- The piece discusses the prevalence and risks of floods, particularly in the United States.
- It mentions that floods are often referred to as natural disasters, but their damage is partially within our control due to decisions that put people and property in flood-prone areas.
- The piece acknowledges that people live near water for various reasons, despite the risks involved.
- It highlights the impact of climate change on increasing the severity of floods.
- The video mentions the role of flood insurance in enabling people to live in risky areas, but also points out flaws in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), such as outdated and inaccurate floodplain maps.
- It criticizes the administration of the NFIP, where private insurance companies profit from handling claims while the government and taxpayers bear the financial burden.
- The piece concludes by questioning the effectiveness of the NFIP and the need for government support in helping people stay in their homes after a disaster.

- A large portion of money allocated for disaster relief goes to insurance companies and a small number of repetitive loss properties.
- Some homes, like one in Poincapiee Parish, have flooded multiple times and received large amounts of money from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).
- Dolphin Island has received millions of dollars in payments for damaged homes, highlighting the issue of coastal living draining disaster funds.
- The NFIP also benefits wealthy individuals with vacation homes, which raises concerns about the fairness of the program.
- Buyout programs for flooded homes are underfunded and slow, trapping people in structurally unsound homes.
- Reforms, such as means testing, eliminating discounts for second homes, and increasing insurance rates based on risk, are suggested to improve the NFIP.
- Climate change and rising sea levels make it necessary for some high-risk areas, like Broad Channel, to eventually relocate.
- The NFIP is due for reauthorization and needs serious reform to avoid harming the people it was designed to help.

John Oliver explains why our federal system for financing flood recovery perpetuates a pattern of destruction and why you should never offer a tortilla chip to a seagull.

Connect with Last Week Tonight online...

Subscribe to the Last Week Tonight YouTube channel for more almost news as it almost happens: www.youtube.com/user/LastWeekTonight

Find Last Week Tonight on Facebook like your mom would: http://Facebook.com/LastWeekTonight

Follow us on Twitter for news about jokes and jokes about news: http://Twitter.com/LastWeekTonight

Visit our official site for all that other stuff at once: http://www.hbo.com/lastweektonight

They are clearly catastrophic, traumatic events.

Although they have also been responsible for 1 of the most memorable clips in the history of broadcast news.

Well, obviously, we're getting a nice break from the rain, but not the flooding.

This is essentially now a part of the Passaic River in this neighborhood.

Fuck James Cameron and fuck Titanic, because that is now officially the greatest boat disaster ever captured on film.

Think of them as the Despacito of natural disasters.

Persistent, ubiquitous, and absolutely no fault of the Puerto Rican government.

Involve a flood, which is, I assume, the reason that FEMA's website once referred to flooding as America's number 1 natural hazard, exclamation mark.

Which is a pretty weird tone to take when describing something horrible.

It's like saying, boils, America's number 1 staph infection.

Or parks, America's number 1 place to die unnoticed.

And floods are only going to get worse due to climate change.

And I know that there are people who will dispute that.

And we just don't have time tonight to litigate whether extreme weather events are exacerbated by climate change.

I mean, sure, sure, it is a complicated issue, and we may not have definitive proof until the late 1980s.

But while floods are often referred to as natural disasters, the truth is, the damage they do is often, to some extent, within our control.

Because we have made certain decisions that put and keep people and property in the path of flooding.

And before we go any further, let's acknowledge that people live near water for all sorts of reasons.

For some, it's where their families have lived for generations, or a necessity for the work that they do.

And living next to the water is undoubtedly attractive, despite the risks, like flooding, or stepping on pointy seashells, or mistakenly giving a Tostito to a seagull without realizing that that means that you will now spend the rest of your life haunted by a Tostito-addicted seagull.

The point is, whatever the reason to live by the water, many do...

The point is, the dangers of waterfront living are real, but Many people, like this man, who lives on the water in Tampa Bay, feel the benefits outweigh the risks.

Mark knows that life here is tenuous, but he doesn't dwell on it.

Every morning when I walk out to get the paper, I see dolphins frolicking in the bayou, and rosy-eight Spoonbills walking around the edge of the bayou, so...

Tends to make you forget about all those sorts of things.

Sure, I can imagine that seeing a Rosy 8 Spoonbill would take your mind off things, because you're spending your whole day trying to figure out how a flamingo could have gotten its stupid bird face stuck into a panini press.

I'm just saying, even people who like birds don't like this bird.

The Audubon Society, an organization whose entire purpose is to champion birds, says they are, quote, gorgeous at a distance and bizarre up close.

Which is like the American Kennel Club saying, we celebrate all dogs and honor them as man's best friend, but the dandy Dinmont has a trash personality and looks like a Scotty fucked Phil Spector.

And look, Look, if you are literally overlooking a bayou like that guy, you are probably aware that flooding is a risk.

But, not every flood-prone area is directly along the coast.

And sometimes, aggressive development can exacerbate the risk of flooding, even considerably inland.

at Houston, which was recently rocked by Harvey.

The metro area's development has exploded.

1 study found the Houston area has added 25 percent more pavement over 15 years, replacing soil-rich wetlands that could absorb water with concrete-covered suburbia.

Exactly, and that made Harvey's damage significantly worse.

That is why people don't dry off at the beach by rolling around in the parking lot.

But it's not just global warming or unchecked growth that have put more people in risky, flood-prone areas.

It's also the fact that it's frequently only possible for people to take that risk because they have flood insurance.

It's a house hunters type show for people who want to live near the water.

And 1 episode featured 2 brothers named Mitch and Daniel, arguing over a particular beach house, which led to this exchange.

What'd you think about the island house, Mitch?

Well, I think there was a lot of good and a lot of bad on it.

That's just another thing that's got me concerned.

That may be the most reckless statement ever said on a boat, and I'm very much including, I can definitely make this shot work.

And, hey, let's feed these girls some Tostitos.

That if they bought that house, they could get flood insurance and surprisingly cheaply.

And it's worth taking some time to understand why that is the case.

Because, unlike other forms of homeowner's insurance, flood protection is actually underwritten by the government through the NFIP, or National Flood Insurance Program.

It started nearly 50 years ago, after historic floods wiped out many people's homes in the 1960s.

And the government back then realized that there was a real problem.

Insurance companies wouldn't cover floods at an affordable cost because it was too risky.

So because of that, the government was spending way too much on disaster relief.

So they stepped in and created the NFIP, which offered significantly discounted insurance to encourage people to buy it.

And that sounds great, but crucially, the aim at the time was not that people would be staying in at-risk homes permanently, as the program's current administrator explains.

They presumed that if we told people they were at risk, they would move.

They presumed that over the life of the program, those discounts wouldn't need to be, continued.

And they presumed they wouldn't need to be continued because once people knew they had the risk, they would move out.

No, but of course it hasn't, because that's not how people work.

We will gladly accept huge risks to our personal safety for the sake of a discount.

That was the entire premise behind the McDonald's dollar menu.

--AUDIENCE LAUGHS --And that is just 1 of the many flaws with how this well-intentioned program was designed, because everything about it, from who participates, to where the money goes, to the incentives it creates, needs fixing.

And let's start with the fact that eligibility for the program is determined through floodplain maps.

You are required to buy flood insurance if you have a federally backed mortgage and FEMA's maps show that you live in a risky area.

Unfortunately, the mandate has been poorly enforced, meaning that lots of people don't buy insurance who should.

And the maps themselves can be both out of date and wildly inaccurate.

In fact, just days before Harvey struck, a study of Houston area flood maps was published, and the results were alarming.

Over the course of a decade, researchers at Rice University and Texas A&M Galveston studied 1 section of Southeast Harris County.

They found FEMA's flood plain maps missed about 75 percent of the damages from the storms.

At that point, you might as well predict floods by having blindfolded six-year-olds pin little cardboard puddles onto city maps at birthday parties.

But even if all the maps were perfect, there would be another flaw with the NFIP, which is how it's administered.

You see, typically, the government doesn't directly insure you.

Instead, it pays private insurance companies a fee for every policy they sell.

But not just that, the federal government is then responsible for covering any losses, which is a pretty fucking sweet deal for those companies.

They take none of the risk, and yet they get all the rewards.

But it gets even worse, because they also get paid for each claim they handle.

And when Frontline crunched some of the numbers and presented them to a former head of the program, they found something shocking.

There was 1 number that really jumped out.

With all the claims in the wake of Sandy, the profits were more than $400 million.

Because they're handling a lot of claims that year and they make a lot of money when they handle claims.

When a big storm hits then, they make more money.

Yeah, at the very time you need them to make less money, if anything, because the burden is gonna be borne by the taxpayers, they make a killing.

For insurance companies, the bigger the disaster, the more they stand to profit.

And that is a business model not usually seen outside of Nicolas Cage's career.

--AUDIENCE LAUGHS- And while the insurance industry may dispute exactly how much profit they make, the fact remains that the government and the taxpayer are definitely the ones eating the losses.

Which is 1 of the reasons why, even before these latest hurricanes, the program was $25 billion in debt.

And there are not enough Rosie 8 Spoonbills in the world to take your mind off that.

And just to be clear, there are exactly enough Rosie 8 Spoonbills in the world.

I'm just saying, do we all really need more of this?

The dirty pink dinosaur is noisily devouring its young.

And look, there is a good argument to make that helping people stay in their homes after a disaster is what government is for.

But remember, a big chunk of that money is just going to the insurance companies, and another, shockingly big chunk of that money, goes to very few homes.

For instance, along the Gulf Coast and Florida, just 1 percent of properties covered by the NFIP have accounted for a quarter of flood claims.

These are called, so-called repetitive loss properties.

Now, they are homes that can flood over and over and over again, getting payments each and every time.

And some of them are costing us a fortune.

Just recently, an article in The Washington Post highlighted a home in Poincapiee Parish that has flooded 40 times.

While the house is valued at just $56,000, the NFIP has doled out nearly $430,000 to cover flood claims.

Because if nothing else, if your house floods 40 times, Mother Nature is sending you a pretty clear message, and that message is, hey, would you mind leaving?

Some weird fish would like to fuck in here now.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And some parts of the country have particularly extreme examples of this.

The pastel death trap that they were looking at is on a place called Dolphin Island, where over the past 2 decades, homeowners have paid just 9.3 million dollars in premiums into the NFIP, but they've received 72.2 million dollars in payments for their damaged homes.

It is so bad that the island got written up by Bloomberg under the headline, Love of Coastal Living is Draining U.S.

And at first glance, we thought, hold on, Isn't that the exact same eyesore on stilts that Mitch and Daniel almost bought?

Well, the good news is, it's actually not.

The bad news is, it's literally the house next door,

was also featured on a different episode of Buying the Beach.

It wasn't close to the beach, it was in the ocean.

But what's even crazier is, at the end of the episode,

But even if you are able to overlook the repetitive loss properties, which you shouldn't, there is another issue, and that is that nearly 1 out of every 5 homes covered under the NFIP is a second home.

And because the program isn't means tested, the benefits frequently go to some wealthy individuals' vacation homes.

1 such property belonged to John Stossel, a Fox News personality, and partially hydrogenated Tom Selleck.

And I'll let Stossel, who really answers the question what if Freddie Mercury had quit singing to become an assistant floor manager at Men's Warehouse.

I'll let him tell you all about it, because even he knew it was ridiculous.

The house was on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

A risky place to build, but I built anyway.

Because a federal program guaranteed my investment.

Eventually, a storm swept away my first floor.

I never invited you there, but you paid for my new first floor.

Okay, so now Stossel is clearly just baiting people, because under no circumstances does anyone want to be funding the reconstruction of the world's smuggest man's rickety sea prison.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And there is lots to be confused about there.

Not least of which, that photo of Stossel posing shirtless in skin-tight white swim trunks from hundreds of feet away.

I think that he put a camera on a long delay timer, then sprinted for a full 45 seconds back to the deck of his house, whispering, hurry, hurry, hurry to himself the entire time, and got in position just in time for that photo to happen.

That is the only scientifically possible explanation.

We debated this the entire fucking week, and it's the only scenario that we can all agree on.

If you choose to build something in a risky place, like John Stossel's salt-battered, bottoms-only beach mistake, you should absolutely be allowed to do that.

But you shouldn't expect the government to repeatedly help you rebuild when things inevitably go wrong.

However, the vast majority, the vast majority here of NFIP beneficiaries are not wealthy or second home owners.

They often really need this program and cannot afford for it to go under.

And for those stuck in repetitive lost properties, It is easy for anyone to just say they should move.

But it's much more difficult than that, as this Kentucky woman, whose home has flooded repeatedly, will tell you.

Who would want to buy a house that's had this many...

We have neighbors that have had their houses up for sale for 2 and 3 years, and haven't even had anyone come and view the house.

We need a buyout from FEMA or from whoever it is that...

And her decision to try and leave that home could not have been easy, because you don't want to throw out the baby with the flood water.

But at a certain point, the responsible thing to do is to get a better, more water-resistant baby.

Which is, incidentally, also the title of Britain's best-selling book on teaching children to swim.

Now, unfortunately, our buyout programs are hugely underfunded and prohibitively slow.

It can take years for buyouts to get approved, by which point, homeowners have probably had to rebuild their house at the government's expense, and it may have already flooded again.

So essentially, a government program that was supposed to help people in flooded homes is sometimes trapping them inside them indefinitely.

And trapping people in structurally unsound homes isn't what the government is for, it's what buying the beach is for.

Look, there just has to be a better way here, and there are some key things that we can do to improve this program.

We can do things like means test it, and eventually get rid of discounts for second homes, and gradually increase the insurance rates on some properties so that they reflect actual risk.

Unfortunately, the last time the Congress tried a major reform of the NFIP with the Bigot Waters Act of 2012, the result was that many people's rates skyrocketed overnight, And politicians were so spooked by angry constituents, they significantly scaled back many of the reforms.

And I'm not saying that this will ever be politically easy.

Because even if you do properly fund and streamline a buyout scheme, there are still going to be cases where people just want to stay put.

Right here in New York, there is a low-lying community called Broad Channel, where the streets can flood twice a month.

Its residents fought against those rate increases a few years ago, and many of them have no interest in leaving.

Listen, my whole house got destroyed by Sandy, and I re...

I, you know, people are like, you're crazy, you should move.

-♪ ♪ -♪ But you're standing in water right now.

Maybe the people telling you to move were saying, at the very least, can you move up 5 inches to dry land?

But the hard truth here is, Even expensive interventions are likely to only buy that community a little more time.

And people in broad channel will eventually be leaving, whether it's by moving truck or by boat.

Because environmental conditions are going to get worse.

Heavy downpours have increased in the last 50 years, and sea levels have been climbing steadily.

And I'm not saying that that is because of climate change, even though...

The NFIP is actually due for reauthorization this December, and I would argue that it's time to take another shot at serious, thoughtful reform.

Because without it, we have an unstable, unsustainable program that is indirectly harming some of the people that it was designed to help, and I don't have any time.

We just choose to listen most of the time.

And I heard what you were saying about flooding, and you are right.

Some people in high-risk areas will need to move, and we should give them the help that they can do that with.

Because while leaving your home is hard, being forced out when it's uninhabitable is 10 times harder.

And after all, your home isn't just walls and a roof.

See, though, I got to say, that was absolutely beautiful.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, don't don't don't talk like that about yourself No, don't

Everybody watching knows it's true Hey, I eat french fries out of the garbage.

You make a good point You're absolutely disgusting.

I am truly sorry for misjudging your motives in coming here.

See all LastWeekTonight transcripts on Youtube

Floods: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)