Flooding hits many coastal Long Island properties more than once

Long Island's coastal communities are among the most likely in the nation to experience repeated damage from flooding, with heavily hit areas concentrated along the South Shore, new data shows.

There were 10,603 "repetitive loss properties" on Long Island and an additional 9,810 in the rest of New York State, according to data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Those are structures whose owners have received two or more payouts of at least $1,000 over a 10-year period from the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides coverage to people in flood hazard areas at discounted rates. 

As authorities in Florida assess this week's damage from Hurricane Milton, the data shows that New York is also among the states most at risk of flood damage. Across the country, there were roughly 250,000 properties whose owners submitted two or more claims, with more than half in the top four states: Louisiana, Texas, Florida and New York. 

New York's repetitive loss properties were heavily concentrated on the South Shore of Long Island, from Long Beach to Westhampton. On the North Shore, there were clusters in Centre Island and Bayville. 

In low-lying Mastic Beach, 109 properties appear on the repetitive loss list. Parts of the village are so often inundated by storms and high tides that once-green neighborhoods are now bordered by ghost forests — leafless, silver-trunked trees that have slowly died from excess salt water.

Louis Blanton, 36, rents in the area and said many people have considered moving after experiencing repeated flood loss.

For those who stay, he said, "You might want to invest in a canoe."

New flooding maps

Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Manhattan, noted that the data captures only a fraction of properties that experience chronic flooding damage.

"In order to get on this list, you have to have insurance," Weber said. "There’s so much risk that people are facing without the financial safety net of flood insurance."

The council found that 9,672 repetitive loss properties in New York have become uninsured since those claims were made, including 3,546 on Long Island.

Robert Kennedy, the mayor of Freeport, said flooding there is a "continuous battle." Some homeowners pay $4,000 a year for flood coverage — and when insurance becomes unaffordable, many simply drop it.

The cost, he said, has "increased dramatically" since Superstorm Sandy hit in 2012.

Since 2022, FEMA's insurance pricing has been based on the risk of each property rather than a calculation of risk for a broader zone. "It's an individual risk rating," said David Clausen, CEO of Coastal Insurance Strategies in Rocky Point. "And there's a surcharge for sure for repetitive losses." 

In Freeport, 1,228 properties received two or more flood damage payments, according to the FEMA data. Of those, 25% since have become uninsured. 

These people still own flood-prone properties and will have to pay the full cost of repairs if — or more likely when — they are flooded again.

To help people understand the risks, Weber and her colleagues are working to make the FEMA data more accessible.

Until recently, repeat flooding data was unavailable even to professional floodplain managers, and Weber said FEMA's data sets are still unwieldy for most people.

So Weber and her colleagues used the large FEMA data sets to create an interactive map that shows at a glance which states have high numbers of repetitive loss properties.

Weber hopes the mapping tool will be helpful to advocates, journalists and researchers, as well as residents who are educating themselves about flood risk "as flooding becomes more of a problem in their communities."

Changing risk patterns

While FEMA’s newly released data provides new details on flood-prone areas, it also underscores climate experts’ long-standing concern that the agency’s assessment of risk is out of date.

The National Flood Insurance Program sets standards for land use decisions in floodplain areas, and communities that want to participate in the program must adhere to those building standards.

But these codes haven’t been fully updated since the 1970s, when the National Flood Insurance Program was first established, and they don’t account for today’s higher sea levels and fiercer storms.

The Natural Resources Defense Council's maps show that nearly a quarter of the repetitive loss properties in New York, and a quarter nationwide, are outside the "special flood hazard areas," zones where the insurance program's floodplain management regulations must be enforced.

"There are a lot of properties that are not on a FEMA map, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t at risk," said Bill Nechamen, a former floodplain management coordinator for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

In Southampton, 24% of repetitive loss properties lie outside FEMA's special flood hazard areas. In Long Beach, it's more than a third. 

Flood experts warn that FEMA’s outdated hazard maps are undercounting flood risk.

As the planet warms and seas rise, Nechamen said, floodplain managers "need to look at the future floodplain as well as the current floodplain."

Over the next 25 years, sea levels around Long Island are expected to rise 13 to 25 inches — and as much as 69 inches by the end of the century, according to the DEC.

Flood mitigation efforts

The interactive map also suggests that New York lags behind the national average in mitigating future risk for these flood-prone properties. Nationwide, 16% of properties experiencing repetitive loss have benefited from some kind of mitigation afterward.

That could include elevating an individual house or restoring a wetland that absorbs stormwater. For Nassau County, 339 out of 6,830, or 5%, of repetitive loss properties have been mitigated. In Suffolk County, 331 of 3,773, or 8.7%, of repetitive loss properties have been mitigated.

In Hempstead, mitigation measures have included hardening the shoreline against incoming storms. 

Brian Devine, a spokesman for the Town of Hempstead, wrote in an email that the town has replaced and enforced bulkheading along shores and channels. The town also has worked with the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery to complete $96 million in hazard mitigation projects since 2021.

"We are constantly upgrading infrastructure to combat flooding," Devine wrote.

Garrett Guttenberg, executive vice president of the Denis A. Miller Insurance Agency in Long Beach, pointed to new and increasing risks.

He said FEMA's traditional calculations of risk also don't take into account the new realities of where floodwaters are coming from. As climate change accelerates, more areas are getting flooded from heavy rainstorms, not just from coastal inundation.

Yet properties in FEMA’s X Zones — considered areas of low flood risk because they lie above the 500-year flood level — are not required to have flood insurance.

"If you have a house on Long Island — anywhere — and you don’t have a flood policy, you are doing yourself a disservice," Guttenberg said. "It could happen to anybody, anywhere."