Coastal Storm Risks as a Policy Problem

At the heart of American urban growth trends is a disturbing paradox. The areas most attractive to new development are often those most dangerous to life and property. People are drawn to the natural beauty of living on beachfronts, river shores, and mountainsides, despite threats of hurricanes, floods, and landslides. Yet public policy does little to discourage development in hazardous areas, and sometimes it even unwittingly encourages it. Government officials charged with protecting people and property from such natural hazards face political limits on their ability to affect the operations of private development markets, which tend to discount future hazard risks.

This book describes the implications of this paradox for coastal areas. Coastal storm hazards pose a major and growing threat to Public health, safety, and welfare. This threat is an unsolved public policy issue. After an examination of past and present approaches to mitigating coastal storm hazards, we recommend a practical solution to this critical problem through the integration of hazard mitigation measures with the workaday tools used by governments to manage urban development.

Our thesis is that Land use planning and development management offer government officials a practical and feasible way to mitigate the destructive effects of hurricanes and other severe coastal storms. We agree with those who advocate these approaches as among the most promising weapons in the mitigation arsenal (White et al. 1976; Simpson and Riehl 1981). On the basis of our national study of hurricane hazard reduction through development management, we disagree with the pessimists who say that such approaches, while potentially effective, are not politically feasible (Rossi, Wright, and Weber-Burdin 1982). On the contrary, although we recognize powerful obstacles blocking effective hurricane and coastal storm mitigation, we believe that the potential for coordinated intergovernmental programs, in which local development management programs are encouraged and reinforced by strong federal and state mitigation policy, is now greater than ever. The problem is clear, and a solution is at hand; motivated decisionmakers can avert coastal catastrophe if they will take up the challenge.

The Coast as a Risky Commons

Americans view the coast as a national commons where we can find bountiful recreation opportunities and, if we are lucky, sites for retirement or second homes. Images of coastal enjoyment are deeply ingrained in our collective psyche. Coupled with steeply rising coastal real estate values, the combined visions of fun and profit are powerful lures to visitors and investors. Demographic statistics indicate that population growth within five miles of Gulf and Atlantic coastal areas has been three times as fast as that of the nation as a whole (Baker 1979). And during the summer, which is also the annual hurricane season, tourists swell the coastal population manyfold. As of 1984, 66.5 million people (over 28 percent of the nation's population) lived in counties within fifty miles of the hurricane-prone Atlantic and Gulf coast shorelines, at densities much greater than the national average (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1986, 9). Although not all people within these counties face the same storm risks as those on the immediate shorelines, the flooding and tornadoes that accompany a major hurricane can reach far inland.

Few of today's coastal residents understand how a hurricane can damage their beautiful shorefront commons. Some three-quarters of the 1985 population in counties facing the Atlantic and Gulf coasts have moved there since the last direct hit by a major hurricane. According to the National Hurricane Center, this includes almost thirty-two million of the approximately forty-three million residents in these hurricane-prone counties (Hebert et al. 1984; Hebert 1987). Table 1.1 shows the distribution of state population increases since the last direct hit.

Our dominant coastal images involve enjoying sunny skies and sandy beaches rather than fleeing from hurricane winds and storm surges. Yet these negative and often downplayed dangers of coastal life are increasingly significant, precisely because they are underestimated in urban development policy. Coastal development plans, public or private, rarely account for the costs of rebuilding after a hurricane; yet these costs can be staggering to affected individuals, governments, and insurers. By the year 2000 hurricane winds and storm surges are expected to become the leading source of natural hazard per capita property losses, due to the migration of population and investment capital into hazard-prone areas (Petak and Atkisson 1982, 199). Concerned about the accumulation of catastrophic risk and its consequences for insurance losses, the insurance industry has conducted a study examining the effects of two $7-billion-loss hurricanes, seen as a possibility because of the large concentrations of property located along the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines (All-Industry Research Advisory Council 1986). The study concluded that although the existing private insurance system works well in spreading risk among U.S. and international underwriters and reinsurers, two successive $7 billion losses would severely damage the property-casualty insurance industry, resulting in numerous bankruptcies.

Property loss is not the only risk from future coastal storms. Although hurricane-caused fatalities since the tragic 6,000 deaths recorded in the 1900 Galveston hurricane have declined to an average of less than ten per storm in recent years, there is an alarming potential for another killer hurricane due to the increasing population in exposed urban areas. Meteorologists appear to have reached the limits of their hurricane warning capability and thus are no longer able to increase the average warning time of an expected hurricane strike. But while warning times are leveling off, the time required to evacuate people from the path of a hurricane continues to rise by as much as an hour per year in major at-risk metropolitan areas due to continuing urban growth (Griffith 1985). A recent article from the National Hurricane Center (Sheets 1985) stated that evacuation of only the vulnerable residents of exposed communities such as the Tampa Bay area, the Fort Myers area, the Florida Keys, and Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as well as Galveston, Texas, and Hilton Head, South Carolina, requires evacuation lead times of twenty to thirty hours or more. According to Baker (1979, 263), "The United States may be on the verge of a hurricane disaster involving losses of life not experienced since the turn of the...