19 Jun Top Reasons to Invest in Flood Insurance Even if You’re Not in a Flood Zone

If you live in a flood zone, you are required to carry flood insurance, right? This way your home and belongings are protected the next time that your nearby stream or river overflows its banks into your basement.

But what happens if you don’t live in a flood zone? Do you still really need flood insurance? While the circumstances depend on many factors, it’s crucial to understand why you may need flood insurance outside of a flood zone.

Standard Homeowner’s Policies Don’t Cover Floods

Did you know that your homeowner’s insurance policy may not cover flooding in your home? This means that you could be stuck paying a lot of money out of pocket for those repairs. In general, homeowner’s insurance covers things like water damage from broken pipes or rain that’s leaked into the home from a damaged roof, but not from the actual flooding itself. You need to have a flood insurance policy for this.

You Might Be in the “Minimal Risk Area,” But Floods Don’t Listen to Maps

Most of the time, insurance companies go off of flood maps created by the federal government. These maps, sent out by FEMA, place areas of the country in flood zones marked by the risk of flooding, from high to low. However, even areas of the country that are in minimal flood zones can end up with catastrophic flooding because the maps don’t matter to the water. The water simply goes where it wants to. You can’t control it, and there’s no way to make sure that it doesn’t hit your house.

Flood Zone Boundaries Can Change

Even though the flood zone maps get updated on a yearly basis, those flood boundaries can change pretty quickly. Since the climate is changing in unpredictable ways, the seas are rising, bringing additional water with it. This means that you could be in a low-risk flood zone that pretty quickly becomes a high-risk one. If you don’t have flood insurance to cover your home and it gets flooded, you could end up paying for a lot of the damages out of pocket.

Storms with A lot of Rain Can Cause Flooding

If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past few years, you no doubt have noticed that large storms, like hurricanes, have been hitting areas that they normally haven’t and have been causing more flood damage than wind damage. The people living in these areas, if they don’t have the proper amount of flood insurance, risk losing everything from their belongings to their homes. These areas, even if they haven’t flooded until recently, are now at risk of flooding again when the next storm hits.

Contact Spivey Insurance

If you’re worried that your home insurance policy isn’t enough, contact our team. We can help you get the insurance that you need for those unpredictable circumstances that sometimes arise.