It is the peculiar nature of hurricanes that they are both uncommon and utterly predictable. Depending on an island’s geography, it may have a one-in-ten chance of being hit, or a one-in-a-thousand chance. Those are only odds, of course, but they are important because hurricanes are best understood as numbers and probabilities. Some areas are simply more vulnerable than others — Southeast Florida, Puerto Rico, the Florida Panhandle, and the Gulf states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. While you may reassure yourself that you have only a one-in-a-hundred chance of being leveled by a devastating storm in a given year, it’s highly likely that there will be a hurricane in one of these geographies, and someone’s house will be destroyed.
Moreover, the chances appear to be increasing, though not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine. Even accounting for years with lots of hurricanes, including 2004, 2005, 2017, and 2018, the number of hurricanes has held relatively steady for centuries, dating back to the founding of the nation. What has changed is the amount of property at the coast, which amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild after hurricanes.
In July 2014, the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit arm of the federal government that helps fund and direct critical research in medicine, engineering, and the social sciences, reported the findings of a yearlong study of coastal risks. Damages from hurricanes and nor’easters have “increased substantially over the past century,” the researchers noted, “largely due to increases in population and development in hazardous coastal areas.” The chief beneficiaries of the land boom at the coast have been the beach towns and property owners who perversely shoulder little of the risk of building in harm’s way yet enjoy most of the wealth, the report added.
Critically, the report, Reducing Coastal Risk on the East and Gulf Coasts, observed that there is “no central leadership, unified vision,” or national strategy to reduce the costs associated with hurricanes. The preponderance of federal funding is paid out after storms, with scant attention to zoning or land-use issues, buyouts, or retreat from vulnerable floodplains. “Over the past century, most coastal management programs have emphasized coastal armoring, while doing little to decrease development in harm’s way,” the report concluded. (...)
In the last two decades, hurricanes and coastal storms have caused over three-quarters of a trillion dollars in damage at the coast — far more than earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfires combined. That represents a nearly sixfold increase from the prior two decades (1980–1990), as well as most of the hurricane damage in the last century ($725 billion of $1.2 trillion), after adjusting for inflation and population. Alarmingly, the pace of destruction is accelerating, with seventeen of the twenty most expensive hurricanes occurring since 2000. In 2017, Harvey, Maria, and Irma alone accounted for over $300 billion in damage, the single-most expensive hurricane season ever.
Absent a dramatic but unlikely shift in weather patterns, or Americans abandoning the coasts, this sharp spike in hurricane damage is likely to continue, experts say. This is even as the federal government is spending tens of billions on building seawalls, widening beaches, elevating houses, and undertaking an array of other costly efforts to protect coastal property. (...)
It needs to be acknowledged that government spending is full of kinks, making it hard to know the exact price tag for some disasters. Historical data aren’t always available or reported consistently, with disaster recovery programs scattered across numerous federal agencies. Nevertheless, based on figures that FEMA and other agencies have published, it is safe to say that federal taxpayers have spent at least $500 billion since 1950 responding to hurricanes and coastal storms, including over $350 billion in the last decade alone, a phenomenon that some researchers have likened to a “stealth entitlement” that primarily benefits the wealthy.
In his revealing 1999 study of federal disaster spending, the University of Massachusetts geographer Rutherford H. Platt coined a nice phrase, “the federalization of disasters,” to capture the growing inclination of politicians and bureaucrats to declare every disaster a federal disaster, followed by a gusher of government funds to help pay for the recovery.
“The law since 1950 was always that federal assistance should be secondary to local assistance. It should be a residual level of protection, not the major level of protection,” Platt told me in an interview in 1998. “But clearly the politics have changed.”
But it wasn’t only the politics that shifted; it was the public’s attitudes as well. There was a growing expectation among coastal property owners, mayors, and governors that federal dollars would flow their way after hurricanes to help underwrite their recovery. In the 1970s, FEMA administrators pointed out the distorting effects of this shift in attitudes, noting that “first-dollar coverage” by the government (versus private insurance or homeowners paying for their own repairs) subsidized risky building in floodplains and encouraged owners of coastal property to forego private insurance. In effect, the government was creating a moral hazard by rewarding reckless behavior and then serving as the primary insurer when catastrophe struck.
by Gilbert M. Gaul, Longreads | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/The Philadelphia Inquirer, Clem Murray
Moreover, the chances appear to be increasing, though not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine. Even accounting for years with lots of hurricanes, including 2004, 2005, 2017, and 2018, the number of hurricanes has held relatively steady for centuries, dating back to the founding of the nation. What has changed is the amount of property at the coast, which amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild after hurricanes.In July 2014, the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit arm of the federal government that helps fund and direct critical research in medicine, engineering, and the social sciences, reported the findings of a yearlong study of coastal risks. Damages from hurricanes and nor’easters have “increased substantially over the past century,” the researchers noted, “largely due to increases in population and development in hazardous coastal areas.” The chief beneficiaries of the land boom at the coast have been the beach towns and property owners who perversely shoulder little of the risk of building in harm’s way yet enjoy most of the wealth, the report added.
Critically, the report, Reducing Coastal Risk on the East and Gulf Coasts, observed that there is “no central leadership, unified vision,” or national strategy to reduce the costs associated with hurricanes. The preponderance of federal funding is paid out after storms, with scant attention to zoning or land-use issues, buyouts, or retreat from vulnerable floodplains. “Over the past century, most coastal management programs have emphasized coastal armoring, while doing little to decrease development in harm’s way,” the report concluded. (...)
In the last two decades, hurricanes and coastal storms have caused over three-quarters of a trillion dollars in damage at the coast — far more than earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfires combined. That represents a nearly sixfold increase from the prior two decades (1980–1990), as well as most of the hurricane damage in the last century ($725 billion of $1.2 trillion), after adjusting for inflation and population. Alarmingly, the pace of destruction is accelerating, with seventeen of the twenty most expensive hurricanes occurring since 2000. In 2017, Harvey, Maria, and Irma alone accounted for over $300 billion in damage, the single-most expensive hurricane season ever.
Absent a dramatic but unlikely shift in weather patterns, or Americans abandoning the coasts, this sharp spike in hurricane damage is likely to continue, experts say. This is even as the federal government is spending tens of billions on building seawalls, widening beaches, elevating houses, and undertaking an array of other costly efforts to protect coastal property. (...)
It needs to be acknowledged that government spending is full of kinks, making it hard to know the exact price tag for some disasters. Historical data aren’t always available or reported consistently, with disaster recovery programs scattered across numerous federal agencies. Nevertheless, based on figures that FEMA and other agencies have published, it is safe to say that federal taxpayers have spent at least $500 billion since 1950 responding to hurricanes and coastal storms, including over $350 billion in the last decade alone, a phenomenon that some researchers have likened to a “stealth entitlement” that primarily benefits the wealthy.
In his revealing 1999 study of federal disaster spending, the University of Massachusetts geographer Rutherford H. Platt coined a nice phrase, “the federalization of disasters,” to capture the growing inclination of politicians and bureaucrats to declare every disaster a federal disaster, followed by a gusher of government funds to help pay for the recovery.
“The law since 1950 was always that federal assistance should be secondary to local assistance. It should be a residual level of protection, not the major level of protection,” Platt told me in an interview in 1998. “But clearly the politics have changed.”
But it wasn’t only the politics that shifted; it was the public’s attitudes as well. There was a growing expectation among coastal property owners, mayors, and governors that federal dollars would flow their way after hurricanes to help underwrite their recovery. In the 1970s, FEMA administrators pointed out the distorting effects of this shift in attitudes, noting that “first-dollar coverage” by the government (versus private insurance or homeowners paying for their own repairs) subsidized risky building in floodplains and encouraged owners of coastal property to forego private insurance. In effect, the government was creating a moral hazard by rewarding reckless behavior and then serving as the primary insurer when catastrophe struck.
by Gilbert M. Gaul, Longreads | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/The Philadelphia Inquirer, Clem Murray
