To engineers and disaster experts who have analyzed the data and helped communities recover from the damage, there was nothing surprising about the storm that made landfall near Fort Myers Beach on Sept. 22.
What alarms them is that they know how to mitigate property damage with resilient construction and avoid deaths — especially those related to storm surge and inland flooding — but Floridians aren’t listening to the warnings.
“We’re seeing an overall decline in direct fatalities with a corresponding increase in indirect fatalities,” said Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center at the annual Governor’s Hurricane Conference in Palm Beach on May 10.
The Florida Division of Emergency Management has not completed its after-action report on Hurricane Ian because recovery is still underway, and it canceled its annual statewide training exercise for emergency responders because “we literally just practiced in real life,” said Alecia Collins, spokesperson for the agency.
Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber says his community can’t wait for the state to assemble recommendations and train for the next disaster. His city is conducting an evacuation tabletop exercise on June 6 “to evaluate our readiness and capacity to carry out a citywide evacuation in the face (of) an approaching hurricane.
Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber says his community can’t wait for the state to assemble recommendations and train for the next disaster. His city is conducting an evacuation tabletop exercise on June 6 “to evaluate our readiness and capacity to carry out a citywide evacuation in the face (of) an approaching hurricane.
Communication failures and misdirected focus from emergency officials can be deadly, Rhome said in his presentation to the conference.
“You’ve got to stop focusing on the wrong thing,” he said. “Storm surge is historically the biggest killer.”
He said warnings from local officials and the media too often focus on the cone of the hurricane’s potential impact and the Saffir-Simpson scale that produces the 1 to 5 rating based on sustained wind speed. He said the scale does not take into account storm surge, rainfall flooding and tornadoes, all hazards that proved deadly last year.
The message from forecasters was consistent, Rhome said: “A major hurricane is going to move in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. And likely impact the west coast of Florida. … This is messaging and lead times that for those of us who are dinosaurs thought never possible and likely saved numerous lives, but the story was never told.”
Yet, one of the incorrect narratives that emerged is that the forecast abruptly changed as Ian “took a hard right hook [and] cut everybody off by surprise,” he said.
Those factors led Lee County, where nearly half of the deaths occurred, to wait to order evacuations until a day after neighboring Charlotte County issued its order. It was a decision Gov. Ron DeSantis and other officials defended after the storm.
As a result, the number of people who were exposed to life-threatening storm surge was about 157,000, “which was more than all of the storms in 2020 and 2021 combined,” Rhome said.
“When we issue a storm surge watch or [flood] warning we mean it,” Rhome said, noting that from 2013 to 2022, 57% of the direct fatalities from hurricanes are attributable to freshwater flooding, 15% are due to surf or rip currents, 12% are because of wind, and 11% are the result of storm surge.
“It should have the same shock as the hurricane watch or warning,” he said.
The messaging also needs to be focused on introducing the dangers to newcomers to the state, he said, because of the “huge number of people who experienced a hurricane for the first time.”
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“When we rise to the occasion, we learn from our failures,” he said Thursday. “I contend that our learning from failure in a context of wind hazards is too slow and the growth of housing — being built in very vulnerable areas — far exceeds our ability to do something about it.”
Testimony before the state Senate Select Committee on Resiliency from emergency managers in Lee County, where 322 homes were destroyed, and in Collier, where there were 144 homes lost, underscored that older slab-on-grade homes constructed before Florida’s updated building code, and manufactured or mobile homes — both on the coast and inland — consistently could not withstand the impact of winds or flooding.
Prevatt and his team of scientists came to similar conclusions: The wind speed on land of about 120 mph was below the maximum expected by building code standards, but the flooding damage had enormous impact. According to an assessment by the insurance data firm the CoStar Group, Ian destroyed about 5,000 homes and severely damaged another 30,000 from Lee County and inland across Central Florida to Daytona Beach.
“In particular, it was a manufactured homes on Fort Myers Beach and slab-on-grade homes, mainly older homes,” Prevatt said.