The Hurricane Paradox

Robert and Aida Florit will spend this hurricane season in a mobile home in Punta Gorda, same as last year. Only it's not their home -- that dwelling was destroyed by Hurricane Charley last August. Since November, they've lived in a 70-by-14-foot mobile home given to them temporarily by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The Florits, a retired couple, are just one of 13,000 Florida families still living in FEMA mobile homes and trailers -- either on the sites of their former homes or in FEMA "villages."

The Florits -- whose FEMA village is sandwiched between I-75 and a prison -- are hardly alone in being unsettled as the 2005 hurricane season begins this month. Tens of thousands of Floridians in the pockets scarred by last summer's storms, along with the businesses and local governments that serve them, are stretched thin and worry about what another storm could mean.

Meanwhile, however, Florida finds itself overall just fine. The state's property insurance infrastructure, while in need of tweaking, is largely intact. Last summer's four-storm whammy hasn't deterred tourism, which even with the disruption in the third quarter increased 3% in 2004. Visitor spending through just November topped 2003's $51.5 billion total. Building is booming, and home values are skyrocketing. Tax revenue is soaring, climbing $752 million this year and next on hurricane repair spending alone.

Indeed, the most alarming thing about last summer's four storms may not be the damage they caused, but rather a false sense of security they left in their wake. Floridians talk about having lived through four hurricanes last summer when, in fact, most Floridians lived through the preparation for four and, at worst, nothing more than two or three passes of sustained tropical storm-force winds. Even in the areas nearest the hurricane tracks, "most of the people experienced Category 1 winds," National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield told a university conference in March.

The false sense of being storm-tested could impact future preparation and evacuations. In Miami-Dade, for instance, officials worry that Miami Beach residents who were there for 1992's Hurricane Andrew feel too secure in their properties, forgetting that Andrew was a south Miami-Dade phenomenon. "They figured they lived through Andrew, but they really didn't," Miami-Dade emergency operations center chief Carlos Castillo told the same conference.

The same is true this year. As bad as Charlotte County had it from Charley, the storm was half a hurricane. Charley produced no appreciable storm surge -- a blessing for a county so low-lying that the American Red Cross won't certify any storm shelter in its boundaries.

Even in Martin County, the landfall site for 2004's Frances and Jeanne, emergency management agency director Keith Holman worries that his residents have undue confidence now in the durability of their homes. Both storms damaged plenty of roofs but caused no substantial structural failures that a more potent storm would cause. Indeed, neither storm exceeded the design loads of the older, weaker building code the state used before 2002. "A lot of people have a false impression of what a hurricane can be," Holman says.

There is no shortage of reminders. In the Florits' home county of Charlotte seven of the county's 14 fire stations were still under repair, and three traffic lights were still out even in May. Some 10,000 of the 30,000 blue tarps distributed by FEMA to cover leaking or non-existent roofs remained in place, mostly in Punta Gorda. Blue tarps also remain fixtures in northwest Florida, the Treasure Coast and Orlando area.

Shortages of labor, materials and contractors persist. As recently as March, Holman, who lives in Martin County, still had a blue tarp on his home's roof. "I got one estimate. Foolish me, I thought I could get two or three," he says.

Steve Munnell, executive director of the Winter Park-based Florida Roofing, Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors Association, says all roofs in Florida damaged by 2004's storms won't be repaired until 2006.

Extrapolate the damage left by four body blows in 2004 into a 2005 scenario in which a storm KOs a major urban area, and the aftermath could create a future as uncertain for many Floridians as it is for the Florits and others.

Next February -- 18 months after Hurricane Charley bore down on Charlotte County, FEMA is scheduled to take most of its trailers back, potentially leaving victims homeless. Last summer's unfinished business holds sway elsewhere as well. "This is not an exaggeration. This is a mathematical fact," says Garrett Walton, co-executive director of Rebuild Northwest Florida, the Panhandle effort to recover from Hurricane Ivan. "There are tens of thousands of hurting Hurricane Ivan victims that need help, and some of them will not make it."

SufferingImmobile: Since Hurricane Charley destroyed their mobile home in Charlotte County last summer, Robert and Aida Florit are among the 5,145 county residents living in 1,470 travel trailers and 596 mobile homes provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The hurricane also destroyed more than 300 businesses in the county, affecting more than 800 employees. Statewide, some 13,000 families whose homes were damaged or destroyed still are living in trailers or mobile homes at FEMA sites.Opportunity Rebuilding: The hurricane paradox shows in northwest Florida. Approximately 1,000 of the area's 7,000 hotel rooms were knocked out, but hotel-based tax revenue, with rooms in the slow season jammed with relief workers, is up 11.3% in Okaloosa County and as much as 41% in Santa Rosa from 2003. Beach area buildings were destroyed but will be replaced with pricier construction that generates more tax revenue. The storms dealt $4.5 billion in damage to the area's houses, condos, apartments and mobile homes but will create 13,000-plus jobs in construction alone, leading to 9,000 new permanent residents. So much money will flow in through insurance that when everything is repaired and rebuilt by 2007, the slowing of activity will seem like a recession, says Rick Harper, director of the Haas Center for Business Research at the University of West Florida.

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