Florida’s west coast this year, and many will have to be gutted and rebuilt higher — some a full story off the ground.

The process makes communities safer the next time a storm comes aground, but it’s expensive and painful for the people who have to foot the bill, often without much financial help from the government.

Sidestepping that decades-old state and federal rule comes with pricey consequences, as Fort Myers Beach residents discovered last week.

FEMA announced that starting next year, Fort Myers Beach residents will no longer get a 25% discount on their flood insurance — an average increase of about $300 per resident— because FEMA found that rebuilding efforts from previous storms weren’t good enough. And if the town makes any future mistakes in the rebuilding process from this year’s double whammy of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, residents could lose federal flood insurance altogether.

The National Flood Insurance Program provides nearly every flood insurance policy in the state of Florida, and flood insurance is required for any property with a mortgage in a flood zone. Without the NFIP, future development would come with huge hurdles.

“FEMA will continue to provide technical assistance to Fort Myers Beach to meet the required program standards and end probation as soon as practicable,” a FEMA spokesperson told the Miami Herald in an emailed statement.

The 2024 hurricane season was another above-average one, with record-breaking activity in July with destructive Hurricane Beryl, which hit Texas, and three hurricane landfalls in Florida: Category 1 Hurricane Debby in August, Category 4 Hurricane Helene in September and Category 3 Hurricane Milton just two weeks later.

November 30 marks the official end of another battering hurricane season and the start of yet another off-season of frantic rebuilding. All three landfalls in the Sunshine State caused flooding that will force thousands of Floridians to raze and rebuild their homes, thanks to a rule enshrined in both federal and state law.

The “50% rule” requires homes with damage exceeding half the value of their home to be torn down and rebuilt to the newest standards. It’s a city planner’s dream, a force that ensures the new wave of homes built after a hurricane is more likely to survive the next one.

READ MORE:‘On borrowed time.’ Why coastal Florida keeps rebuilding after storms like Hurricane Ian

But for residents, it can be a nightmare. After every storm, residents protest the high costs of reconstruction that often force people to sell, not stay. After Hurricane Ian, Cape Coral and Lee County tried to help residents get around the rule after intense public pushback. And after Milton, some residents in the Sunny Shores neighborhood in Manatee County started a petition to find an exemption.

Experts say what happened in Fort Myers Beach is a warning for other governments just beginning the burdensome and lengthy rebuilding process.

“As the floodplain manager for a community, part of your job is to protect the residents from themselves,” said Del Schwalls, a Florida-based floodplain management consultant. “You have to fight the mindset of ‘it’ll never happen to me, it’ll never happen again’.”

“At some point in time, you’ve got to stop throwing good money after bad.”

A town on probation

This spring, FEMA dinged five southwest Florida communities for issues with rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Ian: Unincorporated Lee County, Cape Coral, Estero, Bonita Springs and Fort Myers Beach.

The federal agency said, at first, that the municipalities didn’t keep track of which homes needed to be razed and rebuilt and allowed some residents to rebuild with no permits. That meant homes were being built too low, leaving them in the path of future storm flooding. Officials protested, calling FEMA a “villain in this nightmare.”

Eight months later, four out of five of those communities were found to be mostly in compliance with the rule. FEMA accepted the reports they filed with plans to fix the issues the agency found and their commitments to rebuild better in the future. All of them get to keep their hard-won discounts on federal flood insurance.

All except for Fort Myers Beach.

FEMA said the town still has not proved that all newly built or repaired homes in flood zones follow all the rules, that the town isn’t doing a good job of policing properties that aren’t following those rules and Fort Myers Beach has not demolished any properties that were built in flood zones without permission.

READ MORE: Southwest Florida may keep flood insurance discounts after all as FEMA reevaluates

In a letter, FEMA officials said the punishment was a $50 fine for each flood insurance policy opened or renewed in the future, a loss of the 25% discount all residents enjoyed and at least a two-year probation.

Fort Myers Beach officials had no comment for the Miami Herald on the agency’s decision.

Schwalls, who served as floodplain consultant to Lee County and Bonita Springs, said improper rebuilding after a storm is a statewide problem and he wasn’t surprised that FEMA found issues to correct in all five communities.

“When you audit any community after a horrific hurricane like Ian you’re going to find mistakes,” he said.

“Someone is substantially damaged but does repairs without a permit, that happens. It’s not that the city permitted that work, it’s that they didn’t catch it. But communities are supposed to catch that.”

However, he has noticed that FEMA has taken a stronger interest in recent years in making sure communities are following the rules about reconstruction after storms, potentially as a reaction to the increased tempo of disasters with massive repair bills. And they found plenty of problems in Southwest Florida, especially in Fort Myers Beach.

Schwalls said he expects more communities in the future to continue to try to challenge the 50% rule as climate change makes worse storms more likely. But he thinks the rule is “here to stay,” at least if communities want to continue to enjoy heavily subsidized flood insurance from the federal government.

“It used to be a voluntary rule. Now it’s in the Florida building code. If every community dropped out of the NFIP you’d still have to do it,” he said. “There is no way out of it.”