'I’m alive': A North Carolina man watched his house float away during Hurricane Helene — and insurance won’t cover his loss. Milton will put many in the same situation

Vlado Novakovic watched his three homes in Newland, North Carolina, get washed away in the early-October floods caused by Helene, a video shared with FOX Weather shows.

In the original video on Facebook, Novakovic shared his gratitude, in his native Croatian, for what he still had left.

“I’m alive,” Novakovic captioned the video, which shows houses disappearing down a rushing river.

Insurance will not cover Novakovic’s losses, he confirmed in the comments of the Facebook video,

The heartbreaking scene is just a sliver of the devastation to hit southern and central Appalachia, where at least 170 people have died — and what many predict will befall west-central Florida when Milton hits.

As many as 32 people were airlifted out of Avery County, where Novakovic used to live, by the local sheriff and 20 deputies, a post on Facebook shows.

The disaster response has included FEMA and the North Carolina National Guard delivering supplies and searching for missing residents.

But when the winds slow and the rain dissipates, a secondary insurance response won’t cover most of the people left homeless by the storm.

Most flooded homes aren’t covered

Helene is expected to cause $25 billion to $30 billion in physical damage, and most of that won’t get compensated by insurance companies, one disaster modeler told Bloomberg.

Milton could cause as much as $175 billion in damage, according to Wall Street analysts.

Regular home insurance does not protect against flooding, and only homeowners living in FEMA-designated flood zones are required to buy flood insurance. The Tampa area, which is expected to bear the brunt of Milton this week, is within the FEMA borders.

About 4% of American homeowners have flood insurance, and that’s mostly under the federal government’s National Flood Insurance Program.

Wind versus water

Not all hurricanes are made equal, however.

In 2022, insurers paid out $63 billion to victims of Hurricane Ian, because most of the damage was from the impacts of wind, which is covered by traditional home insurance, a risk modeler told Bloomberg.

But only a few years earlier, when Hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas, insurance companies mostly avoided paying the people who lost their homes because the damage was largely flood-related, Insurance Journal reported.

Helene is looking like a repeat of Florence in terms of insurance coverage, and the uninsured will pay the price, Jeff Waters, an analyst at Moody's Analytics subsidiary RMS, told ABC News.

Why insurance is so expensive

The rising cost of insurance is deterring many Americans from taking up a flood policy, experts told ABC News.

Hurricane-path states Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virgini saw their insurance premiums rise dramatically between 2018 and 2023.

That increase in rates matched the rising frequency of severe climate disasters in the U.S., and the amount insurance companies paid tripled over the same time frame, according to Deloitte.

Both the increase in natural disasters and the rising costs of building materials have contributed to the spike in insurance premiums, experts told ABC News.

If your home suffers damage from one of the year’s big hurricanes , there’s a good chance your home insurance premiums will go up significantly.