Being a native Texan, I'm more than a little familiar with hurricanes. Sadly, the worst natural disaster in our nation's history occurred in my home State in 1900.In late summer of that year, a hurricane made landfall at Galveston killing six thousand (6,000) people. Since that time, gratefully, we have made so many improvements in communications and weather forecasting, in hurricane tracking, evacuation planning, and public awareness, that we should never again be faced with that kind of senseless loss of life from a hurricane in this country.

Many in this audience can take much of the deserved credit for making America's coastal communities safer and better prepared for hurricanes. The National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, the Department of Defense, the Army Corps of Engineers, NASA, FEMA, State and local governments, as well as the volunteer agencies, have all worked on different fronts, for decades, to improve hurricane monitoring and tracking, evacuation planning, public awareness, and mitigation efforts so that coastal communities and property owners have become safer and better informed.

But hurricanes have cost us dearly in other ways. In just the last decade, according to the Property Claims Services, insured losses in the U.S. from hurricanes have exceeded $30 billion! That total sweeps in all insured losses other than those covered under the NFIP from hurricanes--losses to real and personal property, automobiles, infrastructure, and business interruption, regardless of whether the peril was flood or wind. But no matter how you look at it, $30 billion represents serious money.

Because so much is at risk from hurricanes, I'd like to share with you just a few of the things that we at the Mitigation Division and the National Flood Insurance Program are doing to help property owners and communities threatened by hurricanes.

There are almost 19,000 communities that are participating in the National Flood Insurance Program. These communities have adopted and are enforcing flood mitigation standards that make their citizens safer from flood hazards, and, in return, we have made flood insurance available for purchase in these communities.

The National Flood Insurance Program currently has more than 4 million flood insurance policies in force across the country. Those policies represent more than $483 billion in insurance protection against flood damages. Of those nationwide totals, the States with our largest number of policies include the hurricane-prone States of Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and New Jersey.

In the last decade, the National Flood Insurance Program has paid $1.3 billion in claims for flood losses in hurricane disasters. What's important about those figures is that every flood insurance policyholder pays his or her own way through insurance premiums rather than relying on the rest of the taxpayers for disaster relief.

We estimate that there are 8-11 million structures located in high flood-risk areas in this country. Our goal of course is to have every property owner at risk from flood in this country "paying their own way" with the purchase of a flood insurance policy rather than rely on the general body of taxpayers for disaster relief. We're making headway toward that goal although we still have more to do.

I'm happy to report that our policy base has doubled in the last 15 years. A large reason for that increase is the support and energy the program has attracted from the private insurance industry.

For the past fifteen years, the flood insurance program has been operating under a partnership arrangement between the Mitigation Division--Mitigation Division--and private insurance companies to offer flood insurance to the public. Mitigation Division sets the terms and conditions for flood insurance coverage consistent with the statute and prepares the program's manuals and guidance documents. Mitigation Division sets the premium rates, but Mitigation Division relies on these private insurance companies to use their marketing talent to sell and service our Standard Flood Insurance Policy and to adjust claims. (In many cases, these companies will already have sold the property owner a homeowners policy so it becomes a matter of convenience and efficiency for consumers to buy flood insurance from the same insurance agent or company.) In return for these services, the companies retain a portion of the flood insurance premium which they collect. Currently, we have about 90 insurance companies that operate with us under the Write Your Own program. These companies account for about 95% of the flood program's book of business.

Now I'd like to tell you a little bit about what Mitigation Division has been doing to improve our service to NFIP policyholders, specifically in coastal areas at risk from hurricanes. For the past decade, Mitigation Division has been sponsoring Partners in Planning Conferences in States at risk from hurricanes.

During that period, we've held at least one of these conferences each year, and so far Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas have hosted these important planning sessions.

Mitigation Division's Partners in Planning conferences bring together many of the key players who will have to work side by side in the aftermath of a hurricane--the emergency managers at every level of government, the recovery workers, the volunteers, the insurance companies, and the claims adjusters. These conferences permit Mitigation Division, our insurance partners under the Write Your Own program, State and local emergency managers, and volunteer agencies to exchange information so that we understand how each of us operates, the unique service and contribution each of us offers to the recovery effort, and the requirements we have for providing service to people affected by the disaster. It's quite simple: We can't get a flood insurance claim check into the hands of someone who needs it unless we can survey the damage. And State and local officials don't want us in disaster-torn or restricted areas unless they know who our adjusters are and why they're there. These planning conferences help us bridge that gap and give a familiar face to our operations.

Bette Weadon of my staff who's done such a good job over the years to make these Partners for Planning conferences a success tells me that some of the very people she's met in the spring during one of these planning sessions were the same people she worked with side by side after disaster hit later that year during hurricane season. The 1999 Partners in Planning conference will be held in Mississippi this summer.

Besides our Partners in Planning initiative, another important way the National Flood Insurance Program has been serving the needs of people in hurricane-threatened States is our single adjuster program.

As you all know, the standard homeowners policy covers physical damages from wind and fire but it does not pay for flood losses. And it was this very gap in insurance protection for the public that prompted Congress more than thirty years ago to authorize the National Flood Insurance Program. Before our program, the public simply didn't have the option to buy flood insurance coverage.

Now many property owners in hurricane-prone areas have two property insurance contracts: first, a homeowners or business owners policy to protect against physical damage from wind and fire and other perils, and second, a flood insurance policy to protect against flood losses. But after a loss from a hurricane, the same property owner may often have damages from both the perils of wind and flood--damages that are paid for by two separate policies from two separate insurers. And with everything else the victim of a hurricane has to face, the last thing we want is for that victim to be bothered with unnecessary red tape over two insurance policies. So that's why Mitigation Division has entered into formal agreements with the Wind Pool Associations of nine hurricane-prone States to ensure that we will coordinate our insurance efforts after a hurricane under the single adjuster program.

This program has been in effect also for about a decade and it works on a fairly common-sense principle: have one insurance claim adjuster, whenever possible, inspect a hurricane-damaged property, and adjust the claims for both wind damage as well as flood damage at the same time even though two separate insurers are involved. Under the Single Adjuster arrangement, we combine the inspection, when possible, and adjust two claims with one adjuster. We believe that this is making things easier for the insured victims of hurricanes as they start the grueling process of recovery.

Each year, we tailor the single adjuster agreements to meet the unique needs and wishes of each of these nine States. But generally, this is how it operates. Through our pre-arranged agreements or memorandums of understanding, when a hurricane strikes an area, if the State needs us, we co-locate with the State wind pool. We then share with the State at the disaster scene our databases on flood insurance policyholders in the affected area. In this way, when the State windpool assigns an adjuster for a wind loss and if that property also has a flood policy, then only one adjuster handles both claims. These arrangements are flexible enough for us to improve them each year to meet the needs of the States that are our partners in this venture and ultimately the people we serve whose property has been damaged or destroyed by a hurricane.

If I had to choose any one word had to describe the National Flood Insurance Program and our involvement in hurricanes, it would be the word "partnership." It's Mitigation Division's partnership with the private insurance industry--the 90 private companies that are our partners under the National Flood Insurance Program--that has helped more and more Americans be better protected from property losses through flood insurance. Our flood insurance policyholders are better served after a hurricane through our partnership with the States under our Single Adjuster Program. Those same policyholders are also better served through our Partners in Planning conferences that let us get to know the people we will be working with in the aftermath of a disaster to help those same victims recover as quickly as possible. And it's really the partnership between Federal, State, and local governments as well as the volunteer organizations, the academic community, and the media that has made the nation's coastal areas much safer and better protected from hurricanes.

Before finishing, I'd like to invite you all to get better acquainted with the National Flood Insurance Program by visiting us on our website. Our website has information for just about everyone: consumers, insurance agents, insurance companies, lenders, State and local officials. We have practical advice on how to purchase and pay for flood insurance, how to get flood map information, the status of communities in the program, the mandatory guidelines for flood insurance, information about the Coastal Barrier Resources System, mitigation advice for homeowners.

So I encourage you to visit us on-line. I also encourage you, since you know what hurricanes do to people's lives, to urge people at risk to buy and maintain flood insurance coverage. I urge every one of us here today to work to make sure that new buildings or major repairs comply with the NFIP's mitigation standards so that communities will be disaster resistant and property will protected from flood damage. Finally, I would like to thank the conference coordinators for giving me time to address the National Hurricane Conference on the National Flood Insurance Program. If there's time for questions, I would be happy to answer them.

Thank you.