High Stakes on the High Seas: Sailing Through MDLEA Jursidictional Waters

Authors

• Sean Kim

Document Type

Comment

Abstract

In Spring, Texas, there is a house that has flooded twenty times due to heavy rain and flooding, resulting in National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) payouts totaling over $912,000 to cover the repairs. This house’s current value is $42,000, so the payouts have dwarfed its value by over nineteen times. The story of this home is indicative of an ongoing crisis regarding the NFIP, but also a larger crisis of how we manage the risks of flooding in the United States. Flooding causes more damage in the United States than any other severe weather-related event, costing an average of $5 billion a year. Ninety-nine percent of counties in the United States across all fifty states have been impacted by flooding in some way. Flooding has always been recognized as a risk as early as 1913 with a flood in the Ohio River Valley causing over $200 million in property damage. A nationwide solution only came about through the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, which established the NFIP and was passed in response to extensive and growing costs of hurricane damage throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. Throughout the proceeding decades, the NFIP was stable and affordable, however when we look to the modern day we see a program in crisis.

First Page

189

Recommended Citation

Sean Kim, High Stakes on the High Seas: Sailing Through MDLEA Jursidictional Waters, 31 Ocean & Coastal L.J. 189 (2026).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.mainelaw.maine.edu/oclj/vol31/iss1/8