At Some Point You Don’t Go Back

Hurricane Milton is on its way. On Monday morning, the next storm was inching through the Gulf of Mexico to the east, already spinning with sustained winds of 125 miles-per-hour. It is headed, of course, to Florida.

Barely more than a week since Hurricane Helene cut a swath of destruction across the southeastern U.S., the National Hurricane Center is warning about “life-threatening storm surge.” A 250-mile stretch of Florida coastline may get surge up to 12 feet; though some uncertainty in the projected path remains, at the moment Milton is taking dead aim at the Tampa area, among the most vulnerable cities in the country to a direct hurricane hit. If it wobbles toward the south a bit, areas like Port Charlotte or Fort Myers Beach might take the direct hit.

It has been eight days since President Biden approved a major disaster declaration for Florida, along with the other states hit by Helene, freeing up federal funding for recovery efforts. Almost exactly two years before that, Hurricane Ian roared ashore and demolished Fort Myers Beach. Is Milton another disaster, or just the same one stretched out, elongated by a warmer atmosphere and hot ocean water fueling the now-commonplace rapid intensification of tropical cyclones? How many will this one kill — will it approach the 230 or so Helene killed, or the thousands more likely to die in the years to come of various social and political ills hurricanes leave in their wake? How many billions of dollars will it cost to recover and rebuild? When will the answers to those questions simply be “too many” and “too much”?

The bigger question lurking behind virtually every climate disaster story is about livability. When will a given place become untenable — too hot, too wet, too on fire? There are some relatively knowable pieces of that puzzle, regarding wet bulb temperatures and human capacities and flood return periods and so on, but the second-order background question of “what next?” is the tough part.

The idea of “managed retreat,” or proactively moving away from places sinking beneath the waves or burning and drying up in the greenhouse, is attractive in its logic and empowerment. That sort of move would offer some degree of “agency over the choice, so making it feel like people who are retreating making it feel like this is a choice for them,” one expert on the topic, A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware, has said in the past.

But doing this at scale is an almost incomprehensible absurdity. Individual villages singled out for retreat to avoid eroding coastlines or disappearing beaches can cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, the cost of moving not just people but every structure, the houses and apartments but also the library and the school and the businesses and the public works building and 20 other things we all spend essentially zero time thinking about, ever. Tampa’s metro area has more than three million people; Florida overall has 22 million. The economics aren’t just hard, they basically don’t exist.

The other option is another form of retreat, just not a managed one. Chaotic retreat is what happens when we are not ready for the disaster, and it overwhelms us entirely: before Katrina hit in 2005, there were more than 450,000 people living in New Orleans. A year later, more than 200,000 of those were gone, and most never went back. The water receded, but it didn’t spit the city back out whole; the more times the flood comes, the less there is to go back to.

Evacuation orders are spreading in Florida on Monday. A state where home insurance is becoming untenable, and retirees are facing bankruptcy as condos built on the state’s Swiss-cheese limestone require urgent repair and safety upgrades, and a government so soaked through with too-online lib-owning brain rot that it thinks eliminating climate change from state laws will send the juiced-up hurricanes slinking off toward New Jersey — if Milton hits Florida the way it looks like it will, some non-zero number of those evacuees will not come back.

Faced with the impossible logistics of relocating a city like Tampa or Miami, that’s what will happen: repeated pulses of abandonment, performed chaotically and with almost limitless potential for immiseration, modernity’s wagon trains set out for who-knows-where as a warmed world reclaims chunks of land rendered, piece by piece, uninhabitable.