What if Hurricane Ian had not missed Tampa Bay?

BY ZACHARY T. SAMPSON AND LANGSTON TAYLOR Times Staff Writers

Editor’s note: This story originally published on Dec. 18. The Tampa Bay Times is republishing it in this year’s Hurricane Guide to highlight the important lessons of Hurricane Ian for our region. The National Hurricane Center has since released a report estimating that Ian was the third-costliest hurricane in United States history, causing $112.9 billion in damage. At least 156 people died, according to the report. Storm surge killed 41 Read more on Tampa Bay’s extreme vulnerability to hurricanes at tampabay.com/risingthreat.

When Tampa Bay went to sleep on the last Monday of September, the forecast looked perilous.

Hurricane Ian charged toward Florida’s most fragile coastline. Emergency officials had ordered hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate, warning of a nightmarish, 15-foot flood.

Then the storm shifted. Ian went from a worst-case scenario to another near-miss for a region whose extreme flood risk might only be matched by its unbelievable luck.

Days after landfall while firefighters pulled bodies from the rubble of Fort Myers Beach residents of Tampa Bay again filled bars around Central Avenue and Ybor City. They raked fallen palm fronds and flipped on college football games. They dug their toes in the sand and put another close call behind them.

But Ian is not a storm to forget Had it continued on a different track and hit 100 miles north, one of the most destructive hurricanes in American history almost certainly would have been even worse.

Ian decimated a region remarkably similar to Tampa Bay, but thousands more people, homes and businesses are in harm’s way here. Already, Ian has been tied to more than 140 deaths, making it one of the deadliest storms in recent Florida history. Risk modelers predict it will rival only

Katrina, Harvey and Sandy in losses it causes to the National Flood Insurance Program.

Ian’s ground zero is only two hours away by car. If the storm had kicked off Cuba slightly to the west, it could have slammed Tampa Bay.

Instead, residents of Southwest Florida not St. Pete Beach, Treasure Island and Clearwater feared for their lives as the water rose around them. Dozens drowned And another slice of the Gulf Coast transformed into something locals describedasunrecognizable.

Like somebody took an atom bomb and dropped it.

A war zone.

Barely anything left.

Yet another hurricane season just ended here, again without catastrophe.

To better understand how close Ian came to devastating our region, Times reporters analyzed flood maps, census data and property records. They compared a 25-mile radius around Cape Coral, a swath where Ian’s surge was fiercest, to an equivalent area around St. Petersburg.

The newsroom’s analysis shows about 25% more properties in Tampa Bay could flood from surge in strong Category 4 storms, like Ian, than in the same size area around Fort Myers, based on

National Hurricane Center data. The vulnerable spots include 258,000 homes and apartment or condo buildings around Tampa Bay, compared to 199,000 surrounding Fort Myers. Another 94 nursing homes and assisted living facilities sit in places that could flood, along with at least 15,000

See IAN, 6HH