When Brandon Humberston’s weekly unemployment benefits finally kicked in after months of waiting, the $750 (£586) cheque was a “godsend”.

Suddenly the 19-year-old, who worked as a cook at Mexican restaurant chain Chipotle until the pandemic cost him his job, could pay rent and buy groceries – even save a little.

Now much of that income is set to disappear.

The $600 a week additional payment that the US approved to top up unemployment benefits during the pandemic will expire on 31 July. In many states, recipients have already received their last cheque.

“It’s pretty dire,” says Mr Humberston, whose benefits will be cut to $150. “My generation is hanging on by a thread”.

The fight over $600

When the US approved more than $2.4tn in spending this spring to try to shield its economy from damage caused by coronavirus, economists warned more would be necessary.

Lawmakers in Washington have yet to act.

While Democrats have proposed another $3tn in spending, Republicans have rejected that plan and remain divided about how much more aid – if any – is warranted.

The fate of the unemployment benefits that Mr Humberston – and an estimated 30 million other Americans rely on – is giving the debate a sense of urgency.

When Congress boosted the payments by $600 a week in March, it nearly tripled the average benefits payment. The move meant recipients could claim roughly the equivalent of the country’s median wage of about $975.

Republicans are now pushing to reduce the temporary bonus set to expire at the end of the month.

They say it is discouraging people from going back to work, pointing to research that shows more than two-thirds of current recipients – most of them in low-paid jobs – now earn more on unemployment than they did when they were working.

‘There are no jobs’

Mr Humberston says those fears are misplaced. He says he has applied for dozens of jobs in his home state of Oregon with no luck and the real problem is that employers are afraid to hire because of the pandemic.

“I mean, find what job? That’s the thing – there are no jobs around, no jobs anywhere.”

US employers have cut nearly 15 million positions since February. That’s despite strong hiring in May and June, when lockdowns eased and business received payroll support from the government.

That money is drying up and as virus cases surge, a second wave of layoffs is starting.

Companies announcing cuts last week included LinkedIn, Nike and Dow chemical company. Many smaller businesses are also cutting back.

Economic risk

In an economy reliant on consumer spending, experts warn that now is not the time to remove the unemployment bonus. Some economists have warned that the move could drag down growth by 2% or more.

“The recovery at this point is at significant risk,” says economist Karen Dynan, who teaches at Harvard and is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Other countries, including the UK, have announced additional stimulus measures this month.

Prof Dynan says that with the November presidential election approaching, US lawmakers will ultimately reach some kind of compromise on the unemployment payments, which now reach almost one-fifth of the American workforce.

But she says that by itself won’t be enough. She says businesses and local governments, facing gaping budget holes due to the decline in activity, need support too.

“They need to do more,” she says. “That’s clear.”

The number of people filing new claims for unemployment edged up last week for the first time since March. Food banks have been overwhelmed and as temporary bans on evictions end, cities are bracing for a wave of homelessness.

People are in “absolute panic” as the deadline for extending the benefit nears, according to Courtney Henley, one of the administrators of a Facebook group that helps people navigate the unemployment system.

Ms Henley, who runs an events business in New York, has relied on the payments herself since the pandemic hit.

Having spent much of the spring in quarantine after contracting coronavirus, Ms Henley says she is starting to think about how to reinvent her business for digital gatherings. But many of her clients are small businesses, who are also hurting.

“Pretty much everything I do, I can’t do now,” she says. “If that goes away, I will be looking at not being able to pay bills at all.”

She says Republicans are not being “realistic” about the state of the economy.

“Things have not reopened yet. People are still recovering,” she says. “We’re just hoping that our government doesn’t just leave American workers to starve.”

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When newscasters announce the latest tally of coronavirus cases, Arthur Hall chuckles and turns to his wife.

“Whatever number they say, I’d add one,” he said.

Hall is an uncounted survivor of coronavirus.

The 51-year-old school administrator spent five days in the hospital with what doctors told him was severe respiratory distress caused by COVID-19. Although he had tested negative for coronavirus, his Delaware care team said the tests available in early April were unreliable.

Experts estimate tens of millions of Americans contracted coronavirus but are not included in official tallies because of testing errors, misdiagnoses, a sluggish public health response, and ignorance about the disease during its early days in the United States.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Thursday that there have been about 3.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 nationwide and at least 136,000 deaths. The actual number of infections is likely 10 times the number of reported cases, CDC Director Robert Redfield said in a news conference on June 25.

The nation’s understanding of the pandemic is hampered because so many victims remain uncounted. Americans who paid a physical and emotional toll for COVID-19 describe how being excluded from official statistics exacerbates their isolation, uncertainty, distrust and fear. And without an accurate count, researchers might draw flawed conclusions about the virus’ behavior, local leaders might make poor re-opening decisions, and citizens might underestimate their own risks.

USA TODAY interviewed dozens of people who were diagnosed by a doctor after a presumed false negative test or who were unable to get tested for coronavirus at all, as well as the friends and family of some who might have died from undiagnosed COVID-19 early this year. 

Whatever the reason official tallies missed them, most uncounted survivors said they just want their experience to matter.

“Who are we?” asked Emily Talkington, an uncounted survivor in California. “Did we just battle this out for nothing?”

On her worst nights of illness, Talkington said she awoke soaked in sweat, unable to sleep because of difficulty breathing, joint pain, severe itchiness and burning eyes.

When the 45-year-old woke up gasping for air, Talkington thought she might die. She wondered how long it would take people to notice since she lived alone. Sometimes, she hallucinated that her dog lying in bed next to her was dying and that she, a vet, could do nothing to keep him alive.

“I travel worldwide quite a bit with my work. I’ve had Zika, Dengue, Malaria,” she said. “This felt very different.”

She visited a drive-up testing site and received a negative result that left her wondering why she was ill if it was not COVID-19. After four weeks of bed-bound sickness and isolating at home, Talkington coughed up blood and nearly blacked out. She took herself to a Santa Cruz urgent-care clinic on a day she had the strength to go.

The physician assistant who treated her in early April didn’t believe she was sick at all.

“He thought I was making it up,” Talkington recalled. “He said, ‘Well you just have menopause … and you’re coming up with things in your head.’”

Days later, she said her regular doctor told her that the physician assistant had emailed him to warn she might be on the verge of a mental break.

Her doctor also reassured her she did not have perimenopause — which does not cause women to cough up blood — and agreed that she likely had been suffering from COVID-19. He told her the urgent care clinic staff probably hadn’t read the latest CDC guidance, which recognized a broader array of symptoms for COVID-19 than just a dry cough and fever.

Talkington still suffers from heart and blood pressure symptoms, which she says are documented daily as part of two medical research projects on coronavirus. Information about older cases like hers is critical to accurately understanding how the virus behaves to develop better treatments, vaccines and public health interventions.

But Talkington doesn’t tell most people what she’s been through. Some relatives and friends have told her they are skeptical she really was so sick for so long. When she runs into people she knows, they often comment on the 20 pounds she lost while ill.

Talkington doesn’t tell them the truth. Instead, she says, “I’ve been eating healthy and walking my dog.”

Christine Orrick, 47, was sick for nearly a month in Denver, Colorado.

For the first two weeks, she thought she was just anxious and exaggerating a cold as details of severe coronavirus cases flooded the news in late March and early April. After all, she already had a history of chronic illness, including asthma, pain and hypertension.

In the third week, Orrick became much sicker: fever, chest pain, difficulty breathing, body aches, coughing, swollen lymph nodes and a dysfunctional gastrointestinal system. Her doctor said she almost certainly had COVID-19, but told her to stay away from the hospital unless she could not breathe.

After more than a month of escalating symptoms, her doctor fudged the rules that limited who could be tested. She approved one for Orrick, a former mental health therapist, on the grounds she was an essential health care worker. The result was negative, but her doctor told her it was likely inaccurate. The tests available to her had a known 20% false negative rate and few people still have active virus cells in their system so many weeks after being infected.

Orrick is grateful for her doctor, who helped her navigate a “terrifying” few weeks when no one really understood how the virus worked. Like other survivors, Orrick said it is important their experiences are recognized even if they are not studied or added to official counts.

That validation is important, Orrick said, in part because survivors’ trauma continues long after physical recovery. Doctors still do not know the long-term health consequences of COVID-19. Friends dismiss their stories as attention-seeking tall tales. Survivors watch neighbors resume normal activities as if the coronavirus isn’t still spreading. 

As Orrick continued to recover, she recognized the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Without a positive test, she faced additional scrutiny and personal uncertainty about whether her illness was real.

“We were put in a double bind — told by the experts that we should not seek help until it was too late, and then due to poor testing or testing too far out, we felt additionally invalidated in our illness (when we received a false negative),” wrote Orrick. “This left many of us in a powerless place.”

Orrick, Talkington and others found solace in one place: Facebook.

Coronavirus survivor groups have proliferated on social media sites. For some, the posts spark new anxiety about what they might face next. Most, however, said they were comforted by the informal networks, reading personal stories that often reflect their own.

“Thank God for that group,” Talkington said. “I’m not the only one feeling disheartened and completely defeated.”

In Cheyenne, Wyoming, Chase Brumley received an email in March informing him that a person with a confirmed case of coronavirus had been in his office at the Department of Transportation.

Brumley, 28, was already ill. He had asthma but was deemed a low-risk case because of his age and was denied coronavirus testing. Public health officials told him to stay home.

Brumley became so weak he couldn’t walk across the apartment without collapsing from fatigue. His lungs felt like they were so full there was no room for air. One night, his lips turned blue, and his wife begged him to go to the emergency room. Brumley refused, remembering a nurse practitioner had told him during a video appointment that they wanted to preserve hospital beds for high-priority patients.

He described his experience as a paradox: “You simultaneously had it and not had it. It was Schrodinger’s coronavirus.”

Accurate and available testing is critical, not only to better treatment for patients like Brumley, but also for tracking, tracing and stopping coronavirus’ spread. If people with COVID-19 can be identified and isolated before they infect someone new, communities can avoid widespread shutdowns, hospitalizations and deaths. Often the virus is spread before people develop symptoms as bad as Brumley’s or without showing any signs of illness at all.

“Most cases are not going to lead to outbreaks or super-spreading events, but some are. And you don’t really know which ones those are going to be,” said Jaline Gerardin, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “They can be devastating. They can restart your outbreak.”

A complete count also helps people determine when it’s safe to return to normal activities.

“It’s important, both for directing resources at the time, but also to plan for future needs,” said Dr. Donna Hansel, who leads the pathology department at Oregon Health Sciences University’s School of Medicine. “We can’t forget what’s happened and think it won’t happen again.”

Two months after falling ill, Brumley described lingering symptoms and chest pain. On bad days, he can’t go downstairs without getting winded. On good days, he can go to the grocery store but returns exhausted.

“I’m just one person,” Brumley said. “How many people did this happen to?”

Early research suggests entire communities might have been dramatically undercounted. Experts say gaps in testing can be widest in low-income and marginalized neighborhoods unless health officials and local elected leaders make concerted efforts to reduce barriers.

One April study highlighted how income, work and cultural barriers to testing contributed to undercounting cases of coronavirus early in the pandemic. 

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco collaborated with community organizers and the local government to test nearly 3,000 people in San Francisco’s Mission district, a historical immigrant neighborhood where one-third of residents are Hispanic.

“The results suggest that as many as 1 in 50 people living and working in the Mission could be actively infected with the virus, and that many are likely to be asymptomatic,” the group wrote in its initial report.

Latinos accounted for 44% of residents in the tested area, but they made up 95% of the positive tests.

It was the first time neighborhood leaders had data to back up what they had heard anecdotally about coronavirus’ spread, said Susana Rojas, who is executive director of the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District in the Mission.

“It gave us a direction and a focus,” she said. “Before, we didn’t know for sure. We didn’t have the data to confirm it.”

The challenges that make it easy for Latino workers and families to contract the illness, as well as those that make it difficult for Mission residents to access testing, are the same structural problems that lead to poor health outcomes for many other diseases: low-income, no health insurance or paid leave, high-exposure jobs, crowded homes, and complicated rules about safety-net services for people without permanent residency or citizenship. Many of those factors also were confirmed and quantified by the UCSF study.

Among those who tested positive, 90% could not work from home and 89% earned less than $50,000 a year in one of the nation’s most expensive cities. Almost 60% lived in homes with three to five residents and another 29% reported even larger households.

 “The communities that have been historically underrepresented and underfunded because of race are going to be the ones that bear the brunt of the pain any pandemic will bring,” said Jon Jacobo, a community organizer with the Latino Task Force on COVID-19 and a lifelong resident of The Mission. “If we all understand that framework, we are able to prepare and hopefully push the resources to always help those with the least first.”

Arthur Hall isn’t included in official COVID-19 tallies because of a false negative test result.

Hall, a 51-year-old school administrator in Wilmington, Delaware with no pre-existing health conditions, had taken several trips in the early spring to Washington D.C. for work and to the West Coast to visit friends. His family had planned a spring break trip in mid-March, but their flights were canceled amid coronavirus concerns.

Three days later, Hall started to feel back pain. Then, he became fatigued, and his breathing was labored.

“I was out of breath taking a shower, just standing there,” he said.

He said his doctor told him not to go to the hospital, which would send him home. She said to call 911 if he couldn’t breathe. By that night, he couldn’t. And he started vomiting. Paramedics loaded him into the ambulance so quickly that Hall’s wife didn’t have a chance to ask which hospital they would take him to.

“That experience was pretty traumatic for all of us,” Paula Hall said. She developed mild symptoms but was never tested because supplies were limited to serious cases at the time. 

Arthur Hall’s symptoms worsened at the hospital: fever, chills, hallucinations and low oxygen levels. He was hospitalized for five days and tested negative for coronavirus twice. Doctors said not to be bothered by the tests, which they described as unreliable.

“There’s no way this was just pneumonia,” Hall said. “I don’t necessarily begrudge the fact that I came up negative. I’m just happy to be alive and with my family.”

The day after he returned home, one of his daughters turned 12 years old. He was supposed to isolate himself in a room away from family until he had a second negative test. He broke the rule briefly to join the celebrations from six feet away, wearing gloves and a mask.

“It took my family a while to get used to me being home and even longer to make sure I wasn’t contagious anymore,” he said.

His wife agreed that it was nerve wracking to not know when exactly her own husband was safe to be around her and their children.

“I just did not want to be in the same position knowing we had to take care of the girls,” she said. “And with these new cases in kids in New York City, I guess as a parent that’s my next worry.”

Melissa Hennings, an IT worker at a hospital in Berkeley, California, suspects she contracted COVID-19 in December.

When her fever shot up to 103 and she developed a bad dry cough, Hennings feared pneumonia. In a tele-appointment with a doctor, she had trouble describing her symptoms because talking triggered coughing fits that made her nauseated. After a few days of medication, Hennings still did not feel better, so she drove to the ER.

“They diagnosed me with pneumonia in both lungs and multiple nodes,” the 48-year-old said. “They hooked me up to four bags of IV fluids. I had two different nebulizer treatments in nine hours and my oxygen didn’t come up by much.”

Doctors conducted several tests but found nothing. Against their recommendation, she went home to ride it out. Hennings said it took months to fully recover.

“That part is really crazy, having actual doctors say to you, ‘You are really, really sick, and we have no idea how you got this sick this fast,’” she said.

Like Hennings, many interviewed by USA TODAY said they were seriously ill before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic and as states struggled to gather testing supplies. 

Because their coronavirus antibodies might dissipate before antibody tests are developed that doctors broadly trust, they might not receive formal confirmation of their COVID-19 experience.

Gerardin, from the Feinberg School of Medicine, said identifying early cases like Hennings is helpful in understanding how the virus spread before public health leaders intervened with shut-down orders.

“It’s important to understand what the baseline looks like,” she said. “If we gave up and went back to 100% normal life, that’s what spread would look like.”

Months before federal leaders identified and acted on community spread in the U.S., some people were dying from coronavirus. Many will never be identified, experts said.

Understanding how many more people died from COVID-19 may not change public health policies, said Nicholas Jewell, a professor of biostatistics at The University of California – Berkeley. But it matters deeply to communities that have experienced loss.

“It’s recognizing death and the passage of loved ones. The impact we had on families is incredibly important as humans,” he said. “We have to get beyond just hearing a number.”

Angie Summers’ friends and family believe she might be one of those early victims.

Friends of the 57-year-old former Fort Worth newspaper columnist said she had not traveled recently nor did she have medical conditions that would have put her at high risk for COVID-19.

But on Feb. 18, Summers texted friends and family, saying she was sick but a flu test was negative. Doctors told her that some of her lab results had been “troubling” and “puzzling.”

Three days later, Summers died. An ambulance brought her to the hospital to be treated for pneumonia complicated by sepsis. Within hours, kidney failure triggered a heart attack that killed her.

That same day, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that they had not yet seen community spread of coronavirus in the United States but warned that a pandemic was “likely.”

It would be weeks more before officials confirmed that the virus had, in February, killed several Americans who had no international travel history.

For months, Summers’ friends and family checked the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office’s website over and over to see if officials had identified her cause of death.

“For me, the fact that we still don’t have answers has provoked a range of painful emotions,” said her friend Rhonda Aghamalian. “I think that it’s human nature to seek an answer to the question of what took her from us. And I also feel quite strongly that if Angie succumbed to COVID-19, she deserves to be counted and recognized as a victim of the pandemic.”

The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office cited privacy laws as it declined to discuss Summers’ case.

Four months after Summers’ death, family members learned officials had finally finished their investigation.

Summers’ official cause of death: “Undetermined.”

Investigative reporter Jessica Priest contributed to this story.

Illustrations by Veronica Bravo, Jennifer Borresen and Javier Zarracina/ USA TODAY

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A new, nationwide flood modeling tool released Monday paints a picture of the U.S. as a country woefully underprepared for damaging floods, now and in the future.

The federal government’s best efforts to predict where flooding will strike have underestimated the risk to nearly 6 million homes and commercial properties primarily in the nation’s interior, leaving them unprepared for potential devastation, the analysis shows.

Meanwhile, the model prepares residents of coastal states and cities for risks to come as their communities head toward a future of more intense storms and rising seas.

Experts say the analysis is the latest evidence of a decades-long bungling of flood planning and policy at multiple levels of government across the country. And it presents difficult new questions about who will pay billions of dollars to save communities from going underwater: homeowners, towns and cities, or the U.S. taxpayer?

“Who is going to pay and how we are going to pay, is the ultimate question,” said A.R. Siders, a professor at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center.

The analysis was conducted by the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit organization that paired dozens of scientists and engineers with researchers from academic institutions including the University of California-Berkeley, George Mason University and Rutgers University. The team combined several existing models of sea level rise, riverine flooding and simulations of extreme weather events into a single, nationwide flood assessment model that examined risk in all states except Alaska and Hawaii.

While insurance and investment companies, such as Blackrock, have long used their own private models to make decisions, First Street will allow users of its Flood Factor site to view flood risks to individual properties and created a Flood Lab that allows academic researchers to further access data for research.

The group’s modeling is “exactly what we need to be doing,” said Kerry Emmanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT who serves on First Street’s advisory board.

“Until recently we didn’t have people putting all these little pieces together,” he said. “We had really good people working on that little piece of the problem and good people working on another little corner.”

First Street’s newly combined model found that about 14.6 million homes and other structures across the country currently face a 1% annual risk of flooding, representing about one out of every 10 such real estate parcels nationwide. But First Street calculated that current maps developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency list just 8.7 million properties in the floodplain, a 40% undercount compared with what First Street found.

And the situation is getting worse. In addition to a present-day analysis, First Street’s modeling incorporated 2050 projections from the International Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations’ primary scientific body on the issue. The conclusion: Another 1.6 million properties will be at 1% annual risk of flooding by 2050.

The 1% threshold is the gold standard used by the federal government to assess which homeowners are required to purchase flood insurance. But experts say it’s also misleading, as it actually equates a 1-in-4 chance of flooding over the course of a 30-year mortgage. Local and county planners also use the threshold to determine which areas are safe to develop.

Many flood experts said the discrepancy between the two models wasn’t surprising, given the limitations baked into FEMA’s calculations. The federal agency is stretched thin, struggling to keep its flood maps up to date, particularly for inland areas perceived to be less vulnerable than the coasts, experts said. The agency also looks only at historical data to assess where flooding could strike next, leaving out current and future models that assess where else risk might exist or even be growing.

Grover Fugate, former executive director of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Management Council, said he butted heads with FEMA over floodplains during his nearly 35 years with the council. FEMA revamped its flood maps along the state’s coast in recent years and actually lowered storm-surge estimates by up to five feet where Fugate knew the opposite was true. His team took a closer look.

“We found that there were a series of mistakes with the FEMA maps that were alarming,” Fugate said. 

Fugate said the agency hadn’t accurately accounted for the way winds would drive waves inland during massive storms, and also used a 50-year-old model to predict the way a storm surge would begin moving over the land.

The discrepancies led Fugate’s team to develop its own flood maps with what they felt were better models. As a result, his team found that FEMA had underestimated wave height during extreme storms by as much as 16 feet.

“We now use those in the state for our purposes,” Fugate said.

Eric Tate, a professor at the University of Iowa who early in his career built flood modeling tools as a FEMA contractor, agreed the agency’s maps can be outdated, miss lower-priority areas and at times become subject to political influence through a revision process. 

“As a result of all of these, there’s a lack of uniformity nationwide,” said Tate, who plans to use First Street’s data in his research. “You have a map here that’s based on this set of data, and this way of analysis. And then you have another map somewhere else, and it’s different.”

FEMA’s maps and First Street’s model depict different kinds of risk and serve different purposes, said FEMA Press Secretary Lizzie Litzow.

The federal agency is charged by Congress with mapping current flood risk and its flood data is used for floodplain management and for life and safety during a flood event. It works with  local and state government officials to gather information to prepare and update maps and allows local officials to submit additional data to ask for map revisions. 

The agency sees First Street’s Flood Factor as a tool to inform a property owner’s decision to buy flood insurance or take steps to reduce individual flood risk, Litzow said. 

FEMA’s maps remain the backbone of effective floodplain management, said David Maurstad, the agency’s deputy associate administrator for Insurance and mitigation. Local adoption of minimum standards based on the maps helped avoid $100 billion in losses over the past 40 years, he said.

FEMA’s regulatory maps depict the 1% chance annual event, but flood risks exist outside that flood plain, Litzow said. By the agency’s own accounting, 20% of flood claims come from properties outside high-risk flood zones. 

Although people try to compare flood maps to actual events, Litzow said, it’s “not an apples-to-apples comparison.” 

Still, First Street’s analysis, which used a uniform modeling system across the lower 48 states, helps expose the potential scale of missed risk. Many of the largest discrepancies are driven by states and cities not typically considered at high risk for flooding. In California, nearly 600,000 properties are at 1% annual risk for flooding under First Street’s model, but not under FEMA’s. That’s the largest gap of any state, driven by big jumps in cities like Los Angeles and Fresno.

Similar gaps exist in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Tennessee, driven by underappreciated risks in cities such as Philadelphia and Chattanooga.

Chicago leads among all cities: First Street calculates that nearly 76,000 additional properties there should be in the floodplain.

Officials with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago weren’t surprised to learn of the discrepancy. FEMA’s models have difficulty with urban flooding and that’s Chicago’s biggest problem, said Rich Fisher, the district’s principal civil engineer.

The region has experienced several significant flood events during the past 20 years, including a national disaster declaration in 2013. Between 2007 and 2014, more than 90% of the insurance claims were for properties outside of the federally designated floodplain, Fisher said. 

The implications of First Street’s findings stretch far beyond huge urban centers.

Under its calculations, no state is more at risk than West Virginia, where mountainous terrain has historically forced communities to crowd near rivers and creeks in deep valleys. In that state, nearly one out of every four properties reach the 1% risk threshold under First Street’s model, a higher proportion than in Florida and Louisiana and a significant jump from 1 in 10 properties under FEMA.

In June 2016, the risk became reality in West Virginia, when heavy rains led to flash flooding that killed 23 people in several counties. 

But four years later, First Street’s analysis appears to show risks are still being missed in the state’s river towns.

In the tiny community of Rand, nestled tight against the Kanawha River about six miles southeast of Charleston, just 2 percent of homes currently fall within FEMA’s 100-year floodplain. That figure jumps to 93% under First Street’s model, one of the largest such increases of any community in the entire country.

“When I think about our towns and terrain, Rand isn’t alone,” said Angie Rosser, executive director of the nonprofit West Virginia Rivers. “Most of our areas where people live are right up against rivers and streams.”

Even more dramatic increases occur along the Gulf Coast in communities in Florida and Texas. 

In Pine Manor, a neighborhood several miles south of Fort Myers, Florida, only 0.3%  of properties now reside in FEMA’s 100-year floodplain. That jumps to 99.6% under First Street’s analysis. The nearby neighborhoods of Warm Mineral Springs and Whiskey Creek also see properties within the floodplain jump to nearly 100%.

Jim Beever, a scientist who retired earlier this year from a regional planning council that helped cities in Southwest Florida model floods, said FEMA maps have traditionally not paid much attention to storm surge in the area and are “very broad-brush.” 

In addition to releasing a report with its findings, First Street has created a “Flood Factor” tool that the company promotes as a way for homeowners and buyers to evaluate any given property’s risk for flooding. The tool also allows users to review whether the property flooded in the past, and receive wider statistics for their ZIP code, county, and state.

Some say the application has perhaps the greatest implications for any use of First Street’s model. While the tool likely won’t immediately transform the real estate market, experts predict it will grow as Americans become more familiar with the tool and others like it.

“This sounds like a CARFAX for homes,” said Larry Bartlett, the property appraiser for Volusia County, Florida, home of Daytona Beach.

While Bartlett figures some will doubt the data, just like they doubt sea level rise, others, especially mortgage lenders, would find the updated information invaluable.  

“If I was a lender, I’d want to know if the property I was lending money on stood a good chance of being underwater in 30 years,” Bartlett said. “If it gets to the point where people are relying on the data, it will definitely affect property values, but I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Others said that the current inability for prospective homebuyers to evaluate the true flood risk and history is a crucial problem nationwide.

“We have long been doing a poor job at communicating flood risk,” said Carolyn Kousky, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Risk Center and a First Street advisory board member.

Determining whether a home sits in a floodplain or not is only the first step, Kousky said. Also important is how severe flooding may be, which can inform decisions such as whether or not a home should be elevated or what amount of insurance to purchase. Decisions are further complicated by the fact that with few exceptions, most prospective buyers cannot ascertain whether or not a home was previously flooded.

“Markets aren’t efficient if there’s not full information,” Kousky said, adding she hopes the new tool will help arm buyers with more information.

But several experts urged caution, noting all models have limitations. 

William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the new model may be a “big step forward” in understanding risk. But no model is perfect, he said, and there are still gaps in the understanding of how likely certain weather events are to occur.

“We’ve only been well-positioned to monitor these things in the last 50 to 75 years,” Sweet said. “How do we make assumptions and assessments about today’s risk when we can’t really model and monitor all the components that go into calculating that risk?”

Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association for State Floodplain Managers, further warned that nationwide models by their very nature miss nuances at the local level. Urban flooding is particularly difficult to pin down and often requires detailed and expensive analysis of stormwater infrastructure.

“There is not going to be a national model that is the panacea to answer all flood risk questions,” Berginnis said.

But for at least one potential buyer, the model rings true. 

Kristina Johnson, 23, has flooding on her mind as she checks out homes in the Savannah, Georgia area. 

Her Acura TSX flooded in September 2017, when she was forced to leave it behind while evacuating from Hurricane Irma. She left it parked at her apartment complex on the city’s south side.

It was flooded to the steering wheel, Johnson said, and she had to get a new car. 

“And that actually was not a flood zone,” she said. 

However, on First Street’s list, the complex has seven apartments scored with a high flood risk. Johnson said she’s keeping that experience in mind as she considers a new home. 

While determining a community’s flood risk is challenging, experts say equally as daunting is figuring out what to do next.

Decisions about building in flood zones are almost entirely made by local and county governments. Each face their own unique challenges, and many find it difficult to give up the short-term benefits of waterfront development  because of the chance of a flood decades down the road.

Fugate, the former regional planner in Rhode Island, said an official in the town of South Kingston used to remind him that the first row of houses from the beach accounted for 20% of the municipal tax base. In coastal areas, waterfront property owners are also typically wealthy and hold political clout that enables them to push back on development limitations or financial penalties.

“The incentives are stacked against” local leadership to respond proactively, said Siders, from the University of Delaware.

But Tate said historically disadvantaged communities, not wealthy ones, face the greatest challenges from flooding. His recent research has found that the populations exposed to the highest levels of flood risk are disproportionately African American, Native American and residents of mobile homes.

The problem becomes exacerbated by the fact that many such communities don’t have the resources to pay for their own flood maps to better understand where risks exist.

“Many of these counties and communities that have lower capacity are also places where the economics aren’t as strong, or there’s a higher percentage of racial minorities,” Tate said. 

Rand, in West Virginia, offers a real-world example. Census data shows the poverty rate there is 27%, more than double the national average. Black residents make up one third of the population, much higher than the 13% national figure.

In recent weeks, after heavy rains brought flooding to portions of Rand, local TV station WOWK reported that neighbors felt the state had failed to maintain drainage culverts, exacerbating the flooding. A local state delegate, Amanda Estop-Burton, created a Facebook post calling attention to the issue that was shared hundreds of times by local residents. Many commenters tied the issue to what they felt was a chronic underinvestment in the community. 

In an interview, Kent Carper, a commissioner of Kanawha County where Rand resides, expressed skepticism when told about First Street’s model showing the town in the crosshairs for pervasive flooding. He’s distrustful of such predictions because of his experience with FEMA flood maps he believed to be inaccurate.

“I’ve never had a lot of confidence in these computer modeling programs,” Carper said. “90 percent of this stuff is generally driven by someone making money.”

But Carper is no stranger to the dangers of flooding. Six county residents died in the 2016 floods, after which Carper described the flooding as “Our Katrina” to the Wall Street Journal.

Carper said Rand has its own “difficult struggles,” and that placing such communities into floodplains can make affording insurance “impossible for people.” Carper highlighted other priorities, such as rebuilding critical infrastructure still damaged by the 2016 floods.

“We still have high school children that haven’t had a school building now for four years,” Carper said.

Rosser, with West Virginia Rivers, in many ways agreed. Her own home, situated an hour northwest of Rand, was flooded in 2016, despite not being within FEMA’s 1% floodplain. She said the community has yet to recover, with dilapidated houses standing abandoned after residents moved on. 

She also feels trapped financially.

“My house is livable but I haven’t re-furnished it, because anytime it rains I still have in the back of my mind, ‘Is it going to happen again?’” Rosser said. “But nobody will buy my house.”

Even still, future flooding risk is low on the worry list for residents. Drinking water problems, aging sewer infrastructure, the ongoing opioid crisis, and a lack of access to broadband internet and jobs all loom large.

“It’s hard to look beyond the immediate basic needs to think about flood protection and resiliency,” Rosser said.

And unlike in coastal areas, retreat isn’t an option. There’s no building homes halfway up a mountain, Rosser says. Not that some would even want to.

“I talked to people here locally in 2016. They wanted no part of FEMA, because they were so scared they were going to be forced to move,” Rosser said. “You have land that has been in families for generations, and a very kind of independent, self-reliant culture here. It’s ‘You’re not going to tell me I can’t live here.’” 

The problem with putting flood risk on the backburner is that someone has to pay for it, experts say. The economic harm driven by devalued real estate and insurance premiums is real, but so too are the costs of picking up the pieces after a flood hits.

“There’s always been this kind of tension between wanting to protect home values, but also wanting to be clear about risks and manage those risks effectively,” Kousky said. “Those price adjustments reflect a real underlying risk.”

And currently, U.S. taxpayers subsidize that risk, Kousky said. The federal government’s National Flood Insurance Program is the primary provider of flood insurance policies, which is required by law for any property with a federally-backed mortgage within the 100-year floodplain.

Kousky said the program has been underwater ever since Hurricane Katrina wiped out its coffers in 2005, followed by additional hits from Hurricanes Ike, Sandy, and Harvey. In 2017, Congress voted and President Donald Trump signed off on $16 billion in debt forgiveness for the program. The money theoretically should have been paid back to the federal government for use elsewhere.

FEMA has set aggressive targets for increasing insurance coverage and closing the insurance gap, Litzow said, and is making some progress working with state, local, and industry partners to help at-risk communities and promote flood insurance.

The agency “is constantly working to improve the production of the Flood Insurance Rate Maps within the context of changing conditions,” Maurstad said. “We’re exploring ways to leverage new technologies and provide flood information more efficiently, accurately, and consistently across the nation.” 

Experts say there are no easy fixes, as each solution creates its own problem. Raising premiums can disproportionately hurt disadvantaged communities and drive people away from insurance. Requiring more disclosure about risks and past flooding can penalize those who are honest and reward those who aren’t. 

“A fundamental piece of this is trying to decide from a public values perspective, how much catastrophic risk we want individual homeowners to bear, and how much we think should be socialized,” Kousky said.

Ticking away in the background is the reality that the situation is only getting worse.

Baking in future climate change projections, First Street’s model anticipates rapid growth in the number of at-risk properties in coastal cities, particularly along the Gulf Coast.

This year, First Street’s model shows about 48,000 properties in New Orleans are within the 100-year flood zone, or a little less than one-third of the city. By 2050, nearly 100,000 more will be added to the list, or 98% of the city. Elsewhere in the state, the communities of Chalmette and Meraux will see 99.9% of homes reach the 1% risk threshold.

In Florida, First Street projects Jacksonville will see 19,000 properties added to the floodplain. Around the same number will be added in Cape Coral, sandwiched between the Gulf of Mexico and the Caloosahatchee River. On the opposing banks of the Caloosahatchee, Pine Manor will have fallen entirely into the floodplain. 

FEMA does have a Hazardous Mitigation Grant Program that buys out at-risk homes and relocates residents to higher ground. Siders said the program has purchased about 45,000 homes since first established in 1989. Although the number may seem large, it only amounts to about 30 homes per state per year.

Meanwhile, new development within floodplains continues in many communities across the country.

“We can’t figure how we’re going to pay for the homes that are already at risk, and now we’re adding more, and we’re adding more by the thousands,” Siders said. “That means we’re putting thousands of more families at risk, with no plan for how we’re going to pay to help them get out in the future.” 

Contributing: USA TODAY data reporter Theresa Diffindal and Savannah Morning News reporter Mary Landers

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PHOENIX — A sole winning ticket for Tuesday’s $410 million Mega Millions drawing was sold at a convenience store in a Phoenix suburb, lottery officials said Wednesday.

The winning ticket was purchased at a Circle K in the city of Glendale, Arizona Lottery spokesman John Gilleland said Wednesday.

The jackpot can be paid out as an annuity with 30 annual payments or is worth $316.8 million if collected in a lump-sum, Gilleland said.

The winning numbers were 1, 5, 9, 10 and 23, with Mega Ball 22.

Under a 2019 Arizona law, the winner can remain anonymous forever, Gilleland said.

“We may never be able to release the identity,” he said.

The law specifies that winners of Arizona Lottery prizes of $100,000 or more automatically remain anonymous for 90 days but the winners can choose to remain anonymous permanently. The option for permanent anonymity was adopted last year.

“Every single person that has won that sort of money has opted for that,” Gilleland said.

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Cyclone Amphan, one of the most powerful in decades, has begun to make landfall along the coastline of India and Bangladesh where more than 2.6 million people fled to shelters in a frantic evacuation made all the more challenging by the coronavirus pandemic.

“The cyclone has made landfall. The eye is over Sagar Island,” Sanjib Banerjee, director of the regional meteorological office in Kolkata, told the AFP news agency on Wednesday, referring to India’s east coast.

More:

• Monsoon season threatens Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh

• Cyclone Vayu poised to hit India as year’s second major storm

• Cyclone Fani: Nearly 800,000 evacuated in India before storm

Weather officials say the cyclone – packing winds of up to 190kph (120 miles an hour) – could wreak havoc in India and Bangladesh, and millions of coastal residents have evacuated or battened down ahead of the storm’s approach.

Authorities warned it could cause extensive damage to flimsy houses and a storm surge could push seawater 25km (15 miles) inland, flooding cities including Kolkata.

Coconut trees swayed wildly, electric poles lay scattered on the roads of Kolkata, rain pounded fishing villages, and rivers surged as the storm battered the coast.

Watch | Moment captured as #CycloneAmphan makes landfall in West Bengal’s Digha pic.twitter.com/xZczD8od6b

— NDTV (@ndtv) May 20, 2020

‘Next 24 hours crucial’

“The next 24 hours are very crucial. This is a long haul,” said M Mohapatra, India’s meteorological chief.

The region, with 58 million people in the two bordering countries, has some of the most vulnerable communities in South Asia: poor fishing communities in the Sunderbans and over a million Rohingya refugees living in crowded camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.

Al Jazeera’s Tanvir Chowdhury, reporting from Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, said 1.4 million people have been evacuated and put into shelter but at least 46,000 people remained in the clear line of danger on some of the islands in the coastal areas.

“There is accommodation for at least five million people and there is medical team, rescue operation team, coastguard and the navy have been put on alert and standby in the coastal areas,” he said. 

“This would be one of the biggest cyclones so they are taking it very seriously.”

The Indian weather department forecast a storm surge of 10 to 16-foot (3-4 metre) waves – as high as a two-storey house – that could swamp mud dwellings along the coast, uproot communication towers and inundate roads and railway tracks.

There will be extensive damage to standing crops and plantations in the states of West Bengal and Odisha, the weather service said in a bulletin late on Tuesday.

Authorities were hastily repurposing quarantine facilities for the looming cyclone soon after easing the world’s biggest lockdown against the coronavirus. India has reported more than 100,000 cases with 3,163 deaths.

About 300,000 people had been moved to storm shelters, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said. The state capital Kolkata lies near the cyclone’s path and there was concern about people living in about 1,500 old, dilapidated buildings.

Kolkata was battered by heavy rain and the muddy Hooghly River was rising under dark skies, while in the coastal resort of Digha, large waves were pounding the shore.

Rohingya refugees vulnerable

In neighbouring Bangladesh, officials said the cyclone could set off tidal waves and heavy rainfall, unleashing floods.

The cyclone is expected to hit the districts of Chittagong and Khulna, just 150 km (93 miles) from refugee camps housing more than a million Rohingya in flimsy shelters.

The UN said food, tarpaulins and water purification tablets had been stockpiled, while authorities said the refugees would be moved to sturdier buildings if needed.

“We are fully prepared. But right now, there is no need to take them to cyclone shelters,” said Mahbub Alam Talukder, Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner.

Authorities in Bangladesh have also moved hundreds of Rohingya refugees living on a flood-prone island in the Bay of Bengal to storm shelters as the super cyclone barrels down.

The eastern edge of the storm headed for Bangladesh and neighbouring India is expected to batter Bhasan Char island, where 306 Rohingya, members of a persecuted minority from Myanmar, were sent this month after being rescued from boats.

“Each block has a cyclone centre and they have been moved to the centre,” said Bimal Chakma, a senior official of the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission.

The United Nations has called for the refugees to be moved to the mainland to join more than a million more who live in sprawling camps outside the town of Cox’s Bazar.

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