We don’t live in the 9th Ward.
We don’t live in New Orleans, near the Gulf of Mexico, or within miles of a body of water of any note.
And yet, a short while after Hurricane Katrina struck a decade ago, pummeling NOLA and the Gulf Coast like Ronda Rousey would like to pummel Floyd Mayweather now, FEMA decreed that we must pay them hush money annually or face a threat to our mortgage. I say hush money because the flood insurance policy suddenly mandated by FEMA extortion was akin to a mob boss’s strong arm demands in the backseat of a town car and a blackmailer’s whispered instructions in an empty parking garage.
There’s a small stream that isn’t a stream at all running alongside our suburban property. It’s a runoff channel, situated downhill from the side of our concrete slab, no-basement rancher that, up until 7 years ago, was uninhabited. That wing of our modest home was a pile of junk, Christmas decorations and tools I don’t know how to use without injury. And then it was deemed to be in a flood plain and we had no choice but to pay $900, $1050, $1100, $1235, $1280, $1330, $1522 to protect ourselves from a flood that will never happen. In fact, it is statistically just as probable that the same water which swallowed New Orleans’ 9th Ward would reach us than the water from that runoff non-stream stream which spends the majority of the year bone dry, devoid of aquatic life and of any prospect of causing flood damage to anything bigger than the Playmobil playset my daughters’ sometimes place along side it as they play their Kingdom of Zalabooboo game. That fanciful game, incidentally, is based more in reality that FEMA’s redrawn flood map.
I get it, I do. FEMA was hemorrhaging cash due to the claims rightfully made by the citizens of New Orleans and towns all along the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina 10 years ago. And so they exercised their god given right to commandeer thousands of dollars from homeowners in Pennsylvania who live uphill from mostly dry runoffs. Homeowners who’ve lived through hurricanes and heavy flash flood warnings without the water rising up anywhere near their concrete slab foundation.
No more, FEMA. No freaking more.
This week, we paid off our mortgage and in doing so we’ve finally freed our arm from FEMA’s watery vice grip. The mortgage balance was finally small enough, and my wife’s 401(k) large enough, that a loan from the later could satisfy the former. The net result to us is the same, our home will still technically have payments made through Feb 2019, as was previously the case, but now the deed will be in our hands and the mandate from FEMA for us to set $1500 ablaze each year has vanished.
In a perfect final page to this story, the flood insurance renewal letter arrived in our mailbox on the exact same day I sent away the cashier’s check payoff to the mortgage company. Not only were we still smack dab in that same imaginary flood zone, but our premium had risen faster than flood water, up over $200 from the year before with no explanation whatsoever. FEMA may do some good for some people, but I’ve only been impacted by the scam portion of their operation. But no more, because now that we own our home outright, with no mortgage company on the hook for a single penny, FEMA no longer has the power to pry thousands of dollars from our wallet and my daughters will finally be the only ones playing pretend with that stream.
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