Northwest Florida rebuilds after every hurricane. But are we rebuilding in right places?
When the waves inevitably wash away a sandcastle, it only takes a few pails of sand and a light afternoon's work to rebuild.
When hurricane winds, storm surge and flood waters inevitably come crashing down on the Gulf Coast — toppling beach homes, cracking asphalt and eroding the shoreline — it takes years of work and millions, sometimes billions, of dollars to rebuild.
Still, communities stubbornly rebuild condos, beach homes, retail, resorts and even shorelines, knowing full well it could all come crumbling down again in the next big storm.
It's a vicious cycle Rob Young has been working years to disrupt.
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"The biggest problem that I see is that we still put too much stuff in harm's way," said Young, a professor of coastal geology at Western Carolina University. "If I could beg a community to do one thing, it would be don't put anything else in a place where it's immediately going to be exposed to the next storm or flood. And that may seem really simple, but it's unbelievably difficult for communities."
Young is the director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, which studies the impacts of storms, sea-level rise and climate change on coastal cities and advocates for responsible strategies to promote the long-term sustainability of the nation's coastal ecosystems.
On May 9, Young will be at CivicCon in Pensacola to discuss what coastal cities need to do to prepare for the future while balancing economic and environmental interests.
"The mission of the center that I direct is to ... do basic scientific research on coastal processes: coastal storm impacts, rising sea level, general coastal management issues, coastal restoration efforts," Young told the News Journal in a late April interview.
"So we do science, but then what makes us sort of unusual is that in our mission statement, a primary mission of the center is to communicate that science to decision makers at all levels. So that's everything from an individual property owner, to property owners associations, municipalities, counties, state government, federal government. ... Really what we try to do, through a lot of ways that are a little bit non-traditional for academics, is make sure people have the information they need to make good science-based decisions."
As part of his work, Young led a project to map and evaluate the vulnerability of each coastal National Park Service asset in the U.S. — from the Statue of Liberty in New York, to remote roads in Alaska, to our very own Gulf Islands National Seashore — to help park managers decide what should be protected, what should be abandoned and what should be moved farther inland.
The research looks at an asset's risk to factors like sea-level rise, inundation, overland flooding and coastal erosion to determine its "exposure" and "vulnerability." Essentially, exposure is if — or when — water will reach the assessed area, and vulnerability is what happens when the water gets there.
Young said from a scientific perspective, that part of the work is pretty straightforward.
"The tricky part after that is when you start to look at questions of capacity to do something about that vulnerability, and how the federal and state funding comes into a community," Young said.
Young said local state and federal government spend tremendous amounts of money on "resilience" and addressing vulnerability, but the process is incredibly political without much in the way of an overarching plan.
"Resilience is a buzzword right now, because it can mean really anything," Young said. "We still have localities that are building in the floodplain, increasing the density of development in the floodplain, putting more homes, roads, infrastructure in places that could be impacted by the next storm — just making bad choices, and they're really isn't even a penalty for doing so."
In fact, Young said in many instances they're incentivized to make the wrong decisions.
"The way that we decide to spend resilience money in the United States, money that's spent by the Army Corps of Engineers for example, is they do this economic analysis where they need to get a lot of bang for the buck," Young said. "That means that by the economic analysis that the Corps does, they are biased towards protecting expensive infrastructure and they are biased against protecting single family homes — people who are working class, blue collar or minority communities. It's built into the way they do their economic analysis."
He pointed to the 30A community in southern Walton County as a local example of the phenomenon, noting in a recent visit he was stunned to see the number of $10 million homes being built right up against the dunes.
"I will tell you, if they ever go after a federal federally funded beach renourishment project, they're going to have a much better chance of getting it, even though they cause the problem themselves, because that project will be protecting multimillion-dollar homes instead of homes that only cost $500,00 or $600,000," he said.
Young added, "The federal government spends a tremendous amount of money pumping sand in front of those communities to try and protect those property values. When you step inland from the coast, we sort of turn that on its head and we spend very, very little money trying to reduce the damage in those communities. Because again, the Corps will tell you that the benefit cost analysis doesn't add up for homes that only cost $200,00 or $300,000 each."
In the U.S., and in Florida in particular, where our beaches are the linchpin for much of the area's tourism, industry and allure, it is not surprising that we stubbornly keep rebuilding on exposed and vulnerable beachfront plots. But the question is how long that approach will be sustainable.
"It's gonna come to a head someday because right now, honestly, we're really trying to hold every shoreline in the U.S. in place by pumping in sand — everything from Southern Maine to Padre Island, Texas — with beach renourishment projects," Young said. "We're just not going to be able to afford to do that forever, and there's not going to be enough sand to do it forever. At some point, this bubble will burst."
Young noted with a laugh that he despite how dour his warnings sound, he is a positive person and thinks there is a way forward.
"There are ways to approach this, I think. We need to completely reform the benefit cost analysis that is done for most federal coastal protection projects," he said. "As Americans, certainly we value more than just the cost of individual homes. It's about more than that, right? What we try to save and protect should be about more than that, it should be about community structure and cultural heritage and diversity and fairness. I would hope that we would all be able to agree that that's true, and you shouldn't be able to get the most federal dollars because just because you have the largest property value."
At a free, open-to-all CivicCon presentation, Young will talk about ways communities can balance sustainability and resilience with economic growth and success.
The event will be 6 to 7:30 p.m. May 9 at The REX Theatre, 18 N. Palafox St. in Pensacola. Registration is available by searching "CivicCon" at eventbrite.com.
CivicCon is a partnership of the Pensacola News Journal and the Studer Community Institute to make our community a better place to live, grow, work and invest through smart planning and civic conversation.
For more information about CivicCon, visit pnj.com/civiccon.