When Hurricane Ian made landfall around Fort Myers, Florida, as a Category 4 hurricane, it became one of the strongest storms to hit the United States. The damage in coastal and low areas was catastrophic, with a record-breaking storm surge washing away houses, roads, and bridges and leaving at least 80 people dead. Amid all this devastation, our early assessments reveal a silver lining — one that is instructive for the rest of the nation.
My team has spent decades analyzing structural damage in the wake of hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires, all of which are rising in frequency. Our goal is to learn how to prepare better for these events. We have analyzed hurricanes similar in strength to Ian, such as Hurricane Laura in 2020 and Hurricane Ida in 2021, but the damage from Ian is different. While the storm surge devastated coastal areas, the wind damage is not nearly as widespread as in other similar storms.
Ian’s maximum sustained wind speed was clocked at 150 mph upon landfall, which is near Category 5 strength. Farther inland, gusts were between 120 mph and 140 mph. Typically, winds above 120 mph leave an expansive zone of damage far inland and many miles wide. While our analysis of aerial imagery does reveal wind damage from Ian, the worst of it appears limited to older homes and buildings, particularly those built before the counties passed stronger building codes in 1996.
Ian reveals that Florida, no stranger to extreme weather, learned a lesson many years ago that other states are just beginning to grasp. After Hurricane Andrew struck Florida in 1992, vulnerable counties, and eventually the entire state, passed the strongest building codes in the country, aimed at increasing the resiliency of roofs, siding, and other vulnerable points that tend to fail during high winds.
Like all codes, Florida’s only affected new construction, so it has taken years for modern buildings to replace older ones. Even now, less than half of the homes in Ian’s path were built after the codes. Yet these buildings appear to have reduced Ian’s damage in a historic way. They prove how much building standards matter. Had Ian hit any other state, we’d be looking at a far greater tragedy.
Extreme weather like Ian will undoubtedly affect other states. Hurricane Fiona, which slammed the Caribbean just days before Ian, is proof that warming ocean temperatures are expanding the zone of destruction for hurricanes. After Fiona left the Caribbean, it maintained hurricane-force winds so far north that it caused significant damage in Canada.
As the affected areas have grown, so too have the intensity, frequency, and duration of Atlantic hurricanes, bringing slower, wetter, and more intense storms. The Midwest, Southeast, and West Coast have climate-driven events in the form of increasingly intense wildfires, tornadoes, and floods. Yet outside of Florida, most people remain woefully unprepared.
Only a dismal 35% of jurisdictions in the U.S. have current building codes in effect. Part of the reason is basic human nature: Jurisdictions don’t take threats seriously until a disaster forces their hands. The second reason is upfront cost. But this concern is shortsighted because the relatively low cost of upgrades is more than offset by savings on insurance, repairs, recovery, and increased real estate values in the long term.
Both homeowners and taxpayers feel these savings. Increasingly, residents of disaster-prone areas struggle to find homeowners insurance, which leaves taxpayers to foot the bill for public coverage. Taxpayers also pay dearly for disaster recovery. In this way, governments and the public should view resilience expenditures as investments. Studies show that for every dollar we spend on resilience, we save $6 on recovery.
Our analysis of Hurricane Ian will continue over the coming months, but for now, it is the latest reminder that the next destructive hurricane is never far away. Next time, it could hit a state far less prepared. Many Floridians have a long road of recovery ahead, but the state has also proven that stronger building codes can save lives, property, and money. The rest of the country shouldn’t have to lose lives to learn the same lesson.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Roy Wright is a former FEMA official and current president and CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, an organization dedicated to disaster resilience.
