SC Sea Grant Consortium - Hurricane Report-Fall 1998

VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1 FALL 1998

America's Hurricane Threat is a publication of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium. This report describes community efforts to reduce future hurricane damage, to mitigate storm threats, and to address roadblocks to change.

Editor: John H. Tibbetts

The 1990s have been lost years, a decade of missed chances for coastal areas from Texas to Maine. After Hurricane Hugo battered South Carolina in 1989 and Andrew hit Florida and Louisiana in 1992, hundreds of local governments had a window of opportunity. Pointing to these huge storms, officials could have argued that homes and businesses must be built stronger to withstand ferocious winds. Instead, while population and development boomed along shorelines, many communities essentially ignored the hurricane threat. Very few localities, in fact, tightened building codes and boosted enforcement. Dozens of metropolitan areas failed to establish adequate evacuation routes and safe public shelters. Even today, after two additional large hurricanes—Opal in 1995 and Fran in 1996—U.S. coastlines are in greater danger than ever from tropical cyclones.

Governments can take a number of measures to reduce future hurricane damage. They can fund retrofitting programs, improving the strength of existing buildings, including shelters; relocate highly vulnerable structures; establish floodplain zoning and other measures to reduce construction in hazardous areas; toughen building codes and enforcement so that new structures have better chances of surviving high winds and floods; improve transportation routes for evacuations; and create public-education campaigns to explain these efforts to constituents and encourage initiatives by homeowners and industry.

To its credit, South Florida has taken a number of steps to reduce local impacts from hurricanes. But in this decade, the region's greatest mitigation achievement, by far, has been to strengthen its building codes. South Florida is the only major urban area to toughen the high-wind provisions in its codes and enforcement since Andrew. In addition, South Florida counties have instituted strict testing and approval for all building products so that materials are more likely to withstand hurricane-force winds and other pressures.

But now this achievement is being undercut. Relentless population, development, and political pressures are undermining the region's efforts to reduce storm damage next time, experts say. As a result, South Florida is probably more vulnerable to a giant storm today than before Andrew struck.

The South Florida megalopolis stretches across 300 miles, broken only by salt marsh and waterways, from the Keys of Monroe County, north through Miami-Dade County (called Dade County until its name was changed in 1997), past Ft. Lauderdale and the sprawling suburbs of Broward County, to luxurious Palm Beach. The region is geographically isolated, a finger of land between the River of Grass and the sea, most of its urbanized areas bordered on the west by the Everglades and on the east by the Atlantic Ocean.

This region is highly susceptible to intense storms. In 1926, a huge storm killed 370 in the Miami area, and two years later a hurricane killed 2,000 near Lake Okeechobee. In September 1935, a gigantic tropical cyclone hit the Keys, killing 408. Over just seven years from 1944 to 1950, the Florida peninsula was battered by seven major hurricanes, six of them crashing through the southern portion of the state. In fact, according to the National Hurricane Center, Monroe County is the U.S. locality most vulnerable to Atlantic tropical cyclones, and Miami is one of the most vulnerable urban centers.

In the first half of the century, the Sunshine State was hit so often and so hard that Atlantic tropical cyclones became popularly known as "Florida hurricanes"—perhaps the way some Americans still assume that earthquakes are a plague exclusive to California.

But South Florida's memories of big storms faded during its boom years when the region was transformed from a sleepy backwater into an international commercial and tourism center. From 1951 through 1991, major storms missed South Florida's urban areas; only Betsy in 1965 came close, sweeping south of Miami. By the time Andrew arrived, Miami-Dade and Broward counties had a larger population—almost four million—than that of all 109 coastal counties from Texas to Virginia in 1930. Palm Beach County grew rapidly too, with a population of one million that would double or triple during tourist season. Many long-time residents forgot about the storm hazard; and the great majority of newcomers had never experienced one. "In years before Andrew, there was a great amount of complacency," said engineer Herbert Saffir, a leader in hurricane-mitigation efforts in the region over the past four decades.