Living in a World of Storms

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Category 5

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 …

• “In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and its levee system failed, some thought it was such a horrific event that it would shock the United States into taking steps to mitigate the harm of storms in the future. Others thought that Katrina had only affected people on the margins of American life—that New Orleans was an exceptional place. So they said, you know, This could never happen in New York City. But then Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012. And now there are storms, floods, and wildfires everywhere. America is becoming inured to it. Congress hasn’t overhauled the country’s emergency-response systems. Instead, hurricanes have come to seem ordinary, not exceptional threats. They’re treated like school shootings. They’ve become a new normal.”
• “Emergency responders are hamstrung by existing policy. The United States is leaving them to handle what are in reality huge structural challenges. It’s the job of emergency responders to focus on immediate threats; they have to get people out of harm’s way. But in the current circumstances, that means they’re often forced in effect to create—on a very short-term basis and on a very tight budget—a social-welfare state. That’s not how politicians typically speak of it. Still, one could call the checks the Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent to evacuees “universal basic income.” And “evacuation” is an emergency code name for “transportation infrastructure.” People have struggled to evacuate from Florida because the state has invested billions in highway infrastructure, which isn’t the best way to move lots of people out of harm’s way on short notice—gas stations ran out of gas; traffic discouraged people from evacuating—whereas a well-designed and -built regional public-transportation system would be more useful.”
• “There’s no question that U.S. housing policy has created a situation where people live in high-risk areas. And that’s not because foolish Americans choose to live in dangerous places. A full suite of policy incentives has encouraged people to move to the metropolitan fringe—to places that are more flood-prone, harder to protect from fire, and harder to create transportation infrastructure around. And that’s put people in peril. So, most people who moved to these high-risk areas were just doing what they were supposed to do according to the public-policy incentives they were living with.”

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Race beneath the Earth

But the Americans aren’t the only global superpower building railroads in sub-Saharan Africa these days: China has pledged billions to build a new rail line linking Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast with Zambia’s central line. Why are the world’s two biggest powers doing this—and why are they doing it here?

Minerals.

The new railways will give Washington and Beijing access to 70 percent of the world’s cobalt and 12 percent of the copper, along with enormous reserves of lithium, nickel, manganese, and chromium. These are all elements that go into critical military and computing technologies, including the semiconductor chips in cellphones and most home appliances.

Last year, Nicholas Kumleben explored why these minerals were now one of the few areas of competition where China had a distinct advantage over the U.S., as Washington scrambles to build a supply chain for them outside Beijing’s reach.

—Michael Bluhm

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