Aftermath of Hurricane Ian: Rising death toll and questions about preparedness
The discussion after a major storm seems to follow a very familiar script: Why aren’t predictive models more accurate? Why weren’t more people evacuated earlier? What’s the difference? How can we do better next time?
As Hurricane Ian recedes, leaving behind a rising death toll and miles of devastation, questions have grown about how to prepare and evacuate in the hardest-hit areas.
Flooding and wind damage after Hurricane Ian. photo: PCHS-NJROTC via Creative Commons
“There’s always a trade-off when it comes to preparation,” says Jeffrey Schlegelmilchdirector National Disaster Prevention Center at Columbia Climate School. “Did you evacuate? How motivated were you to evacuate? Even with mandatory evacuation, a lot of people chose to stay and others couldn’t. I think that’s what we’re seeing right now with Hurricane Ian – a lot of people out of various The reason remains.”
A major challenge for Hurricane Ian, though not unique to this storm, is the level of uncertainty about where it will strike. “At first, it’s heading towards Tampa, then it’s turning further south. These small fluctuations could affect whether millions of people have to evacuate,” Schlegelmilch said.
Communities’ collective experiences and memories of previous storms also complicate the evacuation process and can replace more objective warnings. “We have far more memories and experiences of similar storms than the data describes, down to the individual level, down to elected officials and emergency managers,” he explained.
While Hurricane Ian is a Category 4 storm, which is undoubtedly severe, “Florida has been hit by very severe hurricanes. What really makes Ian such a significant threat is the storm surge and rainfall, and the way we categorize hurricanes Those threats were not caught,” Schlegelmilch said. The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale ranks hurricanes on a severity scale of 1 to 5 based on their sustained wind speeds, but that doesn’t always show the full picture.
“On the mainland, at least, most of the loss of life is due to storm surges and inland flooding,” Schlegelmilch said. In terms of cost, most of the damage also comes from water. “
To make matters worse, Schlegelmilch added, hurricanes are behaving differently now than they were in the past because of climate change. They are more likely to carry more water, potentially dumping more water in a smaller area.For individuals and officials, these factors add to the uncertainty associated with preparing for any disaster, and Outdated risk models Of course it didn’t help.
evacuation time
Much of the media attention has focused on one Florida county that, at press time, accounted for more than half of the reported deaths from Hurricane Ian. Lee County issued a mandatory evacuation order the day before the storm hit, prompting criticism of why it wasn’t done sooner.
Evacuation can take a long time and is not an easy process, Schlegelmilch said. “It’s important to understand whether this disparity persists when expressing the full death toll, and whether time is an important factor. The more time it takes to evacuate, the more time there is to do a proper and comprehensive evacuation.”
On the other hand, he noted that evacuations could also have significant consequences, including death, extreme stress and loss of livelihood. “It’s not an easy decision to make forward-looking decisions when you’re surrounded by uncertainty.”
“Unfortunately, one pattern we’ve seen over and over,” he said, is that lower-income, more isolated, harder-to-reach communities pay a higher price, which are harder to evacuate and may have limited resources. Working with these communities on risk information and equity issues has been and will continue to be important.
“As we see more extreme weather events, this will become even more important,” he said.
The long road to recovery
The hardest-hit communities could take at least a decade or more to recover, Schlegelmilch said. Many affected households do not have flood insurance, in part because estimates used to predict the frequency of these types of catastrophic flood events “are often based on retrospective risk calculations and do not address climate change and climate impact considerations well.”
Even if they did, he said, “we have a large number of homeowners that will have a hard time rebuilding and they won’t have access to the same financial mechanisms as everyone else. So we expect to see huge inequities in the recovery process, unless A conscious effort to make this support difficult for over-resourced communities.”
