MANASOTA KEY, Fla. — Back-to-back hundred-year storm events brought record storm surge, rainfall and winds to the Tampa Bay region. The question some are asking now isn’t where people should rebuild, but where we should let nature regain control.
New estimates for Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend, show that the storm's damage could be as high as $250 million. The bulk of that destruction was nowhere near where the category four hurricane came ashore, but in the mountains of North Carolina where entire towns were wiped off the face of the earth.
See our previous coverage here on the science of calculating storm surges.
Barrier Islands are the first line of defense during a hurricane and the last place you would ever want to be. In 2018, during Hurricane Ian, storm surge plus wave action on top funneled unfathomable amounts of water through Ft. Myers Beach had a 15-foot surge with 6 feet of wave action for a combined 21 feet! Not even the second floor was safe.
“We’re seeing more storms in Florida that sort of sweep up the coast, both on the West Coast and the East Coast, and generate significant storm surge along a very significant length of shoreline,” Dr. Rob Young, Director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, said.
ABC Action News reporter Michael Paluska first interviewed Dr. Young in May 2023 for a report on resiliency in Tampa Bay after Hurricane Ian. Dr. Young was a guest speaker at the event.
“With Helene going by miles offshore, we set water level records in Tampa Bay. Imagine if that storm had made that right turn and tracked right up the bay. We could see storm surge levels that would be double— maybe even triple— the flood levels that we saw from Helene, especially in the upper parts of the bay. That really is one of our nightmare scenarios for disasters in the continental U.S., a storm that's like Helene but actually tracks right up the bay and pushes all the water in front of it up the bay.”
Barrier islands up and down the West Coast of Florida were hit hard by Helene and Milton. ABC Action News was in Treasure Island during recovery efforts following Helene. Homes were reduced to shells of what they once were, and residents struggled to pick up the pieces.
Dr. Young said extreme events like Helene and Milton are happening more and more, but despite conferences like the one he spoke at in 2023, leaders still aren’t preparing for the worst impacts of climate change.
“And when you don't have a plan in place, then the easiest thing to do and the fastest thing to do is just to put stuff back where it was,” Dr. Young said.
"You don't spend money in places where you're throwing it into the Gulf. Spend the money in places we can protect over the long term. And that's how you preserve the coastal economy. That may mean developing a plan in coordination with your emergency managers, your planners, and the citizens of your community for how you take baby steps back from some of those places that are the problem spots. Barrier islands are dynamic; it’s not just about building, you know, Fort Knox, that would go into the sea and be fine. It's whether the site is vulnerable to storm processes in a way that means that we can't protect the site. We can't hold 3,000-plus miles of ocean shoreline in the U.S. and tens of thousands of estuarine shorelines in place forever. We just are not going to have the money.”
Many people simply won’t have the money to rebuild, especially if their damage triggers theFEMA 50% rule. And for Dr. Young, that begs the question: If they sell the land, should someone else be able to come in and build to the current code?
“We need to have a much more serious conversation about how we can lessen that risk footprint,” Dr. Young said. “And it doesn't mean leave the barrier islands, but it does mean taking a serious look at those areas that are experiencing repeat damage, repeat impacts, costing taxpayers, both at the local, state, and federal level, a lot of money to rebuild repeatedly.”
According to data from theNOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (2024), “the U.S. has sustained 400 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2024). The total cost of these 400 events exceeds $2.785 trillion.”
The latest estimates for Hurricane Helene are now at $250 billion.
And it isn’t just an issue on the coast.
Dr. Young tells Paluska that climate change significantly affects freshwater flooding inland, impacting people far from the coasts. We saw that firsthand following Hurricane Milton when the Alafia River in Hillsborough County reached record levels. Sarasota and Manatee County also experienced record flooding, inundating homes during Hurricane Helene.
“Climate change is doing a couple of other things that we are going to have to deal with over the long term. As sea level rises, believe it or not, the groundwater table under all of coastal Florida is coming up with it,” Dr. Young said. “Rising sea level sort of backs up the plumbing. So water levels in the ground are rising underneath Tampa Bay and underneath places like Sarasota, which has experienced flooding three times so far this year. When you raise that groundwater level and it rains hard, the water can't infiltrate to the same degree anymore. The water has to run off, and our stormwater handling system is not prepared to handle it in the way that it used to. So a lot of the flooding we're getting is from storm surge, but it's also from precipitation. It's from these rain bombs and hurricanes holding more water than they used to, and we're not prepared to deal with all that extra water.”
