LESSONS LEARNED: Coastal boom fed disasters
Storms show pitfalls of big evacuations
Mike Williams - Cox International Correspondent
Sunday, October 2, 2005

Houston --- Kaye Hairston recalls the way Houston looked 40 years ago: a modest downtown with a few skyscrapers surrounded by broad salt marshes and pine-covered lowlands that were just beginning to be touched by small pockets of suburban development.

Now her city is a huge, sprawling mass of shopping centers, tract housing and seemingly endless freeways teeming night and day with millions of residents drawn by a booming oil economy.

"That's why we have to run when the hurricanes come," said Hairston, 70, who, until Hurricane Rita had never evacuated her home in four decades. "Everything is covered with cement. We don't have any ground left to soak all the water up."

Experts say Houston's boom --- along with similar explosions of urban development in New Orleans, South Florida, the Tampa Bay area, Jacksonville and even smaller cities like Savannah, Charleston and Mobile --- has dramatically increased the chance that mega-disasters like Hurricane Katrina may become all too common in coming years.

They also warn that the evacuation nightmares triggered by Katrina and Rita should persuade emergency officials and individual families across the country to do top-down evaluations of their disaster plans, since cities not in the hurricane zone could be hit with a terrorist attack.

And with the recovery price tag from Hurricane Katrina expected to top $200 billion, many experts are critical of two federal programs that have helped spark the coastal development boom and that lay out billions in the aftermath of such disasters: flood insurance and beach rebuilding projects.

"Federal flood insurance makes a lot of this development possible in areas where people otherwise would've walked away," said Rob Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University. "And federal spending on beach replenishment encourages continued development of the coast, putting more people at risk. It's time for a national discussion about whether we should pull federal money away from certain areas of the coast."

As luck would have it, much of the coastal boom occurred during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a period that climate specialists say was a low cycle of hurricane activity, with fewer, less powerful storms.

Now the 20- to 30-year cycle of hurricane activity has shifted into an "up" mode, meaning we will probably get more storms --- and more powerful storms --- for the next decade, perhaps longer.

Some scientists also believe global warming is contributing to more numerous, powerful hurricanes, although others are not convinced of the link. Recent data, however, does show that sea surface temperatures have risen, and researchers are certain that warmer waters make for more powerful storms.

Whatever the causes, the result of more active hurricane seasons could well be repeats of the massive evacuation of Houston prior to Hurricane Rita, along with scenes of devastation rivaling those in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the Texas-Louisiana coastal area following Rita.

"Unfortunately, we've seen this over and over," said Andrew Coburn, a coastal policy expert at Duke University.

"We have these disastrous storms and people say, 'Oh, my God, this is terrible,' and then within a few years those memories fade."

Geologists have known of the dangers for decades. The Gulf and Atlantic coasts are lined with barrier islands --- narrow strips of sand that move, sometimes hundreds of feet, as storms erode them, cut new inlets through them and shift sand offshore or to new locations.

The barrier islands are nature's shock absorbers, taking the brunt of hurricane strikes, geologists say, while also acting as natural sand banks, with beaches building up during calm periods, storing sand that will be eroded during storms.

Now those barrier islands are home to millions of new residents, many of whom live in towering condominiums or expensive homes built directly on the waterfront. The buildings often go right on top of the sand dunes, wiping out the natural sand bank the beach needs to rebuild itself after storms.

Florida is a prime example. In 1960, the state was an agricultural and vacation spot of about 5 million residents. Today more than 17 million people call Florida home, with 13 million of them living in coastal counties, and most of those crammed inside sprawling urban areas like Jacksonville, South Florida and the Tampa Bay region.

Nationally, the number of people living in coastal areas has nearly doubled since 1960, jumping from 180 people per square mile to 275 in 1994. One study in 2000 found 1,000 full-time residents moving into coastal counties around the country each day. About 50 million people now live in the country's coastal areas.

Many of those people could not afford to live near the water without federally underwritten flood insurance. The program provides relatively cheap insurance --- about $400 a year for $100,000 in coverage --- in an area where private companies will not write policies.

"The program was originally aimed at floodplains in rivers," Young said. "But it's been extended to the coastal areas, where private insurance would cost an unbelievable amount."

The policies pay up to $250,000 for buildings, plus another $100,000 for contents. The program has about 4.6 million policies in place collecting about $2 billion a year in premiums on about $743 billion in assets.

But storms like Katrina quickly outstrip the premiums and reserves, with claims expected to climb into the billions. That means administrators will go to Congress for a bail-out, which in turn means that taxpayers, not policyholders, will foot the bill.

But there's more: a 1998 study by David Conrad of the National Wildlife Federation found 32,000 properties covered by federal flood insurance for which owners have filed at least two claims.

Experts say the idea of paying multiple claims on flood-prone properties is something the private market would never do --- at least without dramatically raising premiums.

"Nature is sending us messages," said Young, who calls for a national nonpartisan commission to examine coastal properties and make recommendations to Congress about which ones should no longer qualify for federal insurance or rebuilding money.

"The idea of repeatedly throwing federal dollars at rebuilding the infrastructure in some of these places is crazy. There are certain areas where we simply should retreat."