Even though a major hurricane has yet to make landfall this season, 2025 has been a year of devastating floods. Thousands of flash floods across the country this summer sent torrents of water into people’s homes, swept away cars, knocked down trees, and ripped bridges away. Floods over the July 4 weekend in Central Texas killed at least 135 people and caused upward of $22 billion in damages according to one estimate.

Though lost lives can never be recovered, the US has long had a program designed to help surviving homeowners financially devastated by floods. But at a moment when so many are trying to return home and the costs of flood recovery are rising, the National Flood Insurance Program is sinking deeper into the red.

Earlier this year, the program borrowed $2 billion from the US Treasury to help cover claims from major storms in 2024 like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. Even though the program previously had $16 billion in debt forgiven in 2017 — the year Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma struck — NFIP’s total debt is now more than $22.5 billion, and is likely to rise further as claims from floods this year complete processing. And an overwhelmed flood insurance system could be devastating for the homeowners who depend on it — whether they want to or not.

Sharon Cozort said that floods were always in the back of her mind when she bought her house in Houston in 2006. “The [500-year] flood plain went right through the middle of our living room,” Cozort said. She and her husband carried flood insurance for about 25 years, paying about $100 to $500 per year, but never needed to use it. Then came Hurricane Harvey in 2017, a one in a thousand-year flood event. It dumped a gargantuan amount of water on Houston and forced the reservoir system to release water to avoid overflowing out of control, which then flooded Cozort’s house for a week.

She thought about relocating to a neighborhood outside the flood zone, or out of the city entirely. But the existence of government flood insurance made coming back the most financially viable option, if not the most comfortable one.

“My husband dragged me back to Houston kicking and screaming,” Cozort said. “The whole town was calling each other, ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to repair? Are you going to rebuild? Are you going to elevate?’ It was kind of a mass panic.”

Cozort is clear-eyed about the risks she faces and knows that the flood insurance system, as it stands, is unsustainable. It’s just that there aren’t any practical alternatives for her and her husband, who are hoping to use their home’s equity to retire and invest. For individual homeowners, there isn’t much they can do on their own to reduce the systemic flood risk for their cities, or to change the structure of flood insurance.

Meanwhile, the other parts of the country she was considering are facing their own mounting insurance costs from severe weather and wildfires. “This house will flood again,” Cozort said. “This is a new world.”

And indeed, we are living in a new world. Flooding is the most frequent and most expensive disaster in the US. More Americans are living in areas prone to flooding, even as property values are increasing and construction costs are rising, making it more expensive to rebuild after a disaster. And due to how humanity has altered the landscape and warmed the climate, the devastation of inundation is growing. “The baseline is that flood risk is definitely increasing,” said........

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