Genuine question since I don’t live in a city which experiences severe weather events annually: what is the financial incentive in rebuilding destroyed homes, businesses and other infrastructure every few years? Does that actually lead to a net positive outcome for those affected in the long run?
Find a map of the rivers that drain into the Mississippi. Think about how much shipping still happens on the rivers, despite the highway and train networks. Lots of goods pass through there, which means lots of money flows through (and all too little of it sticks).
New Orleans is the least shitty place to put a port on the Mississippi. Or at least it's been that since its founding. Rising sea levels and "hundred-year storms" becoming "twenty-year storms" may change that.
And also... it's home. I grew up there, left for a while, came back right before Katrina, and leaving after that ripped a chunk of my heart out that I've only started growing back after returning a couple years ago. The place is fucking magical for the 347 days out of the year we're not staring down a hurricane that might be aimed right for us. Most of them see us staring and decide to go elsewhere.
It's crazy to me how discussions, especially on HN, about some place being less livable always produce comments to the effect of "why wouldn't they just move." Family, friends and history are a tight tie. Probably the tightest and most human tie. Extremely understandable.
I don’t think anyone suggested moving, certainly not me. I’m not from the US and have no idea how these annual hurricanes affect the south west, hence my question.
I'm not saying some areas don't suffer huge losses and this might be a bit of survivorship bias, but living in Miami for 35 years, homes built from cinderblock with roofs secured with hurricane straps -- which have been part of the building code for 30+ years now -- don't really see much damage other than the odd missing roof tile and maybe a bit of water intrusion from the wind, but it's not as dramatic as the media portrays it in _most_ areas.
I'd say the major threats are fallen power lines, downed trees, and CO poisoning from generator misuse. We'll get routine summer monsoons that bring more damage than some category 1 hurricanes at times, so unless it's a direct hit from a major hurricane I try not to panic too much so long as we have supplies.
also popular to clear out trees close to the house. some people make the rookie mistake of not doing that and end up with an open roof during the storm.
Most of the time it isn't the same places that get hit. Its not as if the same neighborhood is rebuilt year after year, many of these places have homes and infrastructure that is 100 years old.
Also keep in mind that a majority of the East Coast is under threat from Hurricanes. If we just abandoned any area that has been severely damaged by a hurricane, there would effectively be an unpopulated coastline from Boston to the Mexican border.
There are steps between doing nothing and abandoning the east coast. There are some areas (right at sea level, river flood zones) which probably are better off as parks, and letting things like costal mangrove forests regrow would be important, but there’s a lot of places where a significant fraction of the existing buildings could remain viable if they were sensibly built following good design practice rather than as cheaply as the developers could get away with.
It seems like something flood insurance and building codes should get increasingly stringent about, similar to how some California fire codes started requiring houses to be built to support sheltering in place during wildfires so you didn’t have so many people evacuating and needing to rebuild as many homes. It’d be nice if that started as guaranteed annual premium increases for unsafe properties with an assistance program for primary residences which phases out based on property value.
The wealth of a society isn’t in houses and TVs. It’s institutions and structures, such as companies, clubs, families, universities etc.
That’s how you can almost literally wipe a city off the face of the earth and see it rebuilt within a decade, think Germany after WW2or London/SF/Chicago after fire and earthquakes.
