Survey: Only 21-36% of Delta Residents Have Flood Insurance
Question: How Can We Do Better?

Pretty much the entire Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a floodplain, where the chances of flooding in any given year are as high as 1 in 10 in some areas[1].

But the Delta Residents Survey found that only about a third of rural Delta residents and a fifth of Delta city dwellers have flood insurance.

Studies show households without insurance take longer to recover[2].

Given the risk, the number of households with insurance may seem low. But Michael Mierzwa, a civil engineer for the California Department of Water Resources, noted this is actually above average. Statewide, about 2% of property owners have flood insurance.

He said there are two likely reasons for the Delta’s higher participation rate: One is the Delta’s generational experience with flooding. Memories run long here.

The other is that mortgages issued in flood-prone areas require flood insurance.

But is this participation rate good enough in the flood-prone Delta? No, Mierzwa said, it should be 100%. “You need something in that area. Even if you’re levee protected, the levees are not foolproof.”

Why Don’t More People Get Insurance?

Kathleen Schaefer, a doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis, said research shows three things will get people to invest in flood insurance:

• The issue must rise to a level of concern. “The year we sold the most flood insurance policies in the state was the year of the Godzilla El Niño,” she said, referring to the winter of 2015-16.
• Their neighbor buys flood insurance or they know someone who has it.
• Flood insurance is affordable.

Affordability is a key issue in the Delta, where many of the small towns have high rates of poverty. This is why Schaefer has worked with the Delta Region Geologic Hazard Abatement District on a pilot program to provide inclusive flood insurance to property owners in Isleton.

Photos: Isleton flooded in 1972 following a levee break (photos: Department of Water Resources)

One goal of the program is providing a disaster recovery benefit in the event of a flood – a modest no-strings-attached payout to every property owner to help with the immediate costs of flooding, such as finding temporary housing in a hurry.

This is called parametric insurance, which provides a fixed benefit based on a pre-defined trigger, or parameter. For Isleton, it would pay if a sensor at the city’s wastewater pumping station detected more than 16 inches of water.

The payout would not be enough to cover the cost of repairing or rebuilding a flood-damaged home, Schaefer said, but the goal is to provide cash when households need it most.

And given that half of Isleton property owners don’t have flood insurance, Schaefer said, it’s a big improvement over the help people would get now. “Everyone pays a little, everyone gets a little,” she said.

She pointed out the National Flood Insurance Program doesn’t pay anything for alternative housing. And for what it does cover, the property owner must pay contractors with their own money first.

The Delta Region Geologic Hazard Abatement District

The pilot started two years ago when the city of Isleton formed the Delta Region Geologic Hazard Abatement District. Its boundaries are the same as the city’s, but it is a separate entity with authority for managing geologic and flood hazards.

The district was recently awarded pilot funding of $100,000 per year for two years by the Department of Water Resources. It will use the funding to work out the details, including how much the disaster recovery benefit will cost and how the money would be paid out.

The money can also be used to pay for the policy initially. But to get off the ground, the proposal will require voter approval, because property owners in the district would ultimately pick up the costs of the policy.

“The voters have to decide,” said City Councilman David Kent, who serves on the board of the district.

“What I want to do is make them a deal,” he said. “Your residence is in proximity of a 30-foot wall of water. The deal is the economy of scale at the government level can protect you. But it can’t do it without the standard mechanism of collecting funds.”

Schaefer puts it another way. “There are two certainties in life: We will all die, and levees will eventually fail. The big question is, which will come first?” she said. “We have life insurance to protect our families if we die before the levee fails. The goal of this program is to protect families if the levee dies first.”

Isleton as a Model

While parametric insurance is not a new concept, Kent said, funding it with a geologic hazard abatement district is. Only one other place has tried it – New York City – and that program has no long-term funding yet.

If Isleton is successful, the Department of Water Resources will be looking to apply what is learned there to other Central Valley communities interested in this kind of protection.

“The state’s role in this is to help them start the process,” said DWR’s Mierzwa. “What we get out of it is a community that’s more resilient, and we learn from the process and can help kick off community-based flood insurance in other small communities.”

The next Delta Region Geologic Hazard Abatement District board meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 20 at the Isleton Community Center. The public is invited to attend.

Further Reading

• Planning for Post-Disaster Housing in Legacy Communities – Identifying populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta historic communities at high risk of requiring temporary emergency housing (Delta Protection Commission, Delta Stewardship Council, Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, Stanford University, UC Davis; 7/2/2024)
• With Flood Risk Rising, Can Community-Based Insurance Fill A Gap? (UC Davis, 2/26/2024)
• New report shows the U.S. insurance industry provides inadequate coverage for climate-related disasters (1/24/2023)
• Parametric Insurance for Disasters (PDF) (September 2020)
• California Climate Insurance

[1] Delta Adapts: Creating a Climate Resilient Future (PDF), page 71

[2] Inclusive Insurance for Climate-Related Disasters – A Roadmap for the United States (PDF)

Survey: The Delta Supports State-Boosted Sustainable Ag
Practice: What Does That Look Like?

Explore more of the survey data yourself with this interactive web app.

What policies would Delta residents support for adapting to environmental changes in the region? Given nine choices in a recent survey of Delta residents, only one garnered majority support: increasing state funding for sustainable agriculture. This is one example of what that looks like.

Rice farming can be an antidote to one big Delta problem: subsidence – the sinking of heavily farmed soils well below adjacent river levels.

But while flooded rice slowly rebuilds subsided soils, it comes with its own challenge: Water on those rice fields must be kept fresh for the crop to survive. That means pumping water off the fields and into the river, then pumping fresh water back in.

The fresh water is easy to come by on Staten Island, because the 9,200-acre farm’s riparian water rights have always met its needs.

But pumping water off the island has two costs: The biggest is the power bill to pump water 30 feet up and over a levee, which is on the order of $750,000 a year for the entire island. The other cost is that it is replaced by taking more water from the river.

A solution to this problem: Recirculate the water. Recirculation keeps it fresh, gives pesticides time to break down, and reduces how much water Staten Island has to take out of the river in the first place.

Building such a system is simple, said Jerred Dixon, director of the Staten Island Preserve. What’s not so simple is the permitting process. That’s where the Fish Friendly Farming program came in.

Operated by the California Land Stewardship Institute, Fish Friendly Farming works with farmers to reduce the amount of pesticides that leave their farms and get into rivers and streams. CLSI received a grant from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy to implement a Fish Friendly Farming program in the Delta, and one of the projects it completed with that grant was a recirculation system for a portion of Staten Island. (See a video about the project.)

Pumps push water up and over a 25-foot levee into the South Mokelumne River through four massive pipes.

For some farms that work with CLSI, being able to market themselves as Fish Friendly Farms is a huge selling point, particularly for vineyards that have more direct relationships with the consumers of their product, said CLSI Science Director Laurel Marcus.

But for others, what’s more important is helping them do the good things they want to do by easing the regulatory compliance burden. “The government gets what it needs, the growers get what they need, the environment gets what it needs,” she said.

That was one of the drivers for Staten Island, which is owned by The Nature Conservancy and used as a living laboratory for wildlife-friendly farming.

The other was mastering the process.

This effort was a first for CLSI and Staten Island, which means it went slowly – it took about a year and a half.

But the next effort will be easier. “The more you do things, the faster things usually go,” Dixon said. “You learn those quick routes and the shortcuts to get these things done.”

Jerred Dixon, director of the Staten Island Preserve, stands at the recirculation pump that was part of a Delta Conservancy Fish Friendly Farming grant project.

He would love to add more recirculation projects to the island. In addition to the rice land, Staten Island also has some wetlands where his goal is to use no water diverted from the river. “I could put 10 of these (recirculation pumps) on the island and make a real difference,” he said.

But he’d also love to see the practice take off throughout the Delta.

“If we can get this streamlined where we have a lot more recirculated water in the Delta, it makes water a lot more available, and it makes it more economically viable for Delta farmers as well,” he said.

“If you want to learn about it and get the lowdown, you can talk to me,” Dixon said. He can be emailed at jerred.dixon@cfrstaten.com.

“If you want to do it, call Laurel.”

The California Land Stewardship Institute is based in Napa. Science Director Laurel Marcus can be reached at (707) 253-1226 or laurelm@fishfriendlyfarming.org.

The Delta Protection Commission played an advisory role in the Delta Residents Survey. Read more about it here: Nov. 7, 2023, article in Delta Happenings