Coastal resilienceFlorida better prepared for hurricane season
Florida’s coastal communities are far more prepared for hurricane season than they were a decade ago, when eight hurricanes swept through the state during back-to-back seasons causing $33 billion in insurance claims. The state’s coastal communities have added an additional 1.5 million people and almost a half-million new houses, but experts say the risk of catastrophic destruction has not increased because builders are doing a better job of constructing new homes with hurricane resistant materials.
Florida’s coastal communities are far more prepared for hurricane season than they were a decade ago, when eight hurricanes swept through the state during back-to-back seasons causing $33 billion in insurance claims. The state’s coastal communities have added an additional 1.5 million people and almost a half-million new houses, but experts say the risk of catastrophic destruction has not increased because builders are doing a better job of constructing new homes with hurricane resistant materials.
In 2002, ten years after Hurricane Andrew’s 165-mph winds gutted part of South Florida, state officials passed stricter building codes for all new structures, requiring them to be built with shatter-proof glass and straps reinforcing the connection between roof and walls. “The building code changes have made a huge difference,” said Shahid Hamid, a professor at the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University. “You have more houses being built, and that certainly means more exposure and losses will go up, but on the other hand, the houses that are more recently built are better built and can perform better in hurricanes.”
Insurance Journal reports that the stronger building standards have not translated into reduced insurance premiums. Florida homeowners pay about twice the national average for insurance, and rates in the state are the most expensive in the nation.
As the Atlantic hurricane season begins this week, South Florida building and emergency officials feel prepared. More than two-thirds of Florida’s almost twenty million residents live in coastal counties. The three counties that make up South Florida — Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach – account for more than half of the $337 billion increase in property values along Florida’s coast in the last decade. Total property values in Florida’s coastal counties reached $1.5 billion in 2014, according to the AP calculations based on Florida Department of Revenue data.
City planners and developers have added parks between buildings and Biscayne Bay in Miami, to act as buffers against storm surge, but the parks also create appealing green spaces for luxury home buyers. “We are trying to create a little more conscientiousness about it,” said Carlos Rosso, president of the condominium division of The Related Group, a builder of waterfront condominium towers. The new buildings, equipped with emergency generators and shatter-proof glass windows, have largely empty ground floors in case of flooding and residences are built on floors well above storm surge projections.
