By Craig Pittman
Saturday marked the end of our horrible 2024 hurricane season. How did you celebrate? Did you build a bonfire from the plywood you used to cover your windows? Turn your blue tarp into a party awning and invite your remaining neighbors to a soirée? Schedule a flash mob at your nearest municipal debris site?
I observed this solemn occasion by reading all the news coverage that rehashed how truly awful this season has been. My favorite line came from the Palm Beach Post, which described the 2024 season as “a quirky, devastating, humbling and deadly thing.”
The three that hit us were, in a word, bad. First came Debby, then Helene, then Milton. Then came gloom, despair, and agony, as they used to sing on “Hee-Haw.”
But with the end of November, we’re finally free to think about more pleasant things, like when all the illuminated boat parades kick-off, not to mention the Surfing Santas. (Why Hallmark has never made a Christmas movie set in Florida is a mystery to me.)
Except … maybe while we’re enjoying the holidays, we shouldn’t stop thinking about the storms of tomorrow.
In fact. I would suggest that we spend the next six months planning for the 2025 hurricane season. That’s because of one very alarming thing I read in one of the end-of-season roundup stories.
“Climatologists are unsure what next year has in store for the tropics, but early signs point to a similar hurricane season to the one that is just ending,” the Tampa Bay Times reported.
In other words, 2025 could be a rerun of 2024. Call it “A Quirky, Devastating, Humbling, and Deadly Thing 2: Electric Boogaloo.”
That’s because the ocean remains heated up like a pot of gumbo bubbling on the stove.
Why is the ocean so hot? Well, I’d love to tell you, but the Legislature doesn’t want us discussing that.
You’ve probably heard they deleted the term from state law, so nobody can bring it up. Apparently, they think it’s bad luck to even mention what our burning of fossil fuels is doing to the world. It’s like that Disney song, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.”
So instead of saying “climate ch—” er, the forbidden words, I’m just going to say “Bruno.” You’ll know what I mean.
Banner becomes Hulk
Hurricanes have been a part of Florida life for a long, long time. One chased away Pensacola’s first Spanish colonists in 1559, and they’ve been trying to chase the rest of us away ever since.
A train sent to rescue 300 World War I veterans was knocked off the track by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 before it could reach its destination. (Florida State Archives)
Sure, we’ve had powerful storms before — the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, for instance, a Category 5 that destroyed Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railway in the Keys. But now, thanks to … uhhhh …” Bruno,” they’re becoming stronger so much faster than they used to.
Meteorologists say that when a storm’s wind speed increases by at least 35 miles per hour over 24 hours, it’s undergoing rapid intensification. We didn’t used to have storms that did that.
“Until about 2017, Gulf of Mexico hurricanes rarely intensified all the way to landfall in the northern Gulf, due mainly to cooler waters near the shoreline and less hospitable conditions in the atmosphere,’ Axios reported in September. “Yet since then, rapidly intensifying storms have seemingly become the norm there.”
For instance, between Oct. 8 and 10, 2018, Hurricane Michael went from a mere tropical storm to a powerful Category 5 when it clobbered Mexico Beach. It became the strongest hurricane to ever make landfall in the Panhandle.
Something similar happened with Ian, Idalia, Helene, and Milton. Helene, for example, “rapidly transformed from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 4 hurricane in less than a day on September 26, 2024, less than a day before landfall,” NASA reported in its wake.
Imagine skinny nerd Bruce Banner is the Cat 1 and the roaring, rampaging Hulk is the Cat 4, ready to tear your house apart. What fuels the rapid changes from nice guy to destroyer isn’t gamma rays, but simple heat in the ocean provided by um, er, “Bruno.”
“Hurricanes are not only fueled by the heat at the surface of the ocean but also by the heat that is stored at depth, below the surface,” NASA reported after Helene. You can see why heat like that wouldn’t fade too quickly — or at all. It will still be around next year.
The other thing such heat does to the water shouldn’t be a surprise to you if you remember your seventh grade science class. Heat makes molecules expand, a process known as “thermal expansion,” which is also the name of my new indie rock band.
That’s why “Bruno” is the main driver of sea level rise. The hotter the water, the higher the rise. This is what makes the storm surges from these powerful storms so much worse now.
So, if you dodged the flooding in 2024, you might not be so lucky in 2025.
Functional paradise
Unfortunately, we humans tend to be stubborn about refusing to believe that the world has changed. We become locked into thinking it’s one way, then don’t believe our eyes and ears when it’s become something very different.
Look what’s happened to the folks in Fort Myers Beach.
Fort Myers area flooded by the Hurricane Ian storm surge. (Photo via USCG)
To say Fort Myers Beach was hit hard by Hurricane Ian in 2022 is to understate the impact, sort of like saying that the atomic bomb did a serious remodeling job on Hiroshima. The storm left almost every home and business in ruins and killed 14 people.
“Few communities in the U.S. have seen the level of destruction Hurricane Ian brought to Fort Myers Beach,” NPR reported a year later. “A 15-foot storm surge swept away many structures and left few undamaged.”
Determined to rebuild, the town’s vice mayor promised that by 2024, “We’re going to have what I call a functional paradise once again.” Instead, it was hit by a six-foot storm surge from Milton that left mud and sand in the first floor of the buildings. Paradise remained dysfunctional.
You’d think the surviving property owners would want to build back better — raise the buildings so floods wouldn’t be so destructive, for instance.
But the Federal Emergency Management Agency found Fort Myers Beach was letting everyone build the same kind of vulnerable buildings in the same vulnerable places that were wiped out in 2022.
As a result, FEMA announced last week that residents and businesses in that city will no longer be able to buy federal flood insurance at a 25% discount. That average increase works out to be about $300 per resident.
Do you see why it’s important to acknowledge that our world has changed? We now have storms that move faster, tend to be more powerful, and will send floodwaters into places they’ve never hit before, all thanks to, you know, “Bruno.”
If you don’t care about your home being washed away, you might want to worry about your job disappearing in the rising waters. Lots of waterfront restaurants and hotels that are important to Florida’s tourism industry were wiped out by the storms and so were the jobs there.
One recent federal study found that 116,000 jobs in Miami-Dade County are at businesses in special flood hazard areas — the highest of any U.S. county. Meanwhile, six of the 10 counties with the most jobs at risk from flooding are in Florida.
So maybe it’s time for us to think about the next hurricane season differently.
Prepping for 2025
I contacted several people about what we should be doing now to prepare for 2025’s storms — I mean other than curling up in the fetal position, which would certainly be my first instinct.
W. Craig Fugate via archived Obama White House website
Dawn Shirreffs of Environmental Defense Fund, via EDF
The best suggestions came from two people: former Federal Emergency Management Agency boss Craig Fugate, a Florida native, and Dawn Shirreffs, Florida director of the Environmental Defense Fund.
Fugate said the first thing everyone should do is check to see whether you still have home insurance. Then you should find a way to buy some flood insurance, too, even if you don’t live in a flood zone.
Being in a flood zone just means the property is likely to flood, not that those will be the only places where flooding will be a problem, he pointed out.
“Think about all the areas in Florida that flooded this year that weren’t in flood zones,” he said.
Folks in those areas spent thousands of dollars to insure their houses but lost everything if they wound up with even an inch of saltwater washing through the place, he pointed out.
Shirreffs noted that, in thinking about the flooding, you cannot make judgments based on how things have been in the past.
“A lot of people got a lot more damage than they should have because they believed in the historic record of flooding,” Shirreffs said. “We need to look at the data about where the flooding is now.”
She recommended checking a website called FloodSmart to see what it shows for your area.
Fugate recommended everyone living close to the coast or near a waterway be prepared to evacuate and to plan now for where you want to go.
Meanwhile, for those who intend to stay put, he recommended investing in portable solar generators for when the power goes out. You run less of a risk of carbon monoxide poisoning if you’re not relying on gas-powered generators.
Shirreffs also recommended replacing regular windows with hurricane windows. She told me everyone should check the grade of our homes to make sure they slope toward the street and not somewhere you don’t want stormwater to go.
“You should also look at the landscaping choices you’ve made,” she told me. Some of the plants now covering your yard may require so much water that the ground remains damp, which leaves the plants vulnerable to loss of support.
One big thing to consider is your means of transportation. If you don’t own an electric vehicle now, you may want to consider getting one before the 2025 storm season starts, she said. That way when you evacuate, you don’t have to stop anywhere for gas.
But you better act quickly, she said, “because the tax credit for those could be going away soon.” The next resident of the White House has vowed to end those.
In defense of Florida
Of course, all of this prep work will cost money. If you’re like professional bloviator Sean Hannity, who just spent $23.5 million on a waterfront estate in Manalapan, that’s no problem. I bet he can easily afford his insurance, too.
But if you’re like me, money is one resource that’s in short supply.
Fortunately, the “My Safe Florida Home Program” offers up to $10,000 toward home improvements to property owners like me who want to be ready for hurricanes. Unfortunately, for the second year in a row, the program was put on hold because the funding was exhausted.
Something similar happened with the new “My Safe Florida Condo Program,” which hit the maximum number of applicants in just a week.
Rumors are circulating that Gov. Ron “Stop Calling Me Bootsy” DeSantis is interested in becoming Trump’s backup choice for defense secretary. I wish he was more interested in boosting Florida’s defense against the storms.
Maybe then he could persuade the Legislature to put lots more funding into these home-prep programs instead of wasting our tax dollars on flying migrants to Massachusetts. Heck, they could fly some of the hurricane victims up there instead. Let them rebuild where they’re less likely to be hit again.
As you may have heard, we’re coming up on a major gift-giving occasion. I plan to ask Santa for some of this stuff for my house. Do you think that jolly old elf can stuff hurricane windows into a stocking?
Really, though, what I most want for Christmas is leaders who aren’t so deathly afraid to talk about what’s driving these dangerous storms and then do something about it. Because frankly, I’m tired of being repeatedly smacked around by, ummm, you know — “Bruno.”
