Mark Woods: Can we protect ourselves from hurricanes? Expert has some thoughts
After Hurricane Ian passed Northeast Florida, I wrote the same thing that, in some shape or fashion, I’ve probably written after every major hurricane of the last couple of decades.
We should do more to prepare. Not the emergency response. Even if there are questions about that in Southwest Florida following Ian, I’d say for the most part we have that part down pretty well.
I’m talking about the long-term vision.
Mark Woods: Ian a reminder that we should do more — and that some things out of our hands
'We got lucky': Jacksonville spared as Tropical Storm Ian moved offshore
But as I was typing this once again after Ian, I realized in many ways it was a classic columnist cop-out. I was pounding a proverbial fist on the table, saying we should do more to prepare for future storms. But what exactly should we do? Beyond saying that resiliency should be more of a priority — before we get hit like Southwest Florida, not after — I wasn’t getting into many specifics.
I guess that’s partly because I don’t have the expertise to get terribly specific in this area. (Before someone else says it … I know that hasn’t stopped me from commenting on many a topic in the past.)
So a week after Ian made landfall in Florida, I talked to someone who does have that expertise, a coastal geologist who has devoted about 30 years to studying America’s coastlines and trying to answer the question: What should we be doing?
Robert Young, 59, is the director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, a joint venture between Duke University and Western Carolina University. When I caught up with him by phone, he was preparing to get on a plane to head to Southwest Florida.
Here’s a few things he said we should be doing:
Start by acknowledging we can’t protect everything from every storm
“One thing you need to understand is that when we engineer coastal, quote, protection — and I'm doing air quotes on the protection part — we could not possibly afford to provide the kind of coastal protection that would protect you from a storm like Ian,” he said. “I'll give you an example. The City of Charleston right now is considering an 8-mile long seawall that will wrap the Charleston peninsula. Well, that seawall project is designed to protect from a 100-year storm, slightly less than a Category 3 storm. It would not have protected Charleston from Ian. To provide that level of protection would be really expensive, and people wouldn't like it because it’d have to be so damn high that you wouldn't even be able to see the water. So this is the Catch-22 that we're in right now.”
Young wrote an op-ed for the New York Times last September that pointed out when it comes to resilience planning, post-Katrina Louisiana is far ahead of most of the country. It has spent tens of billions of dollars on levees, barrier islands, wetlands and seawalls. It has a coastal master plan and a coastal protection agency. And yet look at what happened last August. Hurricane Ida still caused massage damage in parishes south of New Orleans.
He says we give a lot of communities a false sense of security — particularly in Florida.
“Beach nourishment projects or dune building, they're not going to protect Sanibel or Fort Myers or any other place from a hurricane like Ian, or from Sandy or Katrina,” he said. “Yet those are the storms that we keep having. It just doesn't seem like we're acknowledging the real exposure of these coastal communities.”
As climate changes, and seas rise and warm, he says resilience spending is just a Band-Aid, not a cure.
Take a step back wherever possible
There are more than 60,000 miles of shoreline in the United States, excluding Alaska. We can’t provide protection everywhere. Young has been saying for years that we must seriously discuss not only where money goes, but how in some places we can take measured, gradual steps to move people and homes away from the hazards.
“We need to make it politically palatable to take baby steps back from those places on the coast that cause us the biggest headaches and problems,” he said. “You probably know where some of those little spots are in your neck of the woods. And I guarantee you the emergency managers do, and while they would not say it out loud, there's always places where they'll say, ‘If we could just get rid of those like five or six homes, this stretch of shoreline would not be a problem for us for a while.’
“That's what retreat looks like to me. It's not like, ‘Let's order everybody out of the county.’ It's having a planned approach to taking those baby steps back from the problem areas. And then you can spend your money on the parts of your community that are more sustainable rather than just throwing it all into the ocean.”
Don’t just build more seawalls
In 2017, he wrote an op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel after the Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued an emergency authorization, allowing individual property owners in a portion of St. Johns County to build new seawalls without the typical engineering and scientific analysis.
He called this “a terrible mistake,” noting that some states have banned seawalls altogether and predicting that a patchwork of walls intended to protect individual properties — big walls, small walls, no walls — would only create more problems than they solved.
“This is the worst — I repeat worst — possible way to manage the coast,” he wrote. “Vilano Beach will have no beach (maybe officials can drop the word from the town name), but it will have angry residents suing each other.”
Five years later, after Ian passed our area, some of the most dramatic images came from Vilano Beach — with a two-story home standing precariously.
Get rid of the current hurricane rating system
This is something he and other coastal storm scientists have been urging for decades. While the Saffir-Simpson scale rates hurricanes based on wind speeds, they say often the catastrophic damage is done by water — massive precipitation, flooding, storm surge.
He points to Sandy in 2012. By the time it hit New York and New Jersey, its winds had dropped to the point where it wasn’t even a hurricane. But it was a devastating storm.
To a degree, Ian was the latest example of the pitfalls of building public awareness around this rating system.
“You might argue that it made sense at Fort Myers Beach because there was a pretty high storm surge, and it was a Category 4 storm,” he said. “But the problem comes when you're on the other end and you have what is a Category 1 storm. South Carolina and North Carolina flooded way more than what people anticipated.”
He says he isn’t sure what the best replacement is.
“The National Hurricane Center is producing products now that predict storm surge, and that's a major advancement,” he said. “The tricky part is that you can't tie those products up into some pithy little categorization like the Saffir-Simpson Scale. But I think the weather professionals are getting a little bit more sophisticated about how they talk about this stuff. So that's a good thing.”
Evaluate what works — and actually build back better after hurricanes
"For all the money that we spend on resilience nationwide, there's no follow-up," Young said. "There's no good evaluation of what's really been successful and what has happened. But we are still spending a huge amount of money. The new Build Back Better Act had a ton of money in it for resilience. And at the end of the day, I have very few examples of places where we've actually built back better, and very little faith that we're going to build back better after Ian."
Make places that receive federal money promise something in return
“We spend a lot of money on resilience — billions of dollars a year — and we make almost no demands of those communities where the money goes. So if I could fix one thing immediately, it would be that the federal money that pours into communities after a disaster, or even outside of a disaster, for resilience projects and coastal storm protection, you should have to promise us something in return for that money — like no new infrastructure in the floodplain. Period.”
He points back to the planned 8-mile seawall around the Charleston peninsula.
“They’re going to get a billion dollars in federal money. Well, the City of Charleston just approved a massive development that will have 4,000 units in the floodplain. So we're giving you federal money to lower your vulnerability at the same time that you're increasing your vulnerability someplace else. So to me, that's fix Number 1. I would hope that's nonpartisan. Everybody should think that's a good idea. And if you don't think it's a good thing, you don't have to take the federal money. You can just do it yourself.”
Build bridges — and not just the kind over water
“We live in a very politically divided country,” he said. “It drives me crazy. I grew up topping tobacco in rural Virginia. My sister and I were the first ones to go to college in my family. I was duck hunting when I was little. I like NASCAR. … I want to be on both teams. I don't want everybody fighting with each other. I want us to all be friends and just talk about things like facts and how do we do the right thing.”
These days, he says, he finds himself meeting mostly with conservatives and Republicans.
“That's because there's no point preaching to the choir,” he said. “I don't intend on doing this for the rest of my life. I'd like to retire, sit on a lake somewhere up north, and unplug from the internet. So my interest these days is far more in trying to build some of those bridges and talk to people who are skeptical about climate change, talk to them about what's going on in a way that matters to them.”
That isn’t as hard as it might seem, he says. These aren’t just environmental issues. They’re economic issues. They affect communities, fisheries, agriculture and the pocketbooks of people on both sides of the political aisle.
“I like to talk about the economics of these things first, and how we spend taxpayer money. If I'm talking with an elected official who happens to be fairly conservative, that's pretty much what I'll talk about. … And then I can whisper at the end, ‘By the way, this is good for fixing climate change, in case you ever want to tell anybody.’ Sometimes they’ll say, ‘My kids will like that.’”
mwoods@jacksonville.com
(904) 359-4212
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Coastal expert Robert Young on what we should be doing for hurricanes
