The Approaching Hurricane

WHEN I WAS A NEWSPAPER reporter in Florida in the early 1980s, we were preoccupied with the chance that a hurricane would spin out of the Gulf of Mexico and slam into Florida’s West coast. It would be the biggest story of our lives if a big one struck the low-lying coastal city of St. Petersburg. It never came our way, fortunately for everyone.

The most serious storm I covered back then was called the “no-name storm” because it didn’t muster hurricane-strength winds. It broke windows in my favorite diner and sent waves sloshing over low-lying Anna Maria Island but did no lasting damage.

We had such a dearth of hurricanes that The St. Petersburg Times resorted to publishing a make-believe account imagining what might happen if a big storm hit the area. Our weather writer, who had an overwrought fiction style, wrote it. It was not our finest hour.

Times have changed. As I write this on October 8th, a terrible hurricane called Milton is winding up to hit St. Petersburg and Tampa, which is already awash from the six-foot tidal surge delivered by Hurricane Helene in late September. Three hurricanes, including Helene, have lashed the Big Bend region of Florida’s panhandle in the last 18 months.

Hurricane Ian killed two people on Florida’s Sanibel Island in 2022 and cut the causeway to the island. Afterward, I called a friend who lived on the island to see how he was doing. Mike said he, his wife and his four-year-old daughter were safe and had been relocated far inland to temporary housing near the Everglades.

The front and back walls of their Sanibel condo had been breached by stormwater, allowing the storm surge to wash right through their home. Afterward, Mike and his wife recovered photos and boxes of their belongings strewn in the mangrove swamp behind their home. He said he was waiting for an insurance check and then would decide whether to rebuild or sell.

Wealthy people, like my old employers, the Kiplinger family, can afford to rebuild from repeated storms. After two hurricanes hit the Kiplinger estate in Stuart, Florida, they had paid to repair the dock and other damaged structures when I last visited in the 1990s.

Others cannot afford it. My grandfather lost a fortune in Miami Beach real estate in the 1920s. He’d built a Spanish-colonial-style apartment building during the land boom there. Tenants stopped coming after the killer Hurricane of 1927 severed the railway lines and bridges. My grandfather, who lived in New York, lost the property when he couldn’t repay the building loan.

Hurricanes are so frequent now that they’re pounding the property insurance business in Florida. For insurance to work, the insured event—fire, auto theft, windstorm—must be so predictably rare that the pool of funds collected from all the insured can meeting the occasional emergency. Billion-dollar storms are no longer rare. Some insurers are raising rates; others are quitting the state.

If home insurance becomes hard to get, how will new mortgages be written for home purchases? There are already stories in the paper of people having trouble selling their single-family homes in St. Petersburg. The Florida condo market is also stymied. Expensive repairs mandated by safety inspections are saddling many retired condo owners with assessments they cannot afford.

Florida’s explosive post-war population growth was fueled by three factors: mosquito control, interstate highways and air conditioning. Now, with an unsought fourth factor, frequent hurricanes, perhaps Florida is hitting its natural limit.