Living in Harm’s Way on the Gulf
Living in Harm’s Way on the Gulf
With Professor Jack E. Davis
Amid the anxious wait for Hurricane Milton last week, I asked Professor Jack E. Davis if he’d come back on Skipped History to review some storm history. In The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, Professor Davis explores how and why Americans began to build on the Gulf Coast. The aftermath of one hurricane in particular generated a practice of trying to overcome, rather than retreat from, extreme weather. Over 120 years later, Professor Davis insists we need a moratorium on building near the water.
Jack is a history professor at the University of Florida specializing in environmental history and sustainability studies. He’s the author or editor of ten books, including The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird, which we discussed last year, and The Gulf, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2018. A condensed, edited transcript of our conversation is below. You can also listen to us on the Skipped History podcast:
Ben: Let’s start by talking about what you call “Hurricane Alley.”
JED: One of the reasons I wrote the book was to show that the Gulf is more than just a major supplier of oil to fuel our petroleum addiction. It has a rich, wonderful history and an unsurpassed natural environment.
But, yes, hurricanes gravitate toward the Gulf. They typically form off the west coast of Africa as storms, develop into tropical storms, and sometimes escalate into hurricanes. They travel west across the Atlantic and many end up in the Gulf, where the water is shallower, which means it’s warmer. Warm water attracts and intensifies hurricanes.
Some storms also form in the Gulf, and those tend to be the strongest, like Milton and Helene.
Ben: The word “hurricane,” you note, comes from the Yucatán Maya, who paid tribute to Huracan, “the divine source of wind and storms and, appropriately, birth and destruction.”
This is a tangent, but I feel like so often when I look up the origins of words or spellings in American English, the source ends up being Noah Webster, author of Webster’s Dictionary in 1828. The other day I was researching why we say “aluminum” versus “aluminium,” and the answer is just that Noah Webster decided we should.
So it’s refreshing when a word like “hurricane” has Indigenous roots rather than originating from the whims of a guy who spent his free time listing every word he could think of.
JED: Ha, well, you know, cyclone, typhoon, hurricane—they're all the same thing, just named differently in various parts of the world. Native peoples had their own names for these storms, having lived with them for thousands of years. On the American mainland, some people, like the Karankawa in what’s now Texas, moved inland during hurricane season, not just for safety but also because they could harvest food there. Others, like the Calusa in southwest Florida, built homes in more protected areas on shell mounds or stilts to avoid the storm surge.
Ben: Fast forwarding, one major turning point in how humanity here responded to hurricanes came with the Galveston storm in 1900. Could you talk about that and its long-term impact?
JED: Yes. I see the Galveston hurricane as a turning point in America’s decision to live on the coast, including the Gulf. The storm killed between 8,000 and 10,000 people. Galveston was built on a barrier island, and the hurricane flattened it. It was in complete ruins.
Instead of retreating to the mainland and leaving the barrier island to be a buffer for intense weather, Galvestonians rebuilt. Engineers said, we can do it. We can fix it for you. They dredged Galveston Bay, brought in fill, and raised every standing building, the sidewalks, the roads—everything. They built a massive seawall that ultimately stretched several miles, several feet thick. The mindset was we’re Americans, we don’t retreat. Engineers can control and outsmart nature.
Ever since, we’ve responded to hurricanes as Galvestonians responded. Not only do we rebuild, we rebuild bigger. We expand. That’s happened time and time again throughout our history. I remember being a kid in the panhandle of Florida in 1969 when Hurricane Camille hit. At the last minute, it veered toward Mississippi and tore up the coast. Afterward, Mississippi invited casinos to come build on the coast.
In another of countless examples, just last week, St. Petersburg was in the middle of building the tallest building on the Gulf Coast when Milton struck, crumbling the construction crane. But it’ll go right back up, even though Milton could’ve been so much worse.
Ben: Yikes. A friend of mine was texting me ahead of Milton saying, could we at least think of a more intimidating name? “Milton” doesn’t really inspire much fear.
JED: I know. I was asking my friends what parent names their child Milton?
Ben: Maybe the same one who names their child Pee-Wee. (If you’re a Pee-Wee reading this, don’t come for me!)
Construction on Florida’s Gulf Coast began in earnest during the 1920s. Sarasota’s year-round population nearly tripled, Tampa’s nearly doubled, and across the bay, St. Petersburg’s population more than doubled, to forty thousand.
Can you talk about some of the environmental costs of that growth?
JED: The 1920s was an urban boom period for the Gulf Coast, especially Florida. The next big boom period came after World War II. John D. MacDonald, the novelist who lived in Sarasota, said Florida was the only state in the country that was growing bigger—and he wasn’t talking about population (though it was growing, too), but about land mass. Developers were creating new land by dredging up estuarine environments or bulldozing mangroves and filling them in.
Ben: Some of the most egregious offenders were the Rosen Brothers, a couple of very deceptive if not skilled salesmen south of Tampa.
JED: Yes, they dredged four hundred miles of canals in Cape Coral, creating more “waterfront” property to sell. Cape Coral has more mileage of canals than any city in the world, including Venice.
The other byproduct was ecological destruction. Canals don’t give life to anything. Often, they’re created from dredging the bay and digging up living environments. They become dead bodies of water.
Ben: Contrary to, say, Florida’s mangrove forests, which give residency to 18 mammal, 24 reptile, 181 bird, and 220 fish species.
JED: Exactly.
Recently, I’ve taken issue with the term “resilience,” because it’s often framed by the growth industry—engineers, policymakers, city planners, federal insurance and flood insurance, and FEMA—in a way that justifies continued coastal development.
Sadly, the solution is often envisioned as hard armoring: expanding rip rap areas and seawalls. But when you do that, you’re diminishing the natural, living shoreline: mangrove woodlands, oyster bars, seagrass beds, and coastal marshes. All of those things are superb natural buffers against intense weather. Not only that, they’re birthplaces and nurseries, as you say. And not only that, but they’re fantastic carbon sinks. Acre for acre, they absorb more carbon than inland forests.
So estuarine environments are a win-win-win. We should be making every effort not to build concrete seawalls in their place. We end up with less protection and more damage.
Ben: Advice that echoes the words of Nash Roberts, a sort of legendary weatherman. Can you talk a bit about him and his thoughts about living on the coast?
JED: I stumbled on Nash Roberts when researching Hurricane Audrey, an oft-forgotten hurricane in 1957 that killed 500 people. Nash, the first TV weatherman in New Orleans, was the only meteorologist to call the storm accurately. He told people you need to evacuate while other outlets and the National Weather Service told people they had time.
He grew into a really established, wise voice when it came to hurricane and weather forecasting. He continued to outforecast everybody throughout his career, lasting into the ‘70s and ‘80s. He just had great instincts. He never relied on Doppler radar and never used the green screen on TV, preferring a whiteboard and squeaky magic markers.
After he retired, Nash gave a talk on the Mississippi coast. All the floating casinos were there—the ones that had moved in after Hurricane Camille in 1969 (which Nash had accurately predicted would hit Mississippi). And he said we’re doing it wrong. We’re moving in the wrong direction.
Ben: “If there is one thing we have gotten from all this,” Nash warned, it’s “to go north—get away from the water.”
JED: People trusted his weather forecasts, but they did not trust his prophecy about living on the coast.
Ben: I think his argument would have hit home more if he’d released thousands of sharks, orcas, or maybe just mutated sea bass into the Gulf.
But, to your point, you observe how “roughly between Audrey and Katrina, the U.S. coastal population expanded by seventy percent, with the rush to hurricane country the greatest. The Gulf Coast population swelled by 150 percent, to fourteen million. To accommodate the arriving hordes, more houses, businesses, shopping centers, restaurants, and sprawling infrastructure had to be built. The number of housing units soared by 246 percent, double the national increase.”
JED: It’s incredible, right? After Katrina, housing values actually increased in New Orleans, and that trend isn’t limited to there. We’re paying a premium to live in areas prone to natural disasters.
And I get it. There's a lure to the coast. We feel connected to the water, both emotionally and physically. We love the sunsets and the sunrises. I grew up on the coast. I love the Gulf. I used to live in St. Petersburg and thought I’d retire there, but I knew it was due for a major low. Gainesville, where I live now, has become a city of climate change refugees.
Look, I’m a realist. I'm not saying get away from the coast—leave, go, move out of your houses. It's hard to give up a place that you own, where maybe you've raised your family over generations. But I think lawmakers need to get their heads out of the sand and impose a moratorium on growth along the coast. They need to offer incentives for people to move away and to stop building. Look at Arizona—they offer incentives for homeowners to replace grass with desert landscaping to conserve water. We need something similar for coastal areas, encouraging people to live in safer areas.
We can't just simply armor ourselves and continue living in harm's way.