How Florida should respond to Hurricane Milton
The number of deaths caused by Hurricane Milton, which struck the west coast of Florida on October 9th, will not be tallied until days after the storm has swept over the peninsula and headed out into the Atlantic. The amount of damage done will not be clear until well after the waters subside from the areas it flooded. How Florida and other storm-prone places will adapt to climate change is also unclear. But adapt they must.
Global warming is not making hurricanes more frequent. It is, however, adding to what makes them destructive. Experts see evidence of human influence in the fact that their winds are more often exceeding 208 kilometres per hour (112 knots), the speed at which a storm graduates to the fourth of the five levels on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which is used to give a sense of the damage in store. And the speeds often pick up at a breathtaking rate. On October 7th Milton went from not being a hurricane at all to having wind speeds of over 250kph in under 25 hours.
The physics behind the dangers posed is simple. A warmer world has warmer seas; more heat stored in those seas means there is more energy available to drive hurricanes. A warmer world also has warmer air; warmer air can absorb more water vapour, which means heavier rains on the land over which hurricanes pass. And a warmer world has less ice, and thus higher sea levels; higher sea levels worsen the storm surges pushed inland by a hurricane’s winds.
There are differences of opinion over the degree to which these trends are already discernible. But the waters of the western Gulf of Mexico, over which Milton formed, are at a remarkable 31°C (88°F). Helene, which hit the Florida panhandle as a category 4 hurricane on September 26th before going on to cause deadly floods in Georgia, the Carolinas and southern Appalachia, underwent a striking intensification as it passed over very hot water in the Gulf shortly before landfall. The damage its torrential rains did inland was not unprecedented; the floods which wrecked Asheville, North Carolina, in 1916 were also due to a hurricane (in fact, to a pair of them). But the sheer amount of water that fell from the sky this time was biblical: something like 100 billion tonnes.
Most Americans are not insured against such hammer blows. Private companies do not offer flood insurance, and few homeowners buy the coverage on offer from the federal government unless they are required to by dint of living on a flood plain. That is why, though the damage done by Helene has been estimated at $250bn, insurers are on the hook for less than 6% of that amount.
More people are insured against flooding in Florida; Milton will cost the government scheme a lot. The damage done by winds can be insured against privately. Premiums, as you might expect, are pricey; that said, the number of insurers that go out of business suggests they are not pricey enough. The result is that the state government both offers its own subsidised insurance and ends up bailing out those affected when other insurers go broke.
Proper insurance coverage, coupled with a firm adherence to the relevant hurricane-aware building codes (descended from those laid down when Herbert Saffir of Saffir-Simpson-scale fame was a county engineer in South Florida) could help make Florida more resilient. They would cost a lot. But if those costs are not borne by Floridians through a mixture of premiums, taxes and mandatory renovations to bring buildings up to code, they will either be passed to the federal government or they will not be paid, and the situation will deteriorate. It would be fairer if those who enjoy the delights of living in Florida shoulder the bulk of the costs. Those who do not want to may opt to live somewhere else. Hard choices like this will proliferate as the world keeps warming. ■
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