Is Any Where Safe?

Climate change and extreme weather events are forcing us to rethink where we are safe. But are we really safe anywhere?

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If you’re not safe from nature in Asheville, are you safe in any community anywhere?

Asheville is, after all, up in the mountains, 2,700 feet above sea level, and 300 miles from the supposedly flood-prone coast of North Carolina. It’s temperate – a little warm in the summer, but in the 50s or 60s most of the year.

If you’re thinking of becoming a climate refugee, you’re going to go toward a place like Asheville, not away from it.

Yet that didn’t stop Asheville from getting hammered by Hurricane Helene, with destruction and loss of life not only unprecedented but unimaginable to the people of the region prior to the storm.

And that raises a profound question: As we contemplate the future of where – where are people going to want to live in the future, especially given the uncertainties of climate change – is any where safe enough to live?

Hurricane Helene damage in Ashville

We are definitely far more aware these days of how extreme weather events are affecting the places we live. Just look at the movement toward “resilient cities” – the idea of retooling our communities, often with “green” solutions rather than engineering solutions, so they can withstand extreme events and bounce back more quickly.

And there’s been a lot of publicity lately about “climate refugees” leaving communities that have been disrupted by extreme weather events or long-term changes in climate, moving from  south to north in the United States and from less developed countries into countries with more favorable climates and better armature against storms.

But are we truly safe from nature anywhere?

Battling Nature Is Nothing New

Back in the summer of 1993, I made a visit to Des Moines on assignment for Governing magazine. The assignment had nothing to do with extreme weather events – in fact, it was focused on the then-nascent effort to bring fiberoptic cable to rural areas. But it wound up being a lesson in what the author John McPhee called “the control of nature,” and in particular the hard choices we have to make when nature threatens to overwhelm us.

As it happened, my visit coincided with preparations for the Des Moines Grand Prix, a race that had begun five years before in the hope that Iowa would gain worldwide attention for road-racing. Every morning on the walk from my hotel to the Iowa State Capitol, I had to maneuver around a wide variety of Jersey walls and barriers that were being put into place for the race.

But that wasn’t the only thing happening around Des Moines that week. The summer of ’93 was also the summer of the biggest flood on the Mississippi River system since 1927 and the city was constantly threatened with inundation. On July 9, while I was there, the Iowa State University campus flooded. And as July 11 – the day of the Grand Prix – approached, concern about flooding in downtown Des Moines grew.

Rehearsing for the 1993 Des Moines Grant PRix — before the flood

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When I drove to the airport on July 10, I felt like I was leaving Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. I had to dodge water everywhere, streets were closed, it seemed like I was barely getting out of town just in time.

And when I got to the airport, I saw thousands of people arriving for the Grand Prix.

The thing to remember about a flood like this is that the timing and location of the flooding isn’t exactly natural anymore. Yes, the Mississippi River system was being overwhelmed by water and was going to flood somewhere and sometime. But the “system” involves thousands of square miles and hundreds – if not thousands – of levees and other flood control devices all up and down the river and its tributaries, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

So as the Grand Prix approached, the question was whether the Corps was going to try to hold the water back until the race was over. I always imagined then-Gov. Terry Brandstad on the phone with some Army Corps general down in Vicksbug, Mississippi, trying to persuade him not to let the flooding begin until after the race, and then, when the last car crossed the finish line, saying, “Ok, now!”

That never happened, of course. The night before the race – that is, the night after I left – water overwhelmed the city and knocked out the sewer plant. The Corps couldn’t hold it off any longer. The race was never run – not that year, and not ever again.

Over and over again throughout our history, we have built major engineering works on the assumption that we can hold back nature – only to learn that we can’t. Major floods in our history – the famous Johnstown Flood of 1889, the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928 (which caused water to flood through my adopted hometown of Ventura, California), the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans in 2005 – all occurred not only because of an excess of water but also because our engineering systems failed.

And even our attempts to minimize the damage by moving things doesn’t always work. After the disastrous Galveston hurricane of 1900 (a story well-told by Erik Larson in the book Isaac’s Storm), Houston exploited the opportunity and persuaded Congress to help fund construction of the Houston Ship Channel, which allowed ships to move 25 miles inland where they are supposedly safe from hurricanes.

Today, Houston is itself increasingly vulnerable to storms like Hurricanes Harvey (2017) and Beryl (2024). It can be hard for Houstonians, so dependent on the oil and gas industry, to accept the idea that climate change is causing all these storms. But as my friend Jim Blackburn says, whether you call it “climate change” or “weird Texas weather” doesn’t change the reality of what’s going on.

Houston’s engineers are still searching for the magic bullet – currently either the so-called Ike Dike or two giant tunnels under the city. But a recent survey found that most people in Houston are considering leaving because of increasingly extreme weather events.

We Keep Putting Ourselves At Risk

For the moment, at least, people in the United States are not moving in huge numbers to protect themselves from extreme weather events. Forty percent of the nation’s population – 130 million people – live in coastal counties that are presumably vulnerable, a fact that has strained the National Flood Insurance Program almost to the breaking point. (I myself have lived my entire life within 100 miles of one of our four coasts – Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf, and Great Lakes – and currently reside two blocks from San Diego Bay and about five miles from the Pacific Ocean.)

Texas is still adding more than 300,000 people per year in spite of the fact that it’s getting a lot hotter very fast. According to the Texas Tribune, “Every year since 2000 in Texas has been warmer than the 20th century average. Last year was a whopping 3.5 degrees hotter than the 20th century average in the state.”

Indeed, affluent tech folks in Austin may be the leading edge of the climate refugee movement. The current joke in Austin is that when these folks moved from Silicon Valley, they traded California’s state income tax for Austin’s hot summers – but after a few 105-degree days they have concluded that a state income tax isn’t so bad after all. Essentially, they’re paying a price to be high-end climate refugees

Meanwhile, Florida would seem to be a disaster waiting to happen: “Twenty million people living on a sandbar,” as my friend Stan Geberer (a prominent Florida harmonica player) likes to say, and not only that but in a location extremely vulnerable to hurricanes. Sea-level rise is already affecting South Florida, which already experiencing “sunny-day flooding,” when stormwater systems simply due to rising water from the ocean.

 And there’s no place to go. The highest point in Miami-Dade County is the landfill.

Yet last year Florida added 350,000 residents, continuing a pattern going back almost a century.

Can We Simply Retreat From The Coasts?

A few years ago, thanks in part to an initiative by the Rockefeller Foundation, cities around the world began paying attention to “resilience” – the ability to bounce back quickly from short-term shocks like storms and adjust smoothly to long-term changes like hotter weather.

Not surprisingly, Rockefeller encouraged the cities to focus on the most vulnerable populations in the most vulnerable places. Because, unquestionably, the affluent have always sought the high ground and the lower-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color have always gotten the low-lying areas. But so have water and sewer plants that everybody needs, as Des Moines learned in 1993. And it’s also true that even affluent areas are at risk in many picturesque locations such as coastal and lakefront areas. The question is whether we can stay ahead of the curve.

One option that keeps coming up is to retreat from coastal areas that are increasingly at risk. Though expensive, this can work in very small situations. For example, in my former home of Ventura, California, a managed retreat project at Surfer’s Point is gradually allowing the ocean to reclaim parking lots and other areas that had been built up until the shoreline is back at a stable level. But nobody lives on Surfer’s Point (a lot of people, obviously, do surf there!) and the retreat area is, in the big picture, tiny.

Bigger managed retreat projects are expensive and controversial. Perhaps the most prominent example is Isle du Jean Charles in southern Louisiana, which has shrunk from 22,000 acres 70 years to 320 today. With a $50 million federal grant, the remaining residents – a few hundred in number – are being relocated to a planned community 40 miles inland. As southern Louisiana disappears, more relocations are likely – but, as with Isle du Jean Charles, they involve tiny populations.

Isle du Jean Charles in southern Louisiana. All residents are being relocated.

In an audio essay for The New York Times, Florida novelist Jeff VanderMeer argued for a massive “managed retreat” from the coasts of Florida that would allow natural systems to blunt the effect of the state’s increasingly common and severa hurricanes.

There’s no question that better management of natural systems along the coasts would help. But there isn’t enough money in the world, not to mention political will, to relocate millions of people out of risky areas. Most of them would probably refuse to go anyway. And how can we be sure that where they resettle is safe as well? It’s just not possible to engage in a managed retreat effort for the entire state of Florida.

So people are going to stay in risky areas. More areas will become risky. We’ll have to spend trillions protecting their communities. And And even if we figure out where the money’s going to come from, there will be huge fights over who benefits and who pays.

Already, for example, California is planning to prop up insurance coverage for 1.5 million homes in risky wildfire areas, even as the state tries to steer new development away from those areas because of climate change. A similar battle lies ahead for the Natural Flood Insurance Program, which may believe encourages risky construction in flood-prone areas. Should taxpayers everywhere cover the cost of some people living in risky locations?

So maybe avoiding this kind of risk wherever you choose to live is just impossible. We’ve probably reached a point in history where we just have to put up with and be prepared for extreme floods, hotter weather, smoke season in the Northwest, and lots of other things we didn’t used to worry about.

 Living in American communities as we have designed and built them simply comes with a risk – one that will increase in the decades ahead. Even in places like Asheville