But what if living in those places is necessary for the rest of the country to benefit from the resources in those areas?
Not having a port at the mouth of the Mississippi would be a massive blow to the country’s economy and productivity. People who live in flood plains often do so because they are farming those flood plains, or are supporting those who farm.
There was a suggestion upthread that some risky areas become tourist only areas, where tourists can more easily evacuate ahead of a storm, but tourist areas need people to live there to support the tourists when they are there.
Kicking people out of the “risky” areas will likely cost us far more economically than rebuilding some structures after a storm. Maybe there are some areas where the math doesn’t work, and it’s not worth it to maintain a human presence there, but I think in most of the cases where people live, there are essential economic factors that make it important that people live there. That’s why people live there in the first place.
In these days of fast vehicles, it’s entirely possible to farm in the flood plain but live on higher ground. And the cost of insuring a year’s crop is a lot less than the cost of insuring densely built homes along the scenic river. Port facilities obviously need to be at water level, but I don’t recall reading about the massive damage to those, mostly it was damage to homes.
There are a lot of places where the math works for crops, and perhaps shacks, but not for nice houses.
California, Japan, and other places where the risk from earthquakes is moderate to high have strict building codes that make homes and other buildings safer during an earthquake. Some of the photos from Florida show a house, clearly fortified, standing nearly unscathed, in a sea of debris, presumably what’s left from their neighborhood. Perhaps stiffening building codes and revision of zoning can help protect communities better. I don’t know if FL has any such codes on the books, tho.
I am sure there’d be strong resistance but doing nothing and letting the system operate as usual will ensure the next disaster will be as bad as the last.
Sure, hop in your car at 4 a.m. to drive a hundred miles or so to get to your farm around sunup, then another couple hour drive home after a day working. I’m assuming that we are also keeping all the farming equipment out of the floodplain, so we will need to be trucking combine harvesters and other equipment in and out. We’ll need to invest quite a bit into road infrastructure.
If people are living there only because they like the scenery, then sure, that’s where the math doesn’t work out to support them, but I doubt that that is a significant fraction of those who live in those areas.
Well, there was pretty massive damage to port facilities after Katrina, but it didn’t make the news as much as the human tragedies that were happening concurrently. But the damage to the homes were to the homes of people who work in the port facilities, or support those who do.
If by “nice houses” you mean mansions and vacation homes, I agree. If you are saying that anyone who works in a port or in a port city needs to live in a shack, I disagree.
I think it would have to be the government, which means collectively we all pay. But spreading the costs of a disaster over 330 million people is a lot easier to bear than telling 100 or 200 people “sucks to be you” and screwing them over, possibly for the rest of their lives. Well, easier for me, but then I’m not in the “F— you, I’ve got mine” club.
Which is why, if we’re going to go down that road, I’d want to make debt forgiveness/rebuilding funds contingent on both relocating to at least somewhat less risky terrain and rebuilding to better standards to withstand disaster. Which, again, may also require some subsidizing of the poorest but I think that in the long term that will be to everyone’s benefit.
Regrettably, our society sucks at long term planning.
If someone shouting about freedumb wants to rebuild on exactly the same spot then, well, you do you buddy but from this point forward you’re on your own.
Yes. That is, in fact, how insurance works on a simplified level. You dilute the costs and risks among a larger group of people. But, again, make getting help/a payout contingent on lowering risks (to the extent possible) going forward. Over time this will reduce the costs (of any sort) of foreseeable disasters, and possibly the unforeseen as well…
I’ll just point out that at this point those two options are identical for flood insurance - the private insurance industry got out of the flood insurance business decades ago so it’s entirely run by the government now, and in fact the national flood insurance is managed by FEMA already. So in the US the it’s the government paying regardless.
Most likely how risk is judged for this program not only needs to be re-evaluated right now, but reviewed on a regular basis going forward.
It was reevaluated a few years ago, and rates went up a lot, as you might expect. It was originally seen as a “help out these poor people who have a disaster” program, and is trying to move more towards a “charge for the risk” program.
But there are political constraints, and yes, it needs to be regularly reevaluated.
I’ll agree with the better standards, especially if those better standards are paid for by a govt program, and not expected to come out of the owner’s pocket, but I still think that there are some places that we need to have people living that are going to be inherently risky.
We are asking them to risk their life and limb to provide us with food or to work in port industries, we shouldn’t ask them to risk their fiscal livelihood as well.
In theory, that’s paid for by people paying into flood insurance premiums, but it is guaranteed and subsidized by taxpayer funds.
The program is projected to run a deficit of approximately $1.4 billion per year under current conditions, with the expected annual cost of $5.7 billion exceeding the $4.3 billion in expected premiums. That shortfall stems largely from two sources: policies embedded in the NFIP and expected flood damages.
It’s not just “backstopped”. It is fully expected to cost more than the premiums. It does not break even, even in theory. And i don’t believe it ever has.
Right, as I said, it is subsidized by taxpayers. The point of my reply was that it was not entirely paid for by taxpayers, and your cite shows that about 75% of the funds do come from premiums.
In the old days people who farmed in flood plains would do things like build their homes on stilts. The area would still flood, but the homes would (usually) survive with intact contents and people would just use small boats to get around until the floods subsided. In between floods, the farming was great because the silt brought in by the floods kept the soil fertile. Hell, Egypt has relied on that sort of thing for literally thousands of years for their agriculture. Or you make an artificial hill to build homes/structures on which yes, does come at a cost but it probably cheaper in the long run that having buildings destroyed repeatedly by floods. There are ways to deal with these problems.
And, as others have pointed out, in these days of motorized transports, people can live significantly further away from their places of work than in the past. After all, on offshore oil rigs we don’t build actual cities to service the workers, they commute from the mainland (there are small stores/commissaries on the rigs, but nothing like what grew up around New Orleans).
Up to a point, yes. And if that is necessary the tourist industry should (even if it doesn’t always) support housing for the needed workers for round the clock occupation, but most workers supporting tourists don’t actually need to be, for example, actually living on Sanibel or Pine island, they can commute (well, once we get the bridges repaired they can). Perhaps we can allow people who have jobs on the island to live there, but not retirees. Also, more robust evacuation plans and rules would be of benefit to such places.
I suspect, though, that most of the 6,000-and-change people resident on Sanibel before last month were not, in fact, working in jobs indispensable to the tourist industry. In 2010 the Wall Street Journal had Sanibel on it’s list of places to have second homes. The people buying/building those homes are not part of the tourist servicing.
If people want government services to bail them out during/after hurricanes then I think it is only fair for them to accept government regulations to reduce risk in return.
Again, there’s a difference between essential workers for an industry that has to occur in a particular place and, say, people retiring to live there who don’t have to live there.
I think we can strike a balance between necessity and risk.
Ports do get damaged in disasters but, since people don’t usually live at a port there isn’t the human loss to catch headlines.
Florida has a long history of relaxing codes to stimulate business and development. As opposed to California, which has a long history of government regulation which means even after major earthquakes most people and structures survive with minimal or no damage.
The results speak for themselves.
Getting up early and traveling some distance has always been part of farming.
Also, “locating buildings on higher ground” doesn’t always mean a hundred miles distance. I linked to Valmeyer, Illinois early in this thread, a small city that was moved to avoid future flooding. The town only had to move 2 miles east to gain 400 feet in elevation. Two miles is walking distance for many people (about a half an hour’s time for most folks), and certainly in the past people routinely walked even farther for work.
Farmers working floodplains near rivers will likely NOT have to move a hundred miles to build on safer ground. Where it might be a problem is a place like the Mississippi delta, which is very extensive, but then there are other possible options for building structures that won’t be completely destroyed by high water.
People have been dealing with these sorts of problems for all of history (and pre-history). Modern engineering can give us further options.
We may continue to have some losses of crops, farm equipment, and so forth. Because we truly do need those things it makes sense to insure them in some manner, or help with replacement. That’s far different than building houses in harm’s way when those houses could be built in a safer location at the same cost.
Depends on the place. Somewhere like Sanibel island which, as I said, the Wall Street Journal featured as a place for a second home might in fact be currently dominated by people who are there for the scenery and not for employment.
People working in risky locations like offshore oil rigs get hazard pay type of compensation for the risk. But while they might reside there for extended periods of time those places are not their permanent residences.
There are a number of jobs that have hazards and require long commutes. Society (private employers and government both) should (but does not always) provide compensation and insurance to those people running greater risks to the benefit of all. But that doesn’t mean building a village onto an offshore oil rig nor should it mean subsidizing homes on ground below sea level right next door to a needed port. In some instances we can locate homes and support businesses on higher ground at a distance that will require a commute, and even provide some support for the commuters like buses or trains or ferries or whatever (works for New York City, among other places). In some places we might have to house people on-site, but that may be housing for those actually working there, with the expectation they won’t live there permanently. We manage to keep McMurdo running in Antarctica without a permanent city growing up around it, we could do that other places, too.
Does that mean some long commutes, or workers living on-site for weeks or month away from their families? Yes. But we already have lots of people in essential industries doing that right now. So clearly it can be done.
And as a taxpayer, I have no problem subsidizing or even outright paying for dealing with these problems.
But people usually live on those rigs for months at a time, not commuting back and forth. It costs a lot to house them, and they make a decent wage for the inconvenience of being far away from home. I don’t know if that’s a model that is viable for any industry that isn’t as profitable as oil.
My understanding is that most of those workers do commute to get to these tourist areas from other areas of the greater Fort Myers area, as they can’t afford to live on Sanibel Island, but the areas they are commuting from are still within the path of a serious storm or flood. And it’s not just the workers working in tourist industries, those workers need places to shop and eat, they need services, too.
Agreed.
You are correct, most of the workers are in Fort Myers or the surrounding areas. Those areas still got hit hard by the storm.
No, they are the ones creating demand for those services.
Sure, but are the regulations going to basically be, “Don’t build here”?
Personally I think that second homes shouldn’t be govt insured, and building code should be improved to have a decent chance of surviving bad storms, but I can certainly see regulations that would do little to reduce risk and payouts, but severely harm individuals and also harm economic activity of regions.
People like to retire to a place that is warm, Florida is one of those places. Does it cost us more to clean up after a storm in Florida, or to keep places like Arizona habitable?
Not quite like this, I don’t think.
Depends on the risk that you are allowing them to take. It’s hard to find good comprehensive 100 year flood plain maps, most that I can find are limited to a county at a time, but looking through them, I see whole counties throughout Mississippi and Louisiana that are within them.
The fact that these are floodplains is what makes them great farmland. As the aquifers in the plain states empty, the Mississippi river valley is going to be more and more important to feed our population. We don’t want to discourage people from being there too much.
Really, there is a reason that people live close to the water, and it’s not just for the view. They produce and move goods that the rest of the country needs.
That’s still a balance. How much do we spend to fortify a home against floods vs how much would it cost to rebuild? If there is a flood every year, then it makes sense to spend a bit on keeping them high and dry, if it’s a flood every 25 years, the math is a bit different.
The value of the farm equipment is often going to be significantly more than the cost of a house.
Right, but how many of the people that work on that island live on that island? I doubt it’s all that many, most are over in Fort Myers.
And how much are we going to spend on that? If the issue is the cost of replacing things when they are damaged by storms, then it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to spend far more than that to prevent damage.
I’m not sure McMurdo base in Antarctica is “profitable” yet we spend money on it year after year. Ditto the ISS. Yes, those are extreme examples, which is why when people commute to their jobs there they might stay for 6 months or longer at a time.
Long haul truck drivers are often away from home for weeks at a time, too - it’s in the nature of their jobs, which are essential to our way of life.
Just because historically we’ve had close-in “factory towns” to certain industries does not mean we have to continue to do things in such a manner. And the “best answers” will vary based on a variety of factors.
Sure, but the very fact that Fort Myers is on the mainland makes both getting people out (evacuation, rescue) and getting people in (after-storm rescue, supply, repair, etc.) easier. Barrier islands are called “barrier” for a reason - the tend to moderate the storms impact on the mainland behind them. Those islands always take a worse beating than the mainland. It’s geography.
Depends. Or rather, it should depend on all the factors involved.
There probably are locations that should not be built upon at all. Others might require very specific types of construction which may not appeal to a lot of people but be necessary to survive certain types of storms or other hazards.
An alternative long practiced in Tornado Alley, particularly among farm types in the past, was to build a secure bunker a.k.a. “storm cellar” or basement in which you and your greatest valuables can weather a severe storm and accept that what’s outside of that shelter you may lose. Thus, you see relatively flimsy home construction (because it’s not cost-effective to build concrete bunkers that can withstand a F5 tornado for everything) but a means for people to survive a storm and rebuild. In certain locations cheap, flimsy construction might be allowed with the acknowledgement that when a major hurricane hits it will be a total loss and rebuild - but there may be a sweet spot where a cheap rebuild every 20-25 years make economic sense. I don’t know enough to run the math on that one, I offer it solely as something to think about.
Again, Valmeyer, Illinois - if by moving 2 miles you gain 400 elevation that’s probably sufficient for flood control. Is that practical everywhere? No. But where it is an option it should be looked at.
As I’ve also stated, in the past people living on floodplains in the Mississippi and other major river watersheds have done things like built their homes on stilts so when the floods come it’s more annoying than catastrophic. Would that work everywhere? Probably not, but it’s an option to look at.
Yes. Having lived in tornado country all my life I’m somewhat familiar with that sort of math, the trade-off between building and living in bunkers vs. a compromise between that and needing to rebuild a certain amount of the time.
I’m going to have to leave that sort of calculation to engineers and actuaries - but that’s what those professions are for. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all answer to these problems, but I do think we can make better decisions than we currently do.
Right, it’s not profitable, the government just chooses to spend lots of money on keeping people there because it thinks the science is worth it. But if we are talking about the vast majority of cases, it does have to make economic sense.
And it’s usually noted as their greatest reason of dissatisfaction with the job. That and the steadily declining pay.
There’s a reason that people live near where they work. People with long commutes hate it.
Agreed, and if we want to say, “If you build there, you’re on your own.” I have no real problem with that, as long as people don’t find themselves in economic circumstances that push them into living there against their own better judgement.
Storm cellars aren’t as common as you make them out to be. The high water table and the rocky soil make them hard to build in most of Tornado Alley. What most people do is cross their fingers and hope they don’t lose the tornado lottery. Tornado Alley makes it sound like there are tornados just ripping through the whole place every year, but the reality is that the vast majority of the area never sees a single one in a generation.
I think that’s the exception rather than the rule. The highest point of the lower Mississippi river is 315 feet above sea level. It’s just a big, flat alluvial plain pretty much from Cairo to New Orleans. Since this is prompted by discussion of Florida, the highest point in Florida is 345 feet above sea level, with the average about 100.
In places you can find high ground nearby, sure, go for it, but that’s not going to be practical in most cases.
Yeah, but the math is that actually, you will most likely never have to rebuild, as the historical chances of your home being hit by a tornado over the course of a century is going to be single digit percentages. (Though this may increase with global warming.)
Engineers and actuaries are already tapped and their input is already used in the locating and building of homes and businesses. Other than flood insurance being a bit subsidized (by about a billion dollars, insignificant compared to the budget or debt.), these factors are taken into account.
The other part of the equation is that not all tornadoes are created equal. The building I current live in might lose some shingles in an EF0, and likely would withstand an EF1 with only minor damage that would not require anyone to relocate during repairs.
I have had a tornado go over my home (removing the roofs of the homes on either side) and a near miss (where we sustained some property damage from debris falling out of the funnel cloud) so I have some familiarity with the weather phenomena. Also, storms that generate tornadoes can also do damage from wind (we’ve had gusts up into the 100-110 mph range around here), water, lightning, and hail. Your point about storm cellars/basements and high water tables or rocky soils is valid, but not universal. A combination of building codes (mandating, for example, hurricane straps on roof rafters) and small shelters mitigates most risk. The fact that in-building shelters can perform double duty makes them most cost-effective (at work the main storm shelter is normally used as the employee break room, and all toilets are also storm shelters, my apartment building does not have a large basement but it does have one, mobile home parks in the area now commonly feature storm bunkers that might be used for storing maintenance equipment or as community space outside of severe weather, individual homes might have “safe rooms” that double as closets during good weather, etc.).
Some parts of tornado alley are more prone to tornadoes than others. Also, some of what I call cultural knowledge impacts safety. Most of us who grew up in tornado country know the weather conditions that make them likely and know what to do if there is a warning (although too many ignore the warnings, but what can you do about idiots?). Municipalities regularly test their warning systems. There is enough severe wind weather my area that people heed some of this a bit more than they would otherwise - we’ve had straight-line winds in the 50-80 mph range and in those conditions flying debris is a thing and it hurts if you get hit even by a small piece of whatever.
Is the system perfect? No. Between idiots, people new to the area who don’t know how to deal with our more hazardous weather, and the occasional new immigrant from a recent war zone who freaks out when on a Saturday afternoon something that sounds like an air raid siren goes off (the town I work in tests their sirens as noon on the first Saturday of the month) we’ve had our issues. But overall it works pretty well and while the US Midwest certainly does get tornado damage we get remarkably few injuries and fatalities compared to such storms elsewhere.
Cultural practices are also important here. I think better such practices might also help mitigate disasters as well. Some of it might be keeping a reasonable amount of disaster supplies on hand so if utilities are out of commission you get take care of yourself until the National Guard or whoever comes to your rescue. Some of it might be educating people on what to do - for earthquakes I’m told getting into a door way or under some substantial furniture is a good idea. Here in tornado country you either want to get to a basement, or get to the center of a building away from windows. These are simple concepts that people carry with them once learned that can make a real difference in an emergency. A willingness to actually evacuate would help, too, in both hurricane and wildfire country.
I guess I’m in favor a multi-pronged approach to mitigating emergencies and disasters.
It’s sounding like most of the loss of life from hurricane Ian was because authorities didn’t issue an evacuation order until the day before the storm hit in some areas. The fix for that isn’t building codes, it’s political/social.
That’s likely because the storm’s predicted path fluctuated by hundreds of miles in the days before landfall.
“The National Hurricane Center’s saw Ian likely hitting Florida far south of Tampa Bay. But that was Friday. Over the weekend, Ian’s predicted path shifted briefly to Tampa, then far north to the Tallahassee area in the Panhandle — and then it moved south again. Forecasters now say it’s on a course that could take it through an area close to Tampa.”