An estimated 40 million Americans live in floodplains, facing a risk of catastrophic flooding that puts them and their homes in danger.
That includes Steve Rodriguez, whose home near a creek in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, floods so often, he paid to raise it 10 feet. Some of his neighbors went even higher, 20 feet or more.
The flooding risk is made worse by more intense rainfall driven by climate change and by unchecked development.
“They’ve overbuilt the area and you get a lot of runoff from the malls, from the street, parking lots,” Rodriguez said.
Local governments are trying to solve the problem by voluntarily buying homes and demolishing them. In the last 25 years, local governments have tapped into federal programs to buy at least 14,700 homes for flood-related reasons.
Many people in his neighborhood took a buyout, but Rodriguez turned it down.
The way the U.S. has built in floodplains is “a huge problem,” said Maya van Rossum, who leads the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, a nonprofit that fights to protect the river and the communities that depend on it.
Homeowners who refuse to take a buyout are sometimes offered government funds to elevate their houses, but van Rossum said that option doesn’t completely protect them and contributes to possible flooding elsewhere.
“It is very sad when people have suffered severe loss from a flood event, but it does a tremendous disservice for the politicians to come in and listen to their sad stories and then respond with solutions like this,” she said. “Because that sad story is going to be repeated over and over and over again. And that is not fair to anybody.”
Rodriguez admitted people probably shouldn’t live in floodplains but said the buyout offer he got in 1999 didn’t make sense for him financially. The creek has flooded a dozen times since, and now he feels stuck.
Van Rossum said the problem is bigger than just one homeowner.
“When there’s been a catastrophic event, you will see massive devastation and in the year or two following you will see massive rebuilding at great expense and then the whole cycle will happen over again,” she said.
National environmental reporter David Schechter and a team of CBS journalists spent five days traveling the length of the Delaware River to explore problems facing America’s waterways. Watch “An American River” on Saturday, April 19, at 1 p.m. ET on CBS News 24/7.
Taylor Johnston and
contributed to this report.
