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MIAMI — Living in Florida would mean being by the water — and closer to the grandkids, Nasrin Larjani and her husband thought. Once they’d done their due diligence, moving from California to St. Petersburg’s affluent Ponderosa Shores was an easy choice.
Though situated amid canals that connect to Tampa Bay, it had never flooded, neighbors who’d lived there for 40 years reassured them.
But two-and-a-half years after moving to Florida, the Larjanis are now hardened veterans of both hurricanes and the disastrous storm surge can bring with them.
Milton, expected to strike somewhere nearby as a major Category 3 hurricane early Thursday morning, is the fourth major storm they’ll experience in just over 13 months. It’s also likely to be the second in as many weeks to fill their home with brackish, smelly water. Hours before Milton’s projected landfall, they moved into the downtown condo that belongs to Larjani’s daughter, who evacuated St. Petersburg with her small children.
This time, on the 26th floor, they hope to be safe. That’s also where the future of much of coastal Florida, and large swaths of the rest of the country, might lie: Up in the air.
Already, water is the deadliest and most destructive feature of a hurricane.
Mightier and less predictable than wind, the storm surge and flooding unleashed by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago was so powerful, they killed more than 200 people in Florida and across the Southeast, from toddlers to seasoned swimmers. Water swept buildings away like autumn leaves; lifted bridges and streets; broke cement pillars like mere matchsticks, and even split a sandy barrier island in half off the Gulf Coast.
Building higher can increase the chances of survival for people and homes along the coast. Helene’s storm surge, however, destroyed homes that had already been elevated, as it broke records by more than 2 feet in places like Cedar Key, St. Petersburg and parts of Tampa.
Less than two weeks later, Milton promises to bring new record-setting water levels. Even if it doesn’t, another hurricane will: Storms are becoming more intense as air and seas warm, and the masses of water they’ll push ashore and dump hundreds of miles inland will be mightier, and harder to escape. So the question is: Can we, or are we willing, to build high enough?
Lessons of hurricanes past
Driving along the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Helene, the fable of the big bad wolf and the three little pigs echoes dramatically. Huffing and puffing, the wolf blew down the houses of the first two pigs, shortsighted constructions of straw and sticks. The third little pig had put more planning into his home, and built it from brick. No matter how much the big bad wolf huffed and puffed, he couldn’t take it down.
It’s a lesson South Florida learned in reality, too, when Hurricane Andrew destroyed more than 63,500 homes in 1992 in South Miami-Dade County. Most of those homes had been poorly designed and shoddily constructed. In the aftermath, Florida did what the third little pig had done: It began building homes with roofs tied to the walls, and walls to the foundations. We built stronger for the wind, but not higher.
Florida is yet to reckon with the destruction water can cause, says David Prevatt, a professor at the University of Florida’s department of civil and coastal engineering. An expert in constructing buildings fit to survive hurricanes, he says he’d choose wind over water in a heartbeat.
“Imagine I throw a paper cup at you, at 150 miles per hour, and that cup is filled with nothing but air,” Prevatt said. “Now, if I take the same cup and I fill it with water, and I throw it at you with just 10 miles per hour, you will feel so much more impact.”
The best way to protect from water, he says, is not to get in its way in the first place.
Many of course, are well aware of the deadly threat the water poses: Shelter from the wind, but run from the water, is what people are taught. The water Helene brought, however, wasn’t just so destructive because it set new records, but because it affected people in areas so far away they hadn’t expected that type of flooding force.
Destruction from a faraway hurricane
All that death and destruction, people kept saying, “from a storm that didn’t even hit us.”
The Larjanis, too, had exhaled when forecasters projected landfall some 200 miles north of St. Petersburg. Having already dealt with five inches of flooding from Idalia, in August 2023, and the flooded streets from Debbie last year, they had calmly fortified their home with 100 sandbags, then turned on the TV to watch the arrival of Helene.
By the time they heard evacuation orders, the water had already turned their street into a river, trapping them in their house. Around 10 p,m., it spilled over the canals, and flushed into the sunroom. In a pitiful effort to stop the deluge, she grabbed towels.
She had always ridiculed disaster movies. “Too unreal,” she said. Then, the power cut out. Moments later, water was gushing through the front door, then the garage. Finally, the windows.
Elsewhere in her county, twelve people died. The Larjanis survived, perched on their kitchen island, just a couple of inches above the surge. Without water, food, light, or access to a bathroom, they rode out the next 12 hours until the water began to subside.
Recalling the trauma to the Herald, Nasrin Larjani posed a question many had on their mind: “What if it’s going to happen again, because of global warming, and it’s going to get worse and worse?”
The answer to her question is simple: It will.
“Climate change is a total game-changer for hurricanes like Helene,” Ben Clarke, a climate change researcher at Imperial College London, said in a statement about a just-released study showing that Helene dumped around 10 percent more rainfall than it might have if we weren’t warming the planet. Seventy-five percent of that warming comes from burning fossil fuels, which create an invisible, atmospheric blanket that traps heat on the planet.
Among everything else, this extra heat has been warming the oceans.
According to NOAA, the Gulf of Mexico is already 1.8 degrees warmer, on average, than just fifty years ago — a change in temperature that might not affect whether you go for a swim. But hurricanes thrive on warm water. To them, 1.8 degrees can be the difference between gas and jet fuel.
An abnormally warm Gulf allowed Helene to quickly intensify to a Cat 4. Similarly, Milton’s strength swelled from Cat 1 to Cat 5 in just over 24 hours, with the National Hurricane Center calling its intensification “explosive.” Seasoned hurricane expert John Morales started to cry as he described the “horrific” storm on TV.
Warm water can also help storms grow in size, said Katy Serafin, a University of Florida scientist who researches extreme sea levels and coastal hazards.
“When we have warmer waters where storms are sitting for a while, they can intensify quickly, and even if their winds don’t get that strong, they can become very, very big,” said Serafin, who spoke to The Herald between post-Helene power outages in Gainesville.
With that, we have to expect storm surge, rainfall and flooding to worsen, too.
Raising homes can work, if they’re high enough
Coastal communities like Cedar Key, a tight-knit, isolated island that prides itself on clam farming and the many hurricanes it has weathered, show how elevating buildings can work. Though most of the homes were destroyed or badly damaged by Helene’s more-than-9-foot-high surge, a blush-colored, oceanfront home on First Street was one of just a handful that seemed entirely unaffected. Twelve-foot tall cement columns had kept it out of raging waves’ reach.
But they also show how long-held concepts of safe height might fall short. The pale yellow house next to it had been raised half that height, five or six feet at most. The waves, 2.4 feet higher than the previous record, had ripped off hurricane shutters, wooden panels and the door, and flooded the interior with sand and seaweed.
Over the past decades, FEMA’s building codes have repeatedly set higher minimum elevation levels for new construction. Florida adds another foot on top; some counties and cities go even higher. It might still not be high enough. In 2018′s Hurricane Michael produced the highest storm surge on record in Florida, with waves of 20.6 feet above high tide that obliterated Mexico Beach on Florida’s Panhandle. Katrina’s was even higher, at a staggering 28 feet, roughly the height of a 3-story building. Even that is dwarfed by the highest storm surge ever recorded, in northeastern Australia. At 42 feet, it reached more than 3 miles inland, and reportedly stranded dolphins and fish on cliffs as high as a six-floor building.
Scientists haven’t modeled anything that high in Florida, but it’s unclear what a maximum surge could look like. And while height generally makes a storm surge worse, Fritz, NOAA’s storm surge expert, says that we also have to account for the speed and direction of the water, known as velocity. “That’s what is so life-threatening, because it can be very, very fast, and it’s very forceful.”
Surveying what remained of her bungalow just down the street from Larjani’s home in St. Petersburg, Dawn Kremer took note of that force. The water had toppled the new washer and dryer, and the fridge with the Celtic cross magnet she’d gotten on a trip to Ireland. Outside, it had moved a round and sturdy white table past the corner of the bungalow, just like a frisbee. “When I came back, I said who the heck moved that table? But nobody was here but me,” she said. “So it was the water.”
At a certain velocity, it might not matter how high we’ve built, said Prevatt. The storm surge, he said, “will destroy you. It will break the piles, the columns that the house was built on. It will break them whether they are wood or concrete and it will take the entire ground floor and all your possessions,” he said.
The root cause fix would be to cut emissions, which, compared to just treating the symptoms, would save lives, and, over time money. By 2049 climate change is already projected to cost $38 trillion a year, roughly equivalent to the current GDP of the US and China combined.
In Florida, public policy is set on adapting when and where possible, and accepting the risks that remain to lives and livelihoods. That leaves it to the hundreds of thousands of people affected by Helene, and, in just a few hours, Milton, to decide how to live in a state that is almost entirely surrounded by water.
For the Larjanis, the question is whether to raise their home, or move. Having survived Helene, could she ever enjoy the view from the sunroom, overlooking the canal? “I don’t want to hear anything about the water, or live near the water,” Nasrin Larjani said. But building a few steps higher might help. “Maybe,” she said. She thinks of her grandchildren, 6-year-old Leila and 4-year-old Zach, and goes back and forth. “Right now,” she said, “I’m really struggling with myself.”
This climate report is funded by Florida International University, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the David and Christina Martin Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald retains editorial control of all content.
Miami Herald reporter Ashley Miznazi contributed to this story. Miznazi is a climate change reporter for the Miami Herald funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners.