In the night hours after Hurricane Milton smashed into Siesta Key, a barrier island near Sarasota, Florida, high winds and a deluge of water pummeled the state’s coastal metropolises. In St. Petersburg, a construction crane toppled from its position on a luxury high-rise, meant to soon be the tallest building on the flood-vulnerable peninsula. The crane crashed down into the building across the street that houses the newspaper offices of the Tampa Bay Times. High winds ripped the roof off a Tampa stadium set to house emergency workers. Three million homes and businesses are now without power.

As this morning dawned, Hurricane Milton was exiting Florida on its east coast, still maintaining hurricane-force winds. The storm came nerve-rackingly close to making what experts had feared would be a worst-case entrance into the state. The storm hit some 60 miles south of Tampa, striking a heavily populated area but narrowly avoiding the precarious geography of Tampa’s shallow bay. Still, the destruction, once tallied, is likely to be major. Flash flooding inundated cities and left people trapped under rubble and cars in the hurricane’s path. Multiple people were killed yesterday at a retirement community in Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, when one of the many tornadoes whipped up by Milton touched down there.

The barrier islands, if they’ve done their job, may have protected Sarasota from the worst of the storm surge, but those vulnerable strips of sand have their own small civilizations built on them, too. This stretch of southwestern Florida happens to be one of the fastest-growing parts of the state, where people are flocking to new developments, many of them on the waterfront. Milton is the third hurricane to make landfall in Florida this year, in an area that has barely had time to assess the damage from Hurricane Helene two weeks ago. Because it skirted a direct strike of Tampa Bay, the storm may soon be viewed as a near miss, which research has found can amplify risky decision making going forward. But this morning, it is a chilling reminder of the rising hazards of living in hurricane-prone places as climate change makes the most ferocious storms more ferocious.

The threat of catastrophic inundation has for years loomed over that particular cluster of cities—Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater—and on some level, everyone knew it. About a decade ago, Karen Clark & Company, a Boston-based firm that provides analysis to the insurance industry, calculated that Tampa–St. Petersburg was the U.S. metropolitan area most vulnerable to flooding damage due to storm surge. Even Miami, despite all the talk of its imminent climate-fueled demise, is in a better situation than Tampa, where the ocean is relatively shallow and the bay “can act almost like a funnel,” leading to higher peak storm surge, according to Daniel Ward, an atmospheric scientist and the senior director of model development for Karen Clark. The regional planning council has simulated the impacts of a Category 5 storm, including fake weather reports that sound eerily similar to those of Milton; estimates of the losses, should a storm hit directly enough, were on the order of $300 billion.

The region’s building spree has only upped the ante, adding to the tally of potential damages. Siesta Key, the barrier island where Milton hit first, had been locked in a battle over proposed high-density hotel projects for years; Sarasota is adding people at one of the fastest rates in the county. Farther south, Fort Myers is expanding even faster (and in recent years has been battered by storms, including this one). Tampa in particular has been a darling of Florida development. Billions of dollars in investment remade its waterfront districts with glassy condo towers, and the traditional retirement city was reborn as a beacon for young people. The population of the Tampa metro area, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater, swelled to more than 3.2 million; median home values nearly doubled from 2018 to June of this year, according to Redfin data cited by The Wall Street Journal.

Like everyone in Florida, people who live on the southwestern coast understand that hurricanes are a risk, perhaps even one that climate change is accentuating. (More than Americans on average, Floridians believe that climate change is happening.) But “every coastal area has a mythology about how they’re going to escape climate change,” Edward Richards, a professor emeritus at Louisiana State University Law School, told me. “We have a culture of downplaying risk.” The last time Tampa Bay was directly affected by a major hurricane was in 1921, when a Category 3 storm hit the metro area, then home to about 120,000 people. It sent an 11-foot storm surge crashing into houses, wiped out citrus fields, and killed eight people. The possibility of another hit was always a real danger, even before the effects of global warming started setting in. “Climate change absolutely makes the storms worse,” Richards said. “But we focus so much on how they will get worse, we haven’t paid attention to how bad they’ve already been.”

Most days, Tampa has plenty of benefits to beckon people, and a century-old storm is likely not on their minds. “The amenities of jobs and economic opportunities and, quite honestly, just the amenity of being close to the beach oftentimes outweigh the disamenity of climate exposure,” Jeremy Porter, the head of climate-implications research at the analytics nonprofit First Street, told me. Getting a mortgage in a FEMA-designated flood zone requires flood insurance, which is mostly supplied by the National Flood Insurance Program, but plenty of people drop it after a year or two, either because they don’t feel they need it or because they can’t pay the bill, Porter said. If your home is paid off, there’s also no requirement to carry flood insurance. Developers pass future risk on to the people who buy their condos; city managers generally welcome developments, which are good for the local economy, as long as they’re still standing. If they’re destroyed, the federal government helps pay to rebuild. “Any time you disassociate the profit from the risk, you get these catastrophic problems,” Richards said. Attempts to undo any of this—by making people face the actual risk of the places they live—can also be a trap: Raise flood-insurance rates to market price, and suddenly plenty of people can’t afford it. Continue subsidizing insurance, and you keep people in dangerous places.

Even before Milton’s blow, though, the region’s great real-estate boom was faltering. Homeowners in the floodplain zone were watching their insurance prices go up dramatically, after FEMA rolled out new adjustments to make its highly subsidized National Flood Insurance Program premiums better reflect the true cost of risk. Thanks to rising insurance costs and repetitive flood incidents in recent years, more homeowners are now looking to sell. But they’re finding that difficult: Supply of homes in Tampa is rising, but demand is falling, and roughly half of the homes for sale—the third-highest share of all U.S. major metropolitan areas—had to cut their asking price as of September 9, according to The Wall Street Journal. That was before Hurricane Helene sent six feet of storm surge into the city and Milton crashed through, damaging properties and likely undercutting chances of a good sale. Plus, Florida passed a flood-disclosure law this year, which took effect on October 1. That means homeowners who try to sell their home after this storm will have to tell prospective buyers about any insurance claims or FEMA assistance they received for flood damage, no matter when they sell.

In the short term, both Richards and Porter predict that people will simply rebuild in the same place. No levers currently exist to encourage any other outcome, Richards said. FEMA has a buyout program for homes in frequently damaged areas, but the process takes years. In the meantime, homeowners have little choice but to rebuild. And even knowing the risk of floods might not dissuade people from coming back, or moving in. A report on New Orleans, for instance, found that almost half of homebuyers surveyed did not consult risk-disclosure statements required after Hurricane Katrina: When people can afford to live only in a flood-prone part of a city, knowing the risk doesn’t change their options.

In the longer term, “from a geologic point of view, we know what’s going to happen,” Richards told me. Over the course of the next century, parts of Florida’s coast will be suffering from regular floods, if not permanently underwater. Hurricane flooding will reach farther inland. Living in certain places will simply no longer be possible. “Eventually we’ll hit a tipping point where people will begin to avoid the area,” Porter said. But he doesn’t think Milton will be it.

The United States is trapped in a cycle of disasters bigger than the ones our systems were built for. Before Hurricane Helene made landfall late last month, FEMA was already running short on funds; now, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, told reporters on Wednesday, if another hurricane hits, it will run out altogether. At the same time, the Biden administration has announced that local expenses to fix hurricane damage in several of the worst-affected states will be completely reimbursed by the federal government.

This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening—after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Florence. Almost every year now, FEMA is hitting the same limits, Carlos Martín, who studies disaster mitigation and recovery for the Brookings Institution, told me. Disaster budgets are calculated to past events, but “that’s just not going to be adequate” as events grow more frequent and intense. Over time, the U.S. has been spending more and more money on disasters in an ad hoc way, outside its main disaster budget, according to Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School.

Each time, the country manages to scrape by, finding more money to help people who need it. (And FEMA does have money for immediate Helene response.) But each time, when funds get too low, the agency winds up putting its other relief work on hold in favor of lifesaving measures, which can slow down recovery and leave places more vulnerable when the next storm hits. In theory, the U.S. could keep doing that, even as costs keep growing, until at some point, these fixes become either unsustainable or so normalized as to be de facto policy. But it’s a punishing cycle that leaves communities scrambling to react to ever more dramatic events, instead of getting ahead of them.

The U.S. is facing a growing number of billion-dollar disasters, fueled both by climate change and by increased development in high-risk places. This one could cost up to $34 billion, Moody’s Analytics estimated. Plus, the country is simply declaring more disasters over time in part because of “shifting political expectations surrounding the federal role in relief and recovery,” according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.

Meanwhile, costs of these disasters are likely to balloon further because of gaps in insurance. In places such as California, Louisiana, and Florida, insurers are pulling out or raising premiums so high that people can’t afford them, because their business model cannot support the current risks posed by more frequent or intense disasters. So states and the federal government are already taking on greater risks as insurers of last resort. The National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, writes more than 95 percent of the residential flood policies in the United States, according to an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania. But the people who hold those policies are almost all along the coasts, in specially designated flood zones. Inland flooding such as Helene brought doesn’t necessarily conform to those hazard maps; less than 1 percent of the homeowners in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where the city of Asheville was badly hit, had flood insurance.

For Helene-affected areas, after the immediate lifesaving operations are done, this is the question that most haunts Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator under President Barack Obama: “How do you rebuild or provide housing for all those folks?” The Stafford Act, the legislation that governs U.S. disaster response, was written with the idea that most people will use insurance to cover their losses and was not built for this current reality of mass damage to essentially uninsured homes, he told me. “The insurance model is no longer working, and the FEMA programs are not designed to fill those gaps,” Fugate said.

Fugate would like to see major investments in preparing homes and infrastructure to withstand disasters more gracefully. This is a common refrain among the people who look most closely at these problems: Earlier this week, another former FEMA administrator, Brock Long, told my colleague David A. Graham that the country should be rewarding communities for smarter land-use planning, implementing new building codes, and working with insurance companies “to properly insure their infrastructure.” They keep hitting this note for good reason. A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that every dollar of disaster preparedness saves communities $13 in damages, cleanup costs, and economic impacts. But since 2018, the government has set aside just 6 percent of the total of its post-disaster grant spending to go toward pre-disaster mitigation.

That actually counts as a major increase in federal funding for resilience, Fugate told me, but it’s still nothing compared with the trillions of dollars needed to protect infrastructure from current risk. Disaster costs are only going to keep growing unless the country invests in rebuilding its infrastructure for the future. Martín put it to me like this: “If I were to have a heart attack, heaven forbid, and I survived it, I would say, Okay, I’m going to start eating better. I’m going to start exercising. I’m going to do all the things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” The country keeps sustaining shocks to its system that won’t stop without work.

But some of these measures, such as adopting stronger building codes, tend to be unpopular with the states that hold the authority to change them. “There is a sort of quiet tension between states and the federal government in terms of how to do this,” Schlegelmilch said. The way things work right now, states and local governments would likely end up shouldering more of the cost of preparing for disasters. But they know the federal government will help fund recovery.

Plus, spending money on disaster recovery helps win elected officials votes in the next election. “The amount of funding you bring in has a very strong correlation to votes—how many you get, how many you lose,” Schlegelmilch said. But the same cannot be said for preparedness, which has virtually no correlation with votes. Nonprofits working on disasters face a similar problem. Schlegelmilch told me that some have websites that they keep dark, and then fill in “like a Mad Libs” when disasters inevitably hit. “Insert the disaster name here, insert a photo here, and then they’re up and ready to go, in terms of fundraising, because that’s when people give.” That is natural enough: People want to help people who are obviously in distress. It’s more abstract to imagine helping before any danger arrives, even if that would be more effective.

None of these dynamics are going away, and Schlegelmilch thinks changing them could mean rethinking federal emergency management altogether, “the way we reimagined homeland security after 9/11,” he said. He counts as many as 90 disaster-assistance programs across as many as 20 different agencies; a reorganization into a central disaster department would at least streamline these. “I say this knowing full well that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was a mess,” he told me. But, he added, “We have to get ahead of this with a greater investment in preparedness and resilience. And greater efficiency and coordination.”

Fugate’s expectations are more pragmatic. “Have you ever seen a committee chairman in Congress willingly give up their program areas?” he asked. (Notably, even after DHS was created, its first secretary, Tom Ridge, had to navigate 88 congressional committees and subcommittees that took an interest in the department’s work.) He would like to see the U.S. establish a National Disaster Safety Board, similar to the National Transportation Safety Board—an organization funded by Congress, and separate from any executive agency—that would assess storm responses and make recommendations.

But he isn’t sure the country has gone through enough yet to fundamentally change this cycle of expensive, painful recoveries. “Every time I think there’s some event where you go, Okay, we’re going to come to our senses, we seem to cope enough that we never get to that tipping point,” he said. Some catastrophic failures—Hurricane Katrina, for example—have changed disaster policy. But Americans have yet to change our collective mind about preparing for disaster adequately. People still can’t even agree about climate change, Fugate notes. “I mean, you keep thinking we’re going to get one of these storms, that we’re going to hit the tipping point and everybody’s going to go, Yeah, we got a problem.” So far, at least, we haven’t reached it yet.

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Western North Carolina lies hundreds of miles inland from any coast. The counties around the Blue Ridge Mountains sit at high elevations, away from the dense flood zones along the Atlantic. The idea that more than a foot of rain would rapidly overwhelm the region, sweeping up homes and ripping up vegetation, seemed almost unthinkable. But a week after Hurricane Helene made landfall, at least 200 people have died, and the death toll is expected to rise as the floodwaters recede and the debris clears. Many inland residents in North Carolina have never experienced flooding like this in their lifetime, and only a sliver have the flood insurance necessary to help them rebuild.

Flood insurance isn’t included in homeowner’s insurance, and Americans are generally not required to buy it. (One exception is the homeowners who live in high-risk areas, who must purchase flood insurance to get a federally backed mortgage.) Without this special coverage, floods can be “a huge financial shock to households,” Carolyn Kousky, the associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, told me. Those living in storm-torn areas without coverage are looking at a massive list of expenses—home repairs, debris removal, temporary lodging—that they may have to pay for out of pocket after Helene. Still, just a tiny share of homeowners currently own flood insurance. Most of the North Carolina counties hit hard by Helene did not fall within high-risk areas on flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency; one estimate found that less than 2.5 percent of homeowners in the region have flood insurance—and that number is even lower in some counties.

“In a perfect world, everyone with some degree of flood risk could and would carry flood insurance on their homes,” my colleague Zoë Schlanger, who covers climate change, told me. But the reality is that even some of the residents in flood-prone areas do not buy the plans because they are so expensive. The average premium cost $700 a year in 2019, but that number can reach the thousands for some coastal communities. Lower-income residents face an especially daunting situation: They are less likely to be able to afford flood insurance, and they also have less money on hand to rebuild.

Many people assume that they face little risk if they aren’t living in an area included in high-risk zones on FEMA’s flood maps, Sarah Pralle, a political-science professor at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, told me. But FEMA’s maps don’t capture the full picture of flood risk. They are drawn “based on the assumption that the past will help us predict the future. In a rapidly changing climate, that’s not the case.” The maps can quickly become outdated as climate risks evolve, she noted, and don’t take into account fluvial flooding, or flooding from heavy-rain events, which is what North Carolina saw last week. Even people who have personally experienced flooding sometimes drop their policies, Pralle said, adding that “if people have lived in a place where it hasn’t flooded in decades, they lose that memory of what can happen and what kind of losses they might suffer.”

Those who do buy flood insurance usually live in areas prone to flooding. The result is a system in which the risk is not evenly spread out, making flood-insurance premiums hugely pricey—Pralle likened it to a health-insurance system in which only the sick buy coverage. Some countries organize their disaster-insurance programs so everyone pays a flat rate, Kousky explained. In the United States, that would mean someone living on Florida’s coastline would pay the same premium as someone living on the top of a mountain. That’s a tough sell for many Americans, and overhauling the National Flood Insurance Program, which is saddled with debt, would be politically contentious.

Those without flood insurance will need to rely on a “patchwork” system of federal aid, loans, and charity, Kousky said, as they recover from Helene. One option is accepting government loans, but she noted that many people are not in a position to take on more debt after a hurricane—and their applications may be denied too. FEMA disaster-assistance grants are another pathway, and most of them do not need to be repaid—but those are “just an emergency stopgap,” Kousky said. They’re not designed to fully help people recover, usually providing only a few thousand dollars for each household—a fraction of what residents would need to rebuild.

The process of recovering from Helene is just beginning. Still, hurricane season is not over for the rest of the country, and FEMA currently does not have enough funding to make it through the rest of the season. Last week, President Joe Biden signed a short-term spending bill authorizing another $16 billion for the agency, but further funding would need to come from Congress, which is currently in recess until after the election.

So much of the response following disasters can feel piecemeal and reactive, Pralle said. Insurance is important—but not the full story. “Every dollar we put into prevention is going to be a lot more efficiently spent,” she explained. In a world reshaped by climate change, “this idea that there’s safe places you can go hide is unrealistic.”

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North Carolina was set up for disaster. Hurricane Helene through the eyes of a former FEMA chief

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