POOLER, Ga.: Waist-deep floodwaters from Hurricane Matthew coursed down the street and seeped under Lori Galemore’s doors, swamping the carpets and furniture as she and her three sons retreated upstairs, where they stayed until firefighters arrived by boat.
Galemore and her neighbors in Pooler, a community about 35 miles inland from the evacuated Georgia coast, were deluged by rain and runoff that overwhelmed a drainage ditch at the end of their cul-de-sac.
“Everybody said, ‘You’re not in a flood plain. You don’t need flood insurance,’ ” Galemore recalled Wednesday. “And flood insurance is expensive. Who wants to pay that?”
Galemore’s story is all too common. Many Americans don’t have flood insurance, some because they don’t want to pay for it, some because they don’t see the need for it.
As of August, only 19 percent of homeowners in Florida had flood insurance, 2 percent in Georgia, 9 percent in South Carolina and 5 percent in North Carolina, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Even in high-risk flood zones, the rate in those states ranged from just 25 percent to 65 percent.
Ordinary homeowner insurance typically covers wind damage — torn-off roofs, fallen trees — but not flooding.
While homeowners in the high-risk zones must get flood insurance if they have a federally backed mortgage, lots of flooding takes place outside those designated hazard areas.