people continue to move to disaster zones

The New York Times has a great article with maps about this issue that is causing disasters to have more damages and impacts to people and infrastructure, Where Americans Have Been Moving Into Disaster-Prone Areas

This is a topic I’ve written about many times. People like to be where there is sunshine, warmer temperatures in the winter and more opportunities for recreational activities. The fact that they are moving to locations that are at risk of having a major disaster is not on there list of options for location and the type of home they want to own.

Interestingly, there is an “out-flow” of people who are tired of the wildfires, heat, and hurricanes. They no longer can afford the home insurance and they are leaving in droves. We’ll likely see that in the Big Bend area of Florida that has had three hurricanes in just one year. Of course, people have to have the monetary means to move!

The linked article lays out nicely where people are moving to. It also notes another important aspect of more people crammed into a smaller area—density! With more density, the impact of a disaster causes more damages.

Mitigation is possible via better building codes. These measures can help protect a home from a storm or wildfire—and they do add to the price of a home, but in many instances, especially wildfire, precautions taken do not have to be that expensive. See Firewise for examples.

The other item of note is that public infrastructure needs to keep up with the population growth. In Texas I think they are setting themselves up for a really big failure of the electrical grid in the future. They continue to dig themselves into a hole of more power being needed and then not keeping up with the distribution system from a growth perspective. This, is an issue along with fixing the vulnerabilities their network which is ever more exposed to failures by not being disaster resilient. All of the above is talked about in the article.