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Florida’s population has skyrocketed. That could make Ian more destructive : NPR


Eastbound traffic is heavy on Interstate 275 as people evacuate before Hurricane Ian hits Tampa, Florida on Tuesday.

Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images


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Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images


Eastbound traffic is heavy on Interstate 275 as people evacuate before Hurricane Ian hits Tampa, Florida on Tuesday.

Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images

No state in the eastern United States has grown faster in recent years than Florida, which has added nearly 3 million residents since 2010.

Now, the state is again in the path of a major hurricane, with Hurricane Ian expected to landed on the west coast of Florida Wednesday. It is currently classified as a Category 4 storm. according to the National Hurricane Center.

Tampa, Fort Myers and Sarasota – all of which are among the state’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas – are within the predicted roads, the NHC said. Ian could bring “life-threatening tides, catastrophic winds and flooding in peninsular Florida,” the storm center said in its 5 a.m. ET update.

More people – and more buildings to house, often in coastal areas – means that a major storm can turn out to be more costly and destructive.

Stephen Strader, a professor at Villanova University who studies the vulnerable human environment to natural disasters, said: The population explosion in hurricane-prone Florida is an example of the “spreading bull’s-eye effect.” wide”.

Imagine an archer aiming for a target, he explained. If the bull’s eye is very small, the archer’s hit rate is low. But as the aim increases, the odds of the archer improve.

“Instead of an arrow, we have dangerous events like hurricanes and tornadoes. Instead of a target, we are a target – our cities, our growth areas. And nowhere is it more visible than along our shores,” Strader said.

Florida’s Population Boom

At the time of population growth slowed to crawl in most of the USFlorida has bucked this trend.

Among the major metropolitan areas of the countryonly Austin and Raleigh have grown faster than Orlando since 2010. Jacksonville and Tampa are #10 and #12, respectively.

The state’s smaller cities are also booming. Since 2010, No city in the eastern United States with at least 50,000 residents has grown faster than Fort Myers, which is home to the largest metropolitan area between Tampa and the Everglades, which added nearly 40% of its inhabitants at the time. Other areas such as Port St. Lucie, Lakeland, and the Village also grew rapidly.

Most of the state’s recent population growth has been attributed to internal migration. In the year ending July 2021nearly 221,000 Americans moved to Florida – more than 600 people per day on average, more than any other state.

People move to Florida for all sorts of reasons: year-round warm weather, relatively inexpensive housing, no personal income taxes, and large communities of retirees or other immigrants, for example.

“People can look past the long-term risk and think, ‘Where do I want to be in the next 10 years of my life?’,” Strader said. “But there’s also a gambling side to that, and unfortunately a lot of people are still willing to sit at the table.”

More population means more damage

Officials have warned that Hurricane Ian could bring a storm surge of 10 feet or more, along with 6 to 18 inches of rain. The geography of Tampa-St. Experts say the Petersburg region is particularly vulnerable to high tides and heavy rains that can cause flooding even inland areas.

With so many people living in potentially affected areas, the damage estimate is huge. Storm is already the most costly natural disasterand billion-dollar storms are happening more often than ever.

More than a million homes are within the reach of Hurricane Ian, according to an estimate published this week by CoreLogic, an asset analysis company. In the worst-case scenario, estimates suggest that reconstruction could cost more than $258 billion.

The actual number is likely to be lower. And since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Florida’s building code requires new homes to be more resilient to hurricanes.

However, a Category 3 hurricane in such a densely populated area could cause more than $100 billion in damage, enough to rank it among the four costliest hurricanes in US history.

“Hurricane sets the stage for disaster, but severity and impact will be determined by social factors – things like poverty and exposure, like how many people and how many homes are affected, like build quality,” Trader said.

New arrivals mean officials must communicate effectively

Newcomers need to know that hurricanes are “a part of life in Florida,” said St. Petersburg Ken Welch said.

Welch said in an interview with NPR.

Eren Erman Ozguven, director of the Center for Disaster Response and Resilience at Florida State University and A&M University, said:

“There are Floridians who have seen a lot of hurricanes over the past decades and people who have a muscular memory, and there are people who have moved to Florida in the last decade. Many of them have not yet,” he said. I’ve seen a storm.”

Adding to the challenge is that many of the newcomers are retired people. “They may or may not have a smartphone, and they may still rely on traditional communication like radio or TV,” Ozguven said.

The last major hurricane to make landfall in western Florida was in 2017, when Hurricane Irma made landfall in the eastern portion of the Fort Myers-Cape Coral metro area; Tens of thousands of people have moved to the area since then. In Tampa, no hurricane has made landfall directly on the city in decades.



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