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Rebuilding 
After a disaster has passed, people must start to rebuild. 

Homes and businesses may have been damaged. Roads 
and highways have often been blocked. In the worst cases, 
whole towns may have been wiped right off the map. 
People have to decide what can be rebuilt and what must 
be torn down. 

Doing either can be very expensive. Often, insurance 
helps cover the cost of fixing homes and businesses. The 
owners of homes and businesses pay money to insurance 
companies to cover their costs if disaster hits them. 
However, the money that insurance provides is often not 
enough to cover all the costs. 

In some cases insurance may not cover any costs at 
all. For example, flood damage is not covered by regular 
insurance; people need to have special flood insurance. 
The great floods along the Mississippi River in 1993 caused 
more than $10 billion in damage, but many of the people 
living along the river did not have flood insurance. 
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In the United States, the Federal Emergency 
Management Agency, or FEMA, helps people, businesses, 
and local governments with the cost of rebuilding. People 
who have lost their homes can turn to FEMA for help in 
finding shelter. FEMA loans money to disaster survivors to 
help them rebuild their homes. 
FEMA also helps local and state governments by 
giving out aid money for the rebuilding and repairing of 
infrastructure. Things like roads and bridges get destroyed 
by natural disasters, and it takes money to fix them. 
In some cases, though, it may not make sense to 
rebuild. After the 1993 Mississippi River floods, the federal 
government bought land back from many farmers who 
had settled close to the river. In one case, the whole town 
of Valmeyer, Illinois, was moved to a new spot! Valmeyer's 
original location along the banks of the Mississippi made 
it prone to flooding. So it was moved to an area several 
hundred feet above the river, thereby helping people avoid 
millions of dollars in potential damages from future floods. 

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