Further notes for flood victims:
1) Keep in mind that most houses that are catastrophically water-damaged and which remain empty (if boarded-up) for a year or more will have to be torn down due to deteriorating structural issues and irreversible infiltration of molds. Even if you finally receive some insurance re-imbursement and want to risk renovation, if FEMA and/or the county health department "condemned" it, as part of a post-storm survey, you will have no recourse. So, off the top, you will have to subtract $12-20K from your payout for demolition, or face escalating fines for non-compliance from the county plus the cost of demolition. (Costs are high because you can only use a licensed demo company officially approved by the county -- no short-cuts allowed.)
2) Be aware that your credit rating may be affected, negatively -- even if you have a great history and continue to make all your payments, every month. That is because your property will be re-appraised by the mortgage company and significantly devalued, at the same time your expenses are doubled or tripled; therefore, your debt to asset ratio may be thrown into a higher risk category.
3) The mortgage company may then try to coerce you into a complete payoff, or, announce that, from now on, you are required to pay a higher rate of interest -- even on a fixed rate loan. (You can fight this and win, but it is a tough fight with lots of bureaucracy to overcome, repeatedly.)
4) Ditto for credit card companies, who will raise your interest rate even if you have paid on the nose for years. This, too, is a fight you can win, but you have to fight it, and pay the higher rate in the interim.
5) Accept that you will not be able to sell your property, even as a building lot, for a very long time. Even in a strong market, the inventory of local properties for sale after a natural disaster will be glutted and it will take years for that surplus inventory to be re-absorbed.
Natural disasters plus opportunistic bureaucracy: the gift that keeps on giving.

Here's how it works:
    "Apres le deluge, " weeks will go by before an insurance adjuster shows up. In the meantime, you camp under a partial roof, without windows or doors, without power or water. Sane people would flee, yet you stay -- lest, by being elsewhere, you miss the adjustor who now controls your future.
    Your gentle life has turned upside down, overnight, into a surreal Jurrasic Park quest for survival. The elegant tree canopy, of ancient pines and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, is gone. Therefore the rookeries are gone; therefore the herons and their annual roster of raucous babies is gone. They are replaced, overnight, by predatory hawks and owls whose own habitats were also anniliated.  An injured duck disappears. Family pets are suddenly at risk. Realizing this, and the fact that, by day, your neighborhood is now a war zone of heavy equipment and questionable clean-up crews, whose desire for hardship pay exceeds a desire to be careful or even lawful. Therefore, you imprison your poor pets, by day, either in the remnants of closets that once housed your lovely, if minimalist wardrobe, or in the empty garage where once his and her cars evaded sun and salt damage. 
    By night, you sleep fitfully on camp cots under the viable portion of roof, one ear cocked for the incursion of looters who robbed your neighbors, just last night. You wonder what you will do if their footsteps break the extraordinary silence that follows the cacaphony of daytime generators, backhoes and dump trucks.
And then you find out. Hearing mutiple footsteps in the silence of 3am, you flee to the safety of the walk-in gun closet a previous owner installed -- you know, the one you made fun of, the one you thought the ultimate right wing extravagance. At daybreak, you stumble out, wondering what this day will bring. The answer? Poor looters, who stole food from the cooler and the hard liquor you suddenly cannot do without.
You are waiting, day by day, for Godot, ie, the adjuster who will set you free, release you from this limbo, this purgatory, into a future that moves. You have been living without a full roof, without windows or doors, without power or water. You have spent backbreaking days retrieving your own sodden momentos, or even your neighbors momentos that were borne on wind and waves into your space, your turf, fetched up in  the seaweed/building material/organic matter cesspool that was once your house or your yard.
You are exhausted, shell-shocked, yet somehow optimistic. Nothing, other than the odd romantic or career disappointment, has -- in your life to date --  defied your belief in that "where there's a will there's a way" philosophy.
Then, finally, the Lloyds of London insurance adjuster shows up. Well, not an agent per se, but rather a subcontractor. Urgently, you conduct a house tour, one that is the polar opposite of that which you conducted, in aid of the local symphony, just last year.
This year you point out the water residue line at an 8' height. This year, you point out the black mold that is infesting, not only the drywall, and the joints in the floor tile, but also  the piano, tossed on its side and rammed through a wall.
The pseudo adjuster takes photos and notes. Complicated instructions are issued about how to file a claim.  Assurances are given that a report will be duly filed and recompense, commensurate with the outrageous policy  payments you have been making, will be forwarded, forthwith. Then,  the adjuster vanishes.
You, as the homeowner, will never talk to that person again; he, or she, will never return a phone call. Eventually you will learn that your claim has been re-assigned to another subcontracter, who will get to you when he, or she, can. They don't come, they don't write, they do not return calls. But helpful people in their offices will suggest that to process your claim more rapidly, you need to produce comprehensive photographs(preferably a video), inventories, an engineer's report, a condemnation notice from the city or county, a substantiating report from the corresponding wind and/or flood company, blah, blah, blah.
You are earnest; after all, you are a can-do person. You spend more money. You hire an engineer, a flood plain surveyor. You buy a camera or a camcorder because your own was lost in the flood. You document. You commission and collate reports. You make a back-up copy. You buy a 3-ring binder because, by this time, the number of pages you have to transmit is the size of a semester's worth of graduate school work. You mail the binder that will substantiate your claim, without any doubt.
Weeks pass. There is no answer from the insurer. Finally, when you are driving in heavy traffic, your cell phone rings. It is a new adjuster. He tells you that, unless you pull onto the verge right now, this minute, your claim will be denied. You must speak into the phone, which transmission is being recorded, and say that you accept the deal the insurer is offering, right now, or your file will be refiled, at the bottom of the list.
It is a seminal moment. Raising the image of your dead relative of character before you, you refuse, on the grounds that you do not have the material before you and you cannot make a momentary decision without referencing your files.
The new agent laughs. "Big mistake" he says, and hangs up.
Later you learn that your file has been relegated to the bottom of the list. You have been re-assigned to yet another agent. But you also learn that the offer, on offer, was 10% of the payout of the policy you payed for
There is much more to this story, but you get the drift.
May God have mercy on the current victims of the Midwest flooding. Right now they think the only thing they have to deal with is murky, smelly water.
Would that that were so.
We so often hear items on the news without understanding what that news may mean to individuals. Please, contribute to the Red Cross. Please, contribute linens, blankets, pro bono legal services. Please -- just be aware.

Small comfort, then. Better comfort, later.

Case in point: Hurricane Ivan savaged much of the Gulf Coast in 2004, a year before Katrina. The eye of the storm hit Pensacola, where the number of waterfront properties -- given houses on the Gulf, houses on the Sound, houses on the Bay, and houses on tidal lakes -- is huge and, in consequence, the percentage of the population that was affected was inordinately high.
In the immediate aftermath of the storm and its tidal surge, when evacuated people were permitted to return to the city, neighbor worked with neighbor to cut felled trees for access so that damage assessment and debris clean-up might begin. Out of pocket money was spent, gladly,  to buy generators, chainsaws, camping gear, minimal replacement clothing and shoes. Though in shock, everyone was strong, anticipating the momentary arrival of insurance adjusters.
Days and nights passed as people camped out in ruined structures with damaged roofs, without windows and doors, without power or water. Backbreaking days in stullifying heat and humidity were spent retrieving what could be salvaged from the muck, fighting a losing battle against rot and black mold that infiltrated absolutely everything.  Time passed. People did this, day after day, night after night, rather than

This I know from personal experience; I lost a waterfront "dream house" to Hurricane Ivan's tidal surge in 2004:
The flood damage itself is, incredibly, only the beginning of the homeowners' nightmare. And it is a third circle of hell nightmare that -- unless there is an enormous hue and cry from the public -- will devastate, and sometimes bankrupt, the homeowner, in phases, over a period of time that can last for up to three years.

Why? Because far worse than the natural disaster itself, which "merely" trashes a house and rids the homeowner of everything he, or she, has inherited or accumulated over time, is the coldly-calculated, carefully-controlled practice of both wind and flood insurers to delay and, if possible, to deny coverage -- even on policies that were paid-in-full....which ultimately trashes innumerable lives, sometimes irreparably.

What about FEMA? Forget help from the government -- FEMA will be AWOL for a long time and, when the representatives show up, they will be volunteers, not paid staffers and, in consequence, despite their good hearts they will be disorganized and therefore unhelpful in meaningful terms.

Here is the bottom line, and it is sobering: flood victims who want to deal in reality would be wise to assume that they will not get one penny from their insurers for at least a year. And they will get it then, only if they agree to a payoff that is a fraction of the value of their policy.
Therefore, flood victims whose houses are lost or uninhabitable should be prepared to pay -- out of pocket, or from savings, or from a high interest loan -- for the following expenses: 1) regular mortgage payments and property taxes (just because the house is gone or you can't live there doesn't mean those costs are not owed); 2) the inflated rent on an alternative house or apartment plus their utilities while you are in transition; 3) cutthroat fees from clean-up crews, engineering firms, surveyors and independent adjusters; 4) replacement costs for necessities from cars to clothing.  (They don't tell you to 'save your receipts' for nothing.)
And remember this: all these costs are undertaken at your own risk. There is no guarantee that your insurer will pay, ever. Some insurers declare "insolvency" so that their claims may be transferred to a state agency pool that will eventually pay, if you are lucky, twenty cents on the dollar, excluding household possessions, for which they will pay nothing, no matter what the original policy said.)
So, if flood victims do not have an offer of settlement after a year, they must decide whether or not to hire a lawyer or join a class action suit. Individual lawyers must be paid upfront; they will not do contingency fees on flood cases. Class action lawyers will accept contingency fees, but these payouts can take years and the lawyers get up to 33%.
Hyberbolic version? Not at all. It is what is. Really.

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