Waiting For Hurricane X

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In all cases, what boosted those early storms to Top-10 status was population growth. In 1995, for example, Pielke says, the population of two Florida counties alone, Dade and Broward, was greater than the 1930 population of the entire coast from Texas through Virginia. Like compulsive gamblers betting the mortgage, Americans have pressed their luck to the limit. There has been so much development on barrier islands and beaches along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, researchers say, that a hurricane of even modest intensity can cause a multibillion-dollar disaster. In Florida the value of insured coastal property rose from $566 billion in 1988 to $1 trillion in 1995. Consider Pinellas County, Fla. The last hurricane struck there in 1921, when the county had 28,000 people. Today Pinellas County has nearly 870,000 people.

All this development occurred in plain view, of course, but until the morning of Aug. 24, 1992, no one seemed to recognize its implications. Hurricane Andrew was not merely a wake-up call; it was a stick of dynamite under the pillow. Prior to Andrew, no one envisioned more than $7 billion in insured losses for a single storm. But after Andrew's landfall, Karen Clark, founder of Applied Insurance Research Inc., in Boston, one of a new breed of "catastrophe modelers," sent an audacious message to her clients estimating insured losses at $9 billion. If Andrew proved to be more intense than first estimated, she added, the damages could hit $13.5 billion. "Nobody believed it," she says. A client remarked, "A few mobile homes and an Air Force base--how much could it be?"

In fact, insured losses topped $18 billion. In Dade County alone, the storm destroyed 63,000 homes and damaged 110,000 others. Nine small insurance companies failed. Large companies raised rates, dumped policies and tried to pull out of coastal areas, but regulators forced them to stay. The "reinsurance" companies, which in effect provide insurance to insurance companies, also got queasy and sharply limited coverage.

The most catastrophic consequence of the Big One, though, won't be property damage; it will be loss of life. It could easily have happened already, in fact, except for pure dumb luck. The Weather Channel and CNN's round-the-clock coverage notwithstanding, hurricane forecasting is not as precise as people like to believe. Storms are capricious. Indeed, the National Hurricane Center's warnings, issued 24 hours before landfall, are subject to a 90-mile error in either direction.

For that reason, even a well-tracked storm like Hurricane Andrew could have caused death on a huge scale, just by zigging a few miles to the north at the last minute. Had it made landfall on Miami Beach, where a third of residents didn't evacuate, Andrew could have killed many more than the 15 people whose lives it claimed.