Hurricane Ian: was the carnage in Florida avoidable?

As a native Floridian, I’m no stranger to tropical storms, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. I was there in 1960 for Hurricane Donna, which meteorologists consider “one of the all-time great hurricanes”. Being relatively new to the state and living quite far inland, my family assumed we could ride that tempest out. “The uninitiated always think it would be cool to ‘batten down the hatches’.” We discovered to our cost just how puny such defences are.

It was a harsh lesson that many Floridians experienced last week when Hurricane Ian struck the state, inundating the Gulf of Mexico coast with storm surges and lifting buildings off their foundations with winds of up to 155mph. Dozens of people were killed and millions were left without power.

Forecasters have fortunately made great strides when it comes to working out where hurricanes will go, said Benji Jones on Vox. “Storm track predictions that could only be made 24 hours in advance 20 years ago can now be issued 72 hours ahead.” The flipside, however, is that it has become harder to anticipate how strong storms will get.

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‘Rapid intensification’

Global warming is thought to be contributing to what meteorologists call “rapid intensification”. Hurricane Ian’s wind speeds doubled in the 48 hours before it hit Florida. Last summer, when Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana, the storm jumped from Category 2 strength to Category 4, with winds reaching 150mph, in less than a day. The sudden speed-up leaves little time to organise evacuations.

The risk is made worse by another factor known as the “expanding bull’s eye”, said Simon Ducroquet in The Washington Post. The huge influx of people into Florida in recent years, and the accompanying development, mean the chance of a hurricane hitting built-up areas is far higher than it used to be.

The federal government has exacerbated this problem by encouraging people to put themselves in harm’s way, said Elizabeth Nolan Brown in Reason. Since the late 1960s, it has subsidised flood insurance, enabling millions of people to move to hurricane zones who might instead have been deterred by high premiums. Interrupting market forces has made such moves less financially risky for individuals, but much more costly for taxpayers, while discouraging development in other, less treacherous regions. It makes no sense to keep “subsidising houses in hurricane zones”.