CEDAR KEY, Fla. – Innkeepers are once again wondering if it’s worth rebuilding this small archipelago-dotted town. Clam farmers are similarly concerned about the impact on the namesake bivalve and visitors. And business leaders ponder what Mother Nature will bring next as the climate changes.
“A natural disaster is a natural disaster,” said innkeeper Ian Maki, who has survived five hurricanes since moving to the island community southwest of Gainesville in 2018. “But these are no longer natural.”
Tens of thousands of residents in Florida’s Big Bend region are facing the same fear in the aftermath of Hurricane Helen. And that sentiment is increasingly shared by coastal residents from Alaska to California to Maine, as stronger and more frequent storms and rising sea levels upend their lives and livelihoods. are. Many insurers have already reduced coverage or exited some areas altogether, suggesting long-term risks.
Although authorities have not yet released formal damage estimates from Herren, financial services firm CoreLogic initially estimated commercial and residential damage in Florida and Georgia alone at least $3 billion and as much as $5 billion. It was estimated that it would reach . That number is expected to increase significantly due to widespread flooding across Tennessee and the Carolinas.
A 2022 USA TODAY study warned that the United States faces a climate catastrophe as natural disasters accelerate. Since 1980, the United States has typically experienced eight disasters a year, resulting in economic damages exceeding $1 billion. But over the past five years, disasters have cost the nation an average of $18 billion a year, according to federal data.
Scientists who study Earth’s climate and weather say storms like Helen are more likely to occur in the future. Unlike traditional hurricanes, which gather strength over relatively long periods of time, Helen intensified from a chaotic tropical disturbance to a powerful Category 4 hurricane in just a few days. Hurricanes are caused by heat, and the Gulf of Mexico has been unusually warm for years.
“As storms intensify rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico, the fact that they are so intense when they make landfall is almost certainly a sign of climate change,” said Jim Cossin, an atmospheric scientist and science advisor at the nonprofit First Street. “There is an impact,” he said. Foundation. “The significantly warmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico are a big factor, and climate change is also contributing.”
No more hurricane parties as storms grow stronger
In coastal areas such as Cedar Key, Horseshoe Beach, and Key West and other geographically isolated areas, fast-moving storms can make it difficult for residents to get on and off, and people may choose to stay home and ride out the storm. sex may increase. In years past, many storms have been so mild that people have held “hurricane parties” to commemorate their passage through their communities.
Bill and Debbie Dotson made that calculation when they retired to Horseshoe Beach in spring 2021. They have now experienced five hurricanes, including Helen, which struck on Bill Dotson’s 67th birthday. Horseshoe Beach is 40 miles in a straight line from Cedar Key, but getting from one to the other requires a 110-mile drive along a two-lane road.
Their home is built on 14-foot-tall concrete columns, and one staircase was destroyed and the other damaged during Hurricane Idalia last year. They had just had both sets repaired at a cost of $15,000 before Helen had them wiped out. The Dotson family looked around the neighborhood and counted at least eight destroyed homes. In Idalia, 41 homes were destroyed in the town, and Helen’s damage appears to be even worse, they said. The town has only about 170 full-time residents.
The Dotson family had planned to live in a tent until they could find a contractor to help rebuild the stairs to their home, but the house was not damaged. Zoning laws across Florida are increasingly recognizing storm hazards, and most new homes in hazard zones must be built on tall stilts. But a few blocks away from Dotson’s home, near the beach, the concrete pillars were flattened and bent like grass.
“We came out here and saw this beauty and knew we wanted to go fishing in retirement,” Debbie Dotson said. “We talked about hurricanes, but you never imagined anything like this would happen. You don’t.”
More people are moving to storm-prone coastal areas
Real estate firm Redfin reported last month that there was a net increase of 16,000 people moving to flood-risk areas last year, most of them in Florida, where sunny skies, lack of snow, great fishing and abundant beaches led to a net increase of 16,000 people. It is said that he was attracted to it. Florida also has no income tax.
Many counties in Florida allow living in RVs, which can be an affordable housing option for the state’s large number of retirees, but are also particularly vulnerable to wind and water damage. Also, because the state is so large, the chances of experiencing a damaging hurricane are statistically low.
That’s the calculation Maki and her husband, Darrin Newell, made before purchasing Cedar Key’s Firefly Resort. Maki had worked in public health in the Pacific Northwest for many years, and they wanted a new adventure in Old Florida.
Unlike most of Florida’s coastal regions, Cedar Key relies primarily on aquaculture, or commercial clam harvesting, rather than tourism. What drew Maki and Newell to Cedar Key was its authenticity and small-town feel. Maki, who has a master’s degree in public health, analyzed historical hurricane data and found that Cedar Key experiences a damaging hurricane on average once every seven years, and that Cedar Key is hit by a damaging hurricane once every seven years, and that Cedar Key has a hard time recovering and rebuilding between storms. It was concluded that there was sufficient time to do so.
Helen’s cottages were flooded and damaged, most of which were originally built in the local ‘cracker style’ using local softwoods and set on concrete block foundations. Easy to repair if damaged.
But the hurricane continues to wreak havoc indoors. Parts of the complex sit just 5 feet above sea level, and Helen pushed the storm surge more than 2 feet higher than the highest storm surge ever recorded.
“I’ve bought more electronics in the past year than I’ve ever bought in my entire life,” Maki said. “I felt everything from wanting to leave this island and never setting foot on it again to digging deeper” because my roots will keep me there. I fear that the consequences of nature, of human influence on nature, will dictate to me that the places I choose to live may become uninhabitable in my lifetime. ”
As Maki was speaking with reporters at a community barbecue hosted by a local church, Cedar Key “Clanbassador” Michael Presley Bobbitt arrived to offer his thoughts. Mr Bobbitt, a commercial clam farmer, author and playwright, said he feared Helen had irrevocably changed the island she called home.
After similar disasters occurred elsewhere, developers were quick to buy up damaged buildings and newly cleared land from distressed property owners, turning old, quaint Main Streets into “Anywhere, USA.” Changed. Cedar Key residents are passionate about preserving the island’s local charm, prioritizing locally-owned stores and restaurants over chain stores.
But what do local property owners do when everything they had is gone?
“All the commercial buildings in the affected towns are gone. And there are stretches of road where familiar homes, homes that have probably been there for 160 years, are missing.” said Bobbitt. “In some cases, there’s not even any debris. There’s just empty land where the house used to be.”
But while cleanup efforts have already begun, the island’s 700-person community, which relies on aquaculture and tourism, is only just beginning to feel the storm’s lingering effects.
Building resilience to protect the future
Doug Lindhout, 71, considers himself one of the lucky ones. Despite some water damage, the row houses on A Street are still standing. Less than 24 hours after Helen moved north, Lindhout and his wife were surveying the destruction of both their home and island and considering what to do next.
“I feel like I’ve been kicked in the teeth and punched in the kidneys,” he said.
As president of the island’s Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Lindhout is deeply committed to Cedar Key. That means seeking as much publicity as possible while boosting the island’s aquaculture and other businesses — negative publicity about Idalia last year led to an 18% drop in tourist interest, he said. said.
“Cedar Key needs to think deeply about how we can mitigate this amount of damage in the future. We can’t stop storms from coming, but we’ve learned lessons since Idalia, because being resilient The higher you are, the harder the punch to your kidneys will withstand.”
For Cedar Key, resiliency means improving the shoreline to reduce wave impact, which will help protect the clam crop, he said. But it could also mean community efforts to relocate grocery stores located in low-lying areas of the island that frequently flood during small storms.
Before he retired, Lindhout used a number of computer models and scrutinized University of Florida estimates of how future storms would flood the island if sea levels continued to rise. Research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also shows that sea levels are rising in Cedar Key, with the number of storm surge flood days in the area predicted to double in just 10 years.
Barring a sudden ice age, Cedar Key needs to seriously consider what life will be like in the coming decades, he said.
“It’s going to rain more than today,” Lindhout said Friday, hours after Helen.
Despite thinking aloud about their future on the island, Maki said he and Newell are fully committed to Cedar Key, come hell or high water. However, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain faith each time.
“I had no idea we’d be talking about a place in the United States where these types of recurring and increasingly damaging weather events recur so frequently,” he said. “And this doesn’t give anyone a chance to recover.”
Contributor: Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA TODAY
