What astounds me is how quickly America moves on from environmental catastrophes. As an example, a huge part of Florida was pretty much devastated earlier this year but now you would never know. The electricity and other services were back up in days and all evidence of destroyed buildings gone as if the trash was just collected.
If a similar extreme weather event hit the UK, that would be all you would hear about for months and there would be no instant clear up. The populace would be deeply traumatised and would not move on from the tragedy. America is different, resilient and it is rare for articles like this one to make the light of day.
Directly from their website: https://www.fema.gov/flood-insurance. This encourages everyone to build in places that shouldn't be built in the first place.
"Floods can happen anywhere — just one inch of floodwater can cause up to thousands of dollars' worth of damage. Most homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Flood insurance is a separate policy that can cover buildings, the contents in a building, or both, so it is important to protect your most important assets — your home, your business, your possessions.
The NFIP provides flood insurance to property owners, renters and businesses, and having this coverage helps them recover faster when floodwaters recede. The NFIP works with communities required to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations that help mitigate flooding effects.
Flood insurance is available to anyone living in one of the 22,600 participating NFIP communities. Homes and businesses in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from government-backed lenders are required to have flood insurance."
Yes. I recently used the online calculator and it quoted me $4200/yr for $250K of coverage.
I live in a "zone X" neighborhood. Interestingly, it appears that significant areas around me are all "zone X" but personal experience and common sense show vastly different flood risks. Meaning there are lots built on the edges of "100 year" flood areas in "zone X" and properties 50-100 feet higher in elevation in the same neighborhood. Surely the risk would actually be quite different? I guess the models aren't particularly fine-grained.
Resilience and foolishness are very close together.
I can't imagine living in a place where you have to rebuild every X years when you can just move somewhere else. The people are just used to it.
This will get worse and at some point you have to ask if the areas are actually habitable or if it's just a colossal waste of resources to live there.
As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[4][5] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[4][6] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.
Japan is similar in terms of moving on from environmental catastrophes. Due to it's geographic location, the number and severity of earthquakes and tsunamis not to mention the regular stuff like wildfires, flooding etc. there's just a lot of devastation and loss. Japan does memorialize the larger events of course and there's public memorials at annual schedules, etc.
> Aira caldera is surrounded by the major city of Kagoshima which has a population of more than 900,000. Residents do not mind small eruptions because they have measures in place for protection. For example, school students are required to wear hard helmets for protection against falling debris.
I'm not sure that a country being "resilient" in that manner is a good thing. It's callous towards the individuals involved, who may not be as quick to move on, emotionally or otherwise. And moving on quickly doesn't exactly encourage learning from tragedy, which really is its only upside.
If a similar extreme weather event hit the UK, that would be all you would hear about for months and there would be no instant clear up. The populace would be deeply traumatised and would not move on from the tragedy. America is different, resilient and it is rare for articles like this one to make the light of day.