Hurricanes on repeat: Natural disasters 'don't feel natural anymore'

CEDAR KEY, Fla. - The innkeeper wonders whether it’s worth rebuilding this town dotted across a small archipelago - again. The clam farmer worries about impacts to its namesake bivalves and visitors alike. And the business leader contemplates what Mother Nature will throw at them next as the climate changes.

“Natural disasters are natural disasters,” said innkeeeper Ian Maki, who has lived through five hurricanes since moving in 2018 to the island community southwest of Gainesville. “But these don’t feel natural anymore.”

Tens of thousands of residents of Florida’s Big Bend region are confronting the same fears in the wake of Hurricane Helene. And those feelings are increasingly shared by coastal residents from Alaska to California and Maine, as stronger, more frequent storms and rising ocean levels upend their lives and livelihoods. Many insurers already have curtailed coverage or withdrawn entirely from some areas, indicating their long-term perspective risk.

Officials have not yet released official damage estimates from Helene, but financial services company CoreLogic initially estimated commercial and residential damage in just Florida and Georgia to be at least $3 billion and as much as $5 billion. That number is expected to rise substantially due to extensive flood damage across Tennessee and South and North Carolina.

A 2022 USA TODAY investigation warned the United States is facing a climate catastrophe as natural disasters accelerate: Since 1980, the U.S. has typically suffered eight disasters a year with more than $1 billion in economic damage costs. But over the past five years, the nation has seen an average of 18 billion-dollar disasters annually, according to federal data.

Scientists who study the Earth's climate and weather say storms like Helene are more likely to occur in the future. Unlike more traditional hurricanes that gather strength over a relatively long period, Helene intensified from a disorganized tropical disturbance into a powerful Category 4 hurricane within just a few days. Hurricanes are powered by heat, and the Gulf of Mexico has been unusually warm for years.

"The fact that the storms are so intense when they make landfall because they have rapidly intensified in the Gulf of Mexico almost certainly has a climate-change contribution to it," said Jim Kossin, an atmospheric scientist and science advisor at the nonprofit First Street Foundation. "The remarkably warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico are a big contributor and climate change has contributed to those."

No more hurricane parties as storms' strength rises

For coastal communities like Cedar Key, Horseshoe Beach, Key West and other geographically isolated areas, quick-moving storms make it harder for residents to board up and leave, potentially raising the likelihood people will choose to stay home and ride out the storm. In years past, many storms were mild enough that people held "hurricane parties" to mark their passage through their communities.

That was the kind of calculation Bill and Debbie Dotson made when they retired to Horseshoe Beach in spring 2021. They've now been through five hurricanes, including Helene, which hit on Bill Dotson's 67th birthday. In a straight line, Horseshoe Beach is 25 miles from Cedar Key, although it's a 70-mile drive along two-lane roads to get from one to another.

Their home sits atop 14-foot-tall concrete pillars, and last year's Hurricane Idalia destroyed one set of stairs and damaged the other. They had just gotten both sets fixed - at a cost of $15,000 - before Helene swept both away. Looking around their neighborhood, the Dotsons counted at least eight destroyed homes. Idalia cost the town 41 houses, they said, and Helene's damage appears to be worse. The town has only about 170 fulltime residents.

The Dotsons planned to live in a tent until they can find a contractor to help rebuild the stairs to their house, which was otherwise undamaged. Zoning laws across Florida increasingly recognize storm risks, and most new-built houses in danger zones must be set atop tall pillars. But a few blocks from the Dotson's house, the concrete pillars of a home closer to the beach were bent flat like grass.

“We came out here and saw this beauty and wanted to go fishing in our retirement,” Debbie Dotson said. “We had the discussion about hurricanes but you never imagine something like this. You just don’t.”

More people are moving to storm-prone coastal areas

Last month, the real estate firm Redfin reported a net increase of 16,000 people moving into high-risk flood areas last year, most of them in Florida, drawn by sunny skies, a lack of snow, great fishing and plentiful beaches. There's also no income tax in Florida.

Many Florida counties also allow people to live in RVs, which can be an affordable housing option for the state's numerous retirees, but they also are particularly vulnerable to wind and water damage. And because the state is so big, the likelihood of experiencing a damaging hurricane is statistically low.

That's the calculation Maki and his husband, Darrin Newell, made before they bought the Firefly Resort on Cedar Key. Maki had worked in public health for years in the Pacific Northwest, and they wanted a new adventure in Old Florida.

Unlike most of Florida's coastal communities, Cedar Key depends primarily on aquaculture - commercial clam harvesting - rather than tourism. It was that authenticity and small-town feel that drew Maki and Newell to Cedar Key. Maki, who has a master's degree in public health, analyzed historic hurricane data and concluded Cedar Key would only suffer a damaging hurricane every seven years on average, giving them plenty of time to recover and rebuild between storms.

Helene flooded and damaged portions of their cottages, most of which were originally built in local "cracker style” with local softwoods, set atop cinder block foundations. The construction allows the wood to expand and contract as it gets wet and dries out, and it's easy to repair when damaged.

But hurricanes keep trashing the interiors. Parts of the complex are just five feet above sea level, and Helene pushed a storm surge more than two feet higher than the highest surge ever recorded.

 “I’ve bought more appliances in the past year than I have in my entire life," Maki said. "I have felt everything from a desire to walk away from this island and never step foot on it ever again to digging in as deep as my roots will allow me to stay. I'm afraid that decisions are being made for me by consequences of nature, consequences of man's influence on nature, so that now the place that I had chosen to live may be uninhabitable in my lifetime."

As Maki talked to a reporter at a community barbecue hosted by a local church, Cedar Key "Clambassador" Michael Presley Bobbitt arrived to offer his perspective. A commercial clam farmer, author and playwright, Bobbitt said he worries Helene has irrevocably altered the island he calls home.

After similar disasters elsewhere, developers have been quick to buy damaged buildings or newly cleared land from distressed property owners, transforming older, quirky main streets into Anywhere, USA. Cedar Key's residents are fiercely protective of their island's local charm, which prioritizes locally owned shops and restaurants, not chain stores.

But what do local property owners do when everything they had is gone?

"Every commercial building in town of consequences just gone. And there are stretches of road where you're used to seeing a familiar house, a house that's been there for maybe 160 years and it's just missing," Bobbitt said. "And in some cases there's not even debris. There's just an empty space where a house used to be."

But while the cleanup is already underway, the storm’s lingering impacts are just beginning to be felt in this 700-person island community reliant on aquafarming and the tourist trade.

Building resilience to protect the future

Doug Lindhout, 71, considers himself one of the lucky ones: Although there's water damage, his rowhouse on A Street is still standing. Less than 24 hours after Helene moved north, Lindhout and his wife were assessing the destruction in both their house and on the island and trying to figure out what to do next.

“It feels like we’ve been kicked in the teeth and punched in the kidney," he said.

As the president of the island's Chamber of Commerce, Lindhout is deeply committed to Cedar Key. That means seeking good publicity when they can get it - last year's negative Idalia coverage caused an 18% decline in tourist interest, he said - while strengthening the island's aquaculture and other businesses.

“Cedar Key needs to do a deep think on how we can mitigate this amount of damage in the future. You can’t stop the storm coming in. But we have learned lessons since Idalia," he said. "Because the more resilient you are, the harder a punch to the kidneys you can take.”

For Cedar Key, he said, resilience can mean making the shorelines better at reducing wave impacts, which helps protect the clam harvests. But it could also mean a community effort to relocate the grocery store, which sits in a low-lying area of the island and frequently floods even in minor storms.

Before retiring, Lindhout worked with a lot of computer models, and he's closely scrutinized the University of Florida estimates showing how future storms will flood the island as ocean levels continue rising. NOAA studies also show sea level is rising at Cedar Key, and project the number of high tide flooding days in the community to double in just 10 years.

In the absence of a sudden Ice Age, Cedar Key has to take a hard look at what life will be like in the coming decades, he said.

“It’s going to be much wetter than it is today," Lindhout said Friday, hours after Helene.

Despite his out-loud musing about their future on the island, Maki said he and Newell are committed to Cedar Key, come the proverbial Hell or high water. But it's getting harder each time to keep the faith.

"I never thought that we would be talking about places in the United States that would be suffering this kind of repetitive, increasingly damaging weather events with frequencies as often as they are," he said. "And this doesn't give anybody a chance to recover."

Contributing: Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA TODAY