U.S. Coast Guard crew members search the flooded Big Bend area for survivors of Hurricane Helene, via Coast Guard.
I hope you readers all came through the horrors of Hurricane Helene fairly unscathed. At my rickety Craftsman humble-abode in St. Petersburg, we suffered eight or nine brownouts and scores of tree limbs knocked down, but that was it — this time.
Just a few blocks away, though, the storm surge washed over the street and into people’s houses — houses that had never before seen any flooding. Up and down the Florida coast, the storm surge broke records as it swept through surprised beach communities, leaving people with indoor pools they didn’t want.
“Waves, up to 8 feet high, had swept in overnight, shattering windows, downing doors, drowning the bars and shops,” the Tampa Bay Times reported from the artsy Pinellas County town of Gulfport, which is neither a port nor on the Gulf. “Beer bottles, silverware, beaded bracelets floated along the curbs.”
That was just a glancing blow. Gulfport was flattened by Helene despite being roughly a hundred miles from the storm.
This hurricane was so huge that if Publix were still making hurricane cakes, the Lakeland-based chain would have needed every ounce of flour and sugar in the bakery, not to mention the icing. Helene’s tropical storm-force wind field grew to reach 345 miles from the center, making it a 690-mile-wide storm, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Up the road in Taylor County, folks were just finishing up the insurance paperwork and repairs from when they were hit by Hurricane Idalia and Hurricane Debby when Helene roared in and obliterated what they’d just fixed.
“I feel defeated,” Taylor County Commissioner Pam Feagle told the Tallahassee Democrat. “This is just a lot of memories washed away in a blink of an eye. … It’s just emotionally devastating,”.
Cedar Key storm damage via FEMA
The roll call of old Florida place names hammered by Helene includes Cedar Key, Perry, and Steinhatchee. Then the storm wrecked states north of Florida too, especially North Carolina, which is full of former Floridians. As of Wednesday, some 176 people have died across 10 states.
“Natural disasters are natural disasters,” one storm-weary Cedar Key innkeeper told the Tallahassee Democrat this week. “But these don’t feel natural anymore.”
It’s as if Mother Nature, hearing that our governor and Legislature deleted climate change from state law, responded by quoting hitman Jules from “Pulp Fiction” — “Allow me to retort!”
An extra foot
When I have questions relating to climate change in Florida, the first person I call is usually David Zierden, who serves as our state climatologist. He runs the Florida Climate Center in Tallahassee.
David Zierden, Florida’s state climatologist, via Florida Climate Center
I am pleased to report that our duly elected dimwits have not deleted his job the way they foolishly deleted the words from the law.
He told me there’s little doubt among scientists that climate change played a major role in making Helene such a monster. It did so in three ways:
Bear in mind that hurricanes draw their power from the heat of the water they pass over, and the oceans have been soaking up much of the heat from the steady warming of our globe.
“Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico are all running at or near record levels this year, just as they did last year,” Zierden said. Meanwhile, the Gulf’s famous loop current is bringing up deeper warm water too, he said.
The heat in the ocean makes the storms rapidly intensify. How rapidly? This is the way The New York Times put it: “In less than a day, Helene transformed from a Category 1 hurricane Thursday morning to a Category 4 storm on Thursday afternoon, which would make it the strongest ever to hit the Big Bend coast of Florida.”
The warmth also makes the atmosphere extremely moist. That’s how we wind up with storms like Helene dumping so much more rain, he explained.
“That’s a piece of what’s happened in North Carolina,” Zierden said.
Finally, he said, there’s the role that the rising sea level plays in making the storm surge so much worse.
“When everyone’s talking about the record storm surge,” he told me, “at least a foot of that is caused by sea level rise.”
Now put it all together: Hot water for power, moist air for heavy rain, and rising seas for the massive storm surge. Can you see now how Helene was a creation of our altered climate, just as surely as the Creature was built by Dr. Frankenstein?
None of this should be a surprise, by the way. Federal scientists predicted all this 10 years ago.
During hurricanes and tropical storms, “homes and infrastructure in low areas are increasingly prone to flooding,” that decade-old report notes. “As a result, insurance costs will increase and people will move away from vulnerable areas.”
When we talk about the people Helene turned into paupers or worse, we shouldn’t call them “storm victims.” We should call them “climate victims.” And when the survivors move, we should call them “climate refugees,” because that’s what they are, just like the folks on islands that no longer offer enough dry land to live on.
But as Tom Petty told us, we don’t have to live like a refugee.
The breaking point
I am of the opinion that you should always get a second opinion, so I checked with a second climate scientist: Jeff Chanton of Florida State University. He echoed what Zierden told me.
“These storms are just getting started with being supercharged by the heated water,” he told me.
He admitted that Helene’s rampant destruction had shaken him, just as it did lots of Floridians.
“I used to think, ‘Oh, I could at least go to North Carolina,’” he said. “Now that doesn’t look so appealing.”
The scariest thing I heard from the two scientists was this: What happened with Helene isn’t the end of it.
“The storms are getting stronger and stronger,” Chanton said. “Where is the breaking point? When is it safe? You put so much into your house, so when it’s damaged, it damages you too.”
Zierden sent me a link to one recently published scientific study that found that between 1979 and 2020 there’d been a global increase in near-shore intensification in all kinds of cyclones, fueled by the rising heat in the oceans. The study predicted that the phenomenon would continue to increase — not just in Florida, but everywhere.
Suddenly, living in a home with a water view doesn’t sound so good, does it?
“We can build houses that can survive this,” Chanton said. “But they cost a LOT of money.”
Chanton and I wound up discussing the one house that survived Hurricane Michael’s assault on Mexico Beach in 2018. Built to withstand 250 mile-an-hour winds, the five-bedroom, five-bathroom house was fashioned from poured concrete, reinforced by steel cables and rebar, with additional concrete bolstering the corners of the house. It sits atop high pilings meant to keep it above the swirling surge.
CNN video of Mexico Beach after Hurricane Michael in 2018. (CNN screenshot)
The couple who built the house wouldn’t tell reporters what it cost. But its architect said that building a house the way they did roughly doubles the cost per square foot, compared with ordinary building practices.
My question is: What did they pay for insurance? Because even if our politicians don’t believe the climate is changing, our insurance companies sure do.
Flirting with disaster
The Republican presidential nominee, that smelly Palm Beach club owner-slash-convicted felon, visited the site of Helene’s destruction in Georgia Monday. While there, he said, “Nobody thought this would be happening, especially now it’s so late in the season for hurricanes.”
I figured he’d then start tossing paper towels to the survivors the way he did in Puerto Rico, but perhaps he wasn’t in such a generous mood this time.
Anyway, he’s completely wrong. This is peak hurricane season, not the end. And the National Weather Service — which the Project 2025 folks want to turn private — issued forecasts on the storm’s path and power that turned out to be totally accurate.
We’re still two months from the end of a season that the National Hurricane Center has predicted will be more active than usual. Who knows what we’ll see next?
Hurricanes have always been a fact of life in Florida. When I was a kid growing up in Pensacola, every June 1 my mom would pull out a new hurricane tracking map. All summer she’d diligently chart the movements of every dark cloud that popped up in the Atlantic or Caribbean. She wouldn’t put it away until Nov. 30. But we never got a storm like Helene.
I have long contended that hurricane season is our annual reminder that Florida is trying to kill us with storms, lightning, sinkholes, and shark bites. This is why, instead of that nostalgic number about the Suwannee River, the more accurate choice for our state song would be the 1979 hit, “Flirtin’ With Disaster” by Jacksonville’s own Molly Hatchet: “We’re flirtin’ with disaster, y’all know what I mean/And the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me.”
Speaking of things that make no sense, Gov. Ron “Honey, Where Are My Go-Go Boots?” DeSantis finally admitted last year that climate change is real — but his solution was to recommend everyone burn MORE fossil fuels, not less.
He doesn’t want to do anything to stop climate change, but he’s fully committed to temporary measures to battle its effects, such as installing pipes and pumps and raising highways. It’s like he’s a brain surgeon who insists on doing nothing but hand out lots of Band-aids
He’s also in favor of spending millions of tax dollars on beach renourishment to replace the sand that keeps washing away as the seas rise.
This week he trotted out another temporary measure called a “Tiger Dam” — a flexible, inflatable flood barrier that was installed around a couple of hospitals before Helene’s surge.
“We want to make sure people know we have an ability to mitigate some of the effects of these [hurricanes],” DeSantis said. Some, mind you — not nearly all.
As usual, he skipped specifics. Who would be paid for putting these up? Where would the state buy them? How would the state pick who to protect? What might happen to people who live near where these were installed and thus were hit with the diverted runoff?
Former Gov. Charlie Crist via X
Listening to him, I was in danger of spraining my eyeballs from rolling them too hard. Before that could occur, I contacted the only Florida governor who took climate change seriously while in office, Charlie Crist. He told me he made it through Helene all right, but one of his sisters had flooding problems.
Crist agreed with the scientists that Helene should be “a wakeup call” for Floridians who previously doubted the reality of climate change.
Helene’s destruction should drive our politicians to search for real solutions, he said, not to continue to prioritize scoring political points over actually helping people.
“We should put politics behind us,” he said, “and the science in front of us.”
Our first line of defense
In search of some of those serious solutions, I contacted Dawn Shirreffs, Florida director of the Environmental Defense Fund. She’s an expert on coping with climate change. She also lost power for four days thanks to Helene.
Dawn Shirreffs of Environmental Defense Fund, via EDF
First, she said, the state needs to ramp up its resiliency programs and be prepared to spend some serious money on helping prepare for the next storm, and the next one and the one after that. Otherwise, it will turn into Helene Part 2: Electric Boogaloo.
“It’s going to require some robust resources,” she told me.
Some resilient features are natural parts of the Florida landscape, she said, naming off barrier islands, mangroves, dunes, and reefs. Those should be prioritized for preservation, rather than bulldozed by developers.
“These are our first line of defense,” Shirreffs told me.
In addition, she said, “we need to have a serious conversation about whether Florida is going to continue to focus on trying to adapt to climate change or if we’re going to reduce our emissions, which would tend to reduce our warming.”
Florida, with its love of cars over mass transit and its polluting power plants to keep our air-conditioners humming, is one of the top greenhouse gas-emitting states. We made a start at cutting back under Crist, but then our next two governors were a couple of Cleopatras, living deep in de-Nile.
I would add one thing to her list: Stop building homes and businesses in Florida’s many low-lying areas. You’re just going to create more climate refugees the next time an angry Mother Nature decides it’s time to retort.