IAN LEAVES BEHIND LESSONS LEARNED

JIM TURNER AND TOM URBAN NEWS

Service Of Florida

TALLAHASSEE — As the 2023 hurricane season starts, memories are still fresh of Hurricane Ian causing billions of dollars in damage and pushing water across Southwest Florida barrier islands.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is forecasting a “near-normal” 2023 hurricane season, which will begin Thursday. One positive sign is that forecasters say odds are improving that a potentially significant El Nino weather phenomenon will form soon, which typically means weaker hurricane formations in the Atlantic.

But pointing to lessons learned from last year’s Hurricane Ian and the devastating Hurricane Michael in 2018 in Northwest Florida, emergency-management officials believe they must do more to communicate the risks of approaching storms.

Part of that involves the risks of storm surge and flooding. As of early this month, the National Flood Insurance Program had paid nearly $4 billion to policyholders because of damage from Hurricane Ian — and that doesn’t take into account damage sustained by numerous property owners who didn’t have flood insurance.

“It does not take a lot of moving, surging water to be life-threatening, especially for the little ones like your kids or your pets,” Mark Wool, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, told The News Service of Florida. “If you try to drive through three or four feet of moving water, you are not going to make it very far. It is going to cut off your evacuation options, and it really does pose a threat to life. So, when we put those storm surge watches and warnings up, that means we feel there is going to be enough inundation to pose a threat to life.”

Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said one change will involve informing people about potential differences between storms coming straight off the ocean or Gulf of Mexico and storms that encounter natural barriers. That could affect storm surge.

“We have got to tell people what nature is going to do, not just the storm, … but what the land-based nature is going to do to that storm in advance of it hitting their area,” Guthrie said. “That way, people can make better decisions, more informed decisions, and we can, you know, help obviously save more lives in the future.”

Guthrie said as future watches and warnings are issued, the potential paths of storms will help shape the impacts.

He said many people in Southwest Florida went through Hurricane Irma in 2017, which was a Category 4 storm, and were