The Cost of Extremes

There is a growing need to address the expanding number and scale of weather disasters

Wading through flood waters in Tarpon Springs after Hurricane Idalia hit Florida’s Gulf Coast. (Photo by Joe Raedle via Getty Images)

Let’s cast our minds back exactly 18 years ago to August of 2005 and the deadly devastation of Hurricane Katrina—the biblical-level disaster that overwhelmed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, led to the loss of 1,833 lives, left millions homeless, damaged or destroyed some 300,000 homes, and caused well over $100 billion in damages. The tragic event—a Category 3 storm which made landfall in Louisiana on August 29—gripped the nation for days with images of residents standing on their roofs in hopes of rescue, people and pets struggling to swim to safety, and later thousands of the disproportionately poor and African American people hunkered down in chaotic conditions inside the New Orleans Superdome.

The failure to adequately prepare and respond after the storm had passed—made evident by the stunning, disheartening images of fellow Americans stranded and suffering for days on end—made one of the nation’s costliest and deadliest disasters a tragic harbinger of what the future could look like. Was it any wonder that President George W. Bush was roundly attacked for his reluctant, incompetent response, forever memorialized by his embarrassing comment to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) head Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job”? Was it any wonder that the federal government ultimately coughed up tens of billions to rebuild the levees and other efforts to sustain the fabled city of New Orleans, even as the population dropped a year later by more than 50 percent and has never fully recovered?

That event has been on my mind this week after Hurricane Hilary (downgraded to a tropical storm) and its record-breaking rainfall attacked Southern California and Hurricane Idalia has raged through Florida and other points north. Hilary is estimated to have caused some $600 million in damages, while early assessments of Idalia suggest the impact could yield as much as $20 billion in damage and lost output. That follows Hurricane Ian, which hit western Florida last year at an estimated cost of $112.9 billion. We are still learning the human and economic costs of the deadliest wildfire in American history in Hawaii, where hundreds of souls in Maui are still missing and the financial toll ranges as high as $6 billion.

And while these most recent events illustrate the increasingly frequent consequences of climate change—as rising carbon emissions and CO2 levels are warming oceans, spurring hotter temperatures and intensifying storms—the data makes clear that the reality is becoming both more extreme and more normal.

This year there have already been 18 “weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect the United States,” reports the National Centers for Environmental Information (including New England flooding in July, Maui and Idalia). This compares with an annual average of 8.1 such events between 1980 and 2022 and 18 such events on average from 2018 to 2022. We can be sure there will be more to come before 2023 is over as the Atlantic hurricane season has not yet reached its zenith.

Taken together, this increasingly predictable reality—which has caused major insurance companies to drop property and casualty coverage in Florida and California—provokes myriad questions: Will this Congress pass a $12 billion supplemental funding bill for FEMA which is running out of money? Can and should the federal government continue to fund the reconstruction of communities that are increasingly under attack due to climate change? Will people living in at-risk areas be increasingly forced to relocate, despite the painful disruption to their lives? How many times can a precarious city or town be rebuilt before taxpayers say “no more”? Will relocating soon become a commonly accepted reality of the climate crisis?

Consider the case of Virginia’s Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. My good friend, journalist and narrative writer Earl Swift, spent over a year on the island documenting the lives of residents. Their centuries-old home is sinking, experiencing rising water levels—and facing eventual extinction without major investment in sustaining infrastructure.

Author of the bestselling Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, Earl of course hopes the island will be saved. But he frames the quandary like this:

Whether it should be saved is a far more difficult matter, because it requires some national consensus on how we address the changes wrought by sea-level rise in the coming decades. Those changes are already happening…and as they accelerate they will affect thousands of American communities.

We will not have the money, the physical means, or the time to save them all. So we as a people will have to develop a rubric for deciding which towns and properties we save and which we surrender to the sea. Should we restrict our efforts to the places with the greatest populations?…Assuming we’re unwilling to sacrifice smaller places we hold dear, we’ll have to come up with other measure of value. We must devise means to quantify the intangibles that makes a place special.

Note the words “national consensus” and “we as a people.” Earl couldn’t be more right about the need to come together, but it’s hard to understate the scale of trouble in making such decisions in these deeply divided and often painfully misdirected times. Let’s not doubt that these extreme events must compel us to a better place.

Yesterday President Joe Biden visited the FEMA headquarters along with Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to thank the hard-working people there. He noted that he’s spoken more than once to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to approve his emergency disaster declaration (that activates federal programs to assist the response).

That’s not all he said: “I’m calling on Congress to make sure you’re able to have the funds to be able to continue to show up and meet the needs of the American people to deal with immediate crises that we’re facing right now, as well as the long-term commitments we have to make to finish the job in Maui and elsewhere.”

But he also underscored the fact that some elected Republicans are determined to ignore reality: “How can I say it? There are still some deniers out there in terms of whether or not climate change has anything to do with any of this. And we’re going to need a whole hell of a lot more money to deal with emergency appropriations, to deal with all that you’re taking care of.”

Tomorrow the president will travel to Florida and visit some of the most hard-hit areas and the people living there. We can expect to see him meeting DeSantis, who only seems to show interest in the role of federal government when it involves securing funding every time a major storm strikes. Too bad the cost of extremes is exacerbated by such leaders who’d rather score points with an extremist base than meaningfully confront an existential danger that will touch every American.

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