When Hurricane Helene struck the Southeastern United States in late September, it killed more than 230 people—making it the most lethal in the mainland United States since 2005, when Katrina hit New Orleans and the city’s levee system failed. Less than two weeks after Helene, when Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida, its unexpectedly rapid growth prompted state officials to order millions to evacuate their homes on short notice. And many of those hit hardest by these recent storms live in places that haven’t experienced extreme weather like it before: Helene made it to mountainous parts of North Carolina that U.S. officials had figured were relatively safe from flooding. Not so.
The data-analytics firm CoreLogic estimates that Helene cost property owners more than US$30 billion. And U.S. President Joe Biden relayed preliminary official estimates putting the costs of Milton in the region of US$50 billion. Meanwhile, Hurricanes have become major factors in making life difficult or impossible to afford for millions of Americans. Many in Louisiana, for example, simply cannot insure their homes anymore. When hurricanes Laura and Ida hit the state in 2020 and 2021, insurance companies faced claims totaling US$22 billion—after which they just stopped writing new insurance policies. Only last year, providers canceled 17 percent of Louisiana homeowners’ policies.
And the explosive surge in Hurricane Milton’s intensity appears to be a sign of things to come. Since the 1970s, oceans have been heating up dramatically. As this continues, hurricanes are becoming more powerful more quickly—leaving those in their path with less time to seek safety. How are these dynamics affecting American life?
Andy Horowitz is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the author of Katrina: A History, 1915-2015. Horowitz says the increasing frequency of powerful hurricanes has meant that more and more communities have less and less time to fully recover from one hurricane before they have to prepare for the next. And that, in turn, has exposed the limits of existing U.S. policies—in areas from transportation to housing. The costs and harms of hurricanes to American communities, Horowitz says, are fundamentally the result of how these communities have been built. In which sense, hurricanes are natural events with increasingly artificial consequences …
Gustav Jönsson: What are the main ways you’d say hurricanes have been changing over the last few decades?
Polina Kuzovkova
This article is for members only
Join to read on and have access to The Signal‘s full library.
