As a water resources engineering professional with an expertise in flood risk management, I saw the great potential of FEMA’s Risk Rating 2.0 to help reduce tragic flood impacts. By using actuarial methods, it aligns flood insurance cost with actual risk. This provides a direct financial incentive to avoid flood prone areas which should, over time, help reduce overall flood risk and the potential for flood tragedies. Read Your Risk builds on FEMA’s effort by providing people the information they need to see how location drives flood insurance rates. That is, it gives people the know-how to avoid flood prone / high cost insurance areas. Over the long haul, this strategic combination of enhanced information and better aligned insurance cost/risk will reduce tragic flood loss.
3 responses to “Why I created Read Your Risk”
Loving in Northeast Arkansas, our flood policy is 2591.00 annually.
Can you please look in to this and let me know why it’s so expensive.
8772 Hwy 62 West
Imboden, AR 72434
Misty,
Will run an analysis for your county and get back to you. But, given where you live it is likely your proximity to Eleven Point River, the size of the river, and the ground elevation at your home relative to the river. Will also post a map for your county so you can see how rates vary across your community.
Paul Cocca
ReadYourRisk.com
Misty,
So I took a closer look and my initial guesses were only partly correct. The reasons for your high rates are:
– Your home is within about 280 ft of a stream south of your house, which results in a distance-to-river multiplier of 1.1. Not a high multiplier, but if you lived farther away you would be getting a discount (e.g., would be 0.87 if your house was 1,000 ft away).
– The land on which your home sits is at about the same elevation as the land adjacent to the stream. This results in an elevation-relative-to-river multiplier of 0.67. This multiplier would be more like 0.30 if your home was 23 ft above the stream.
– The land on which your home sits is about 45 ft lower in elevation that the land in a 500 meter circle surrounding your home. This gives you a multiplier of 2.63 for this factor. This multiplier would be just 0.56 if your home was 8 ft or more above the surrounding land.
Note, these multipliers are applied in series – that is, multiplied one on top of the other, so you have a bit of a triple whammy.
There are other factors that influence your rate as well (e.g., drainage area and dynamics of the nearby stream) but those are not big drivers in your case.
Also, I generated and just posted a RR 2.0 premium estimate map for Randolph County, AR to: https://maps.readyourrisk.com/ryr/Randolph_AR_/
The premiums will run high relative to actual rates because they are based on median home prices in the U.S. but you can use them to compare home to home and area to area. You can also, generate customized premium estimates using the New Risk Rating 2.0 Calculator (linked in the map).
Hope this helps.
Paul Cocca
ReadYourRisk.com