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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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I don't want to discount the people who lost land and homes due to the creation of dams and reservoirs (My great grandpa purportedly lost his home due to some of this), but that feels really different than losing a coastal town due to rising sea levels.
Obviously from an American perspective, FEMA is very imperfect, but that we have structures and systems like FEMA makes it feel like people in coastal towns that get "washed away" will have some form of safety net to fall back on.
Am I missing something in that assessment?
FEMA doesn’t compensate lost land, and shouldn’t. Towns and cities who want to remain in environmentally unstable places are gonna have to figure that out.
States, towns, and cities could probably use eminent domain to take land that is going to flood too often. That way the owners would get some value and have to move. The problem is that then the rest of us are paying for land that’s going to vanish, and it’s a harder sell than paying for a reservoir.
FEMA doesn't do that? I def agree they shouldn't, but I thought that was one of the things they did.
The eminent domain bit feels like its probably too big for anything smaller than a large city to handle, so seems like states handling that is a good move. Don't suppose you know of any states with any active lines of effort in that direction?
FEMA is only for managing the emergency (usually natural disasters, but it’s also for man made ones like damn breaks or things like the train derailment in Ohio a few years back).
The damage is supposed to be covered by insurance, which is largely private except in places like Florida where most private insurers have left because it’s not ~~wildly profitable~~ viable, and only a public insurer exists.
I don’t know of any states working on this, but MA, Virginia, and North Carolina all have capes and peninsulas full or residents and homes that are at great danger in the future (if not already. Florida is obvious too, but they are actively doing the opposite by incentivizing (and legislating) people to ignore climate change.