Explosive construction on the west coast of Florida has created new communities during a long absence of hurricanes. Ian rammed into those high-value targets as the state is gripped by an insurance crisis.
Hurricane Ian’s path of destruction cut through some of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, pulverizing communities whose populations have doubled and tripled in recent decades during a period of deceptive atmospheric calm.
Ian made landfall Wednesday afternoon off the coast of Lee County, Fla., where the population has more than doubled since 1990 to nearly 800,000 residents.
Counties in Ian’s path through west and central Florida include Osceola, whose population has nearly tripled since 1990, and Sumter, where an influx of people has pushed its population to over three times what it was 30 years ago.
The “extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane,” as NOAA’s National Hurricane Center described Ian, potentially flooded hundreds of thousands of homes without flood insurance — maybe millions — and wrecked countless buildings erected under lax construction standards.
“The story of Florida is the story of development happening at times and places where it probably shouldn’t,” said Jonathan Webber of Florida Conservation Voters.
Ian developed as a rare triple threat, causing destruction with winds of 155 miles per hour, storm surge of 12 feet, and two feet or more of rainfall that flooded inland areas. Ian strengthened Wednesday to a Category 4 storm, with its howling winds almost reaching the mythic status of Category 5, which starts at 157 mph. Only four Category 5 hurricanes have made landfall in the U.S. since 1900.
“This is going to be a storm we talk about for many years to come,” National Weather Service Director Ken Graham said at a briefing Wednesday. Ian will cause devastation “not just on the southwest coast [of Florida] but also inland.”
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The storm will expose a wide range of vulnerabilities in the nation’s most hurricane-prone state including a failing property insurance market, a widespread lack of flood insurance and breakneck development.
Florida has some of the nation’s strongest statewide building codes, which were adopted after Hurricane Andrew demolished southwest Florida in 1992. But the new codes didn’t take effect until 2001 and apply only to structures that were built or substantially repaired since then.
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Hurricane Ian ravaged some of the fastest-growing counties in the U.S., pulverizing communities whose populations have doubled or tripled in recent decades during a period of explosive construction.https://t.co/Loa0XL7Mky
— POLITICO (@politico) September 29, 2022
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