In the overnight hours after Hurricane Milton struck Siesta Key, a barrier island near Sarasota, Florida, the state’s coastal metro areas were battered by high winds and a deluge of water. In St. Petersburg, a construction crane fell from its position on a luxury high-rise that would soon become the tallest building on the flood-prone peninsula. The crane crashed into the building across the street where the paper’s newspaper offices are located Tampa Bay Times. High winds ripped the roof off a stadium in Tampa intended to house first responders. Three million homes and businesses are now without power.

As this morning dawned, Hurricane Milton was leaving Florida on the East Coast, still with hurricane force winds. The storm came unnervingly close to what experts feared would be a worst-case scenario in the state. The storm struck about 60 miles south of Tampa, hitting a densely populated area but narrowly avoiding the precarious geography of shallow Tampa Bay. Still, once totaled, the devastation will likely be great. Flash floods inundated towns and left people trapped under rubble and cars in the hurricane’s path. Several people were killed yesterday at a retirement home in Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, when one of several Milton-generated tornadoes touched down there.

If the barrier islands did their job, they may have protected Sarasota from the worst of the storm surges, but those fragile stretches of sand are also where their own little civilizations are built. This stretch of southwest Florida happens to be one of the fastest growing parts of the state, where people are flocking to new developments, most of them on the waterfront. Milton is the third hurricane to make landfall in Florida this year, in an area that has barely had time to assess the damage from Hurricane Helene two weeks ago. Because the storm avoided a direct attack on Tampa Bay, it may soon be seen as a near miss, which research suggests could fuel risky decision-making in the future. But this morning it’s a chilling reminder of the increasing dangers of living in hurricane-prone places, as climate change makes the fiercest storms even fiercer.

The threat of catastrophic flooding has been hanging over that particular cluster of cities—Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater—for years, and at some level, everyone knew it. About a decade ago, Karen Clark & ​​Company, a Boston-based company that provides analytics to the insurance industry, calculated that Tampa-St. Petersburg was the U.S. metropolitan area most vulnerable to flood damage from storm surge. Even Miami, for all the talk of its impending climate-induced demise, is in a better situation than Tampa, where the ocean is relatively shallow and the bay can “almost act like a funnel,” leading to higher storm surges, the researchers said. Daniel Ward, an atmospheric scientist and senior director of model development for Karen Clark. The regional planning council has simulated the effects of a Category 5 storm, including fake weather reports eerily similar to Milton’s; Estimates of losses, should a storm hit immediately enough, were on the order of $300 billion.

The building boom in the region has only raised the bar and increased the number of potential damages. Siesta Key, the barrier island where Milton first struck, had been embroiled in a battle over proposed high-density hotel projects for years; Sarasota is adding people at one of the fastest rates in the county. Farther south, Fort Myers is expanding even faster (and has been ravaged by storms, including this one, in recent years). Tampa in particular has been a darling of Florida development. Billions of dollars in investment have redecorated waterfront districts with glassy apartment buildings, and the traditional retirement city was reborn as a beacon for young people. The population of the Tampa metro area, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater, grew to more than 3.2 million; The average home value nearly doubled between 2018 and June of this year, according to data cited by Redfin The Wall Street Journal.

Like everyone else in Florida, people living on the southwest coast understand that hurricanes are a risk, perhaps even one accentuated by climate change. (Floridians, on average, are more likely than Americans to believe that climate change is happening.) But “every coastal region has a mythology about how they’re going to escape climate change,” Edward Richards, a professor emeritus at Louisiana State University Law School, told me. me. “We have a culture in which risks are downplayed.” The last time Tampa Bay was directly hit by a major hurricane was in 1921, when a Category 3 storm hit the metropolitan area, then home to about 120,000 people. It caused a storm surge of more than 10 feet that crashed into houses, wiped out citrus fields and killed eight people. The possibility of another blow was always a real danger, even before the effects of global warming began to take hold. “Climate change is definitely making storms worse,” Richards said. “But we’re focusing so much on how they’re going to get worse that we haven’t paid attention to how bad they’ve already been.”

Most days, Tampa has enough upside to beckon people, and an age-old storm is probably not on their minds. “The benefits of jobs and economic opportunity and, frankly, the ability to be close to the beach often outweigh the downsides of climate exposure,” Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at the analytics nonprofit, told me First Street, me. . Getting a mortgage in a FEMA-designated flood zone requires flood insurance, which is usually provided by the National Flood Insurance Program, but many people drop it after a year or two, either because they feel like they can’t afford it. don’t need it, either because they can’t pay the bill, Porter said. If your house is paid off, you don’t need to get flood insurance. Developers pass on future risks to the people who buy their apartments; city ​​officials generally welcome developments that are good for the local economy, as long as they are still standing. If they are destroyed, the federal government will contribute to their reconstruction. “Anytime you separate profit from risk, you’re going to have catastrophic problems,” Richards said. Attempts to undo all this — by making people bear the real risk of where they live — can also be a trap: Raise flood insurance rates to market rates, and suddenly many people can’t afford it. If you continue to subsidize insurance, you will keep people in dangerous places.

But even before Milton’s blow, the region’s real estate boom was faltering. Floodplain homeowners saw their insurance prices rise dramatically after FEMA implemented new adjustments to ensure that the National Flood Insurance Program’s highly subsidized premiums better reflected the true cost of risk. Thanks to rising insurance costs and repeated flooding in recent years, more and more homeowners are looking to sell. But they’re finding that difficult: the supply of homes in Tampa is rising, but demand is falling, and roughly half of the homes for sale – the third-highest share of any major US metropolitan area – have had to reduce asking price. September 9, according to The Wall Street Journal. That was before Hurricane Helene sent a seven-foot storm surge into the city and plunged Milton through it, damaging property and likely undermining the chances of a good sale. Additionally, Florida passed a flood disclosure law this year, which went into effect on October 1. That means homeowners trying to sell their homes after this storm should tell potential buyers about any insurance claims or FEMA assistance they received for flood damage. no matter when they sell.

In the short term, both Richards and Porter predict that people will simply rebuild in the same place. No levers currently exist to encourage a different outcome, Richards said. FEMA has a home buying program in often damaged areas, but the process takes years. Homeowners, meanwhile, have little choice But rebuild. And even knowing the risk of flooding may not stop people from coming back or moving in. For example, a report on New Orleans found that nearly half of homebuyers surveyed did not consult the risk disclosures required after Hurricane Katrina: Affording to live alone in a flood-prone part of a city, knowing the risk would not affect their options changes.

In the longer term, “we know from a geological point of view what’s going to happen,” Richards told me. Over the next century, parts of Florida’s coast will experience frequent flooding, if not permanent flooding. Hurricane flooding will reach further inland. Living in certain places will simply no longer be possible. “Eventually we will reach a tipping point where people will start avoiding the area,” Porter said. But he doesn’t think it will be Milton.