Tampa Bay’s coming storm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/health/environment/tampa-bay-climate-change/?utm_term=.46562afa5dae

by raker_SDF • 9 years ago

74 39 9 years ago

Tampa Bay resident here (Brandon suburb really, but close enough).

The reason this happens is simple: other people's money is subsidizing the losses.

First, Florida is extremely fiscally conservative. Taxes for anything are a hard sell. Without additional taxes, our infrastructure will continue to lag, causing far more damage than would've been had we ponied up the taxes in the first place. Also, infrastructure is not prioritized over glitzy marketing. St Petersburg is in dire need of a waste water treatment plant upgrade, but it's mayor is going to spend the money on a development project instead ("The Pier").

Second, insurance: the state has a high risk pool that you can join as an insurer of last resort, and they'll insure you across multiple losses. As long as we continue to issue insurance (taxpayer sponsored!) for properties that are subject to repeated losses or sea level rise, we'll continue to throw good money after bad.

fattire• 9 years ago

The Washington Post just printed what I'd consider a follow up to TFA that discusses the governor's lack of leadership on the issue of climate change (Okay, hostility to the concept of acknowledging it let alone addressing it) and dealing with associated consequences like rising ocean levels and storm surges:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/flori...

The parent article discusses a "direct hit" being inevitable-- Well, at least as I type this, the projection of Irma's path goes right through Tampa Bay...

http://www.tbo.com/weather/local/interactive_radar_wide/

Animats• 9 years ago

Switzerland is fiscally conservative. Florida is just low-tax.

afsina2• 9 years ago

What are the tax rates in both?

phkahler• 9 years ago

the word conservative is not really a synonym for the word responsible.

rootsudo2• 9 years ago

Hey toomuchtodo,

Hope you're safe. As another Tampa Bay resident to another, what you've said is spot on and a damn shame.

toomuchtodo2• 9 years ago

Thank you! If you need any help before I head to the airport at 2pm today, contact info in my HN profile. Please be prepared and be safe!

rodgerd• 9 years ago

First, Florida is extremely fiscally conservative

Neglecting infrastructure is not "fiscally conservative". It is fiscally reckless.

outoftacos• 9 years ago

You cannot be fiscally conservative while constantly demanding unlimited funds for your population. Come up with an intellectually honest term instead.

Ditto with Texas, Alaska.

Maybe "welfare queen states"?

pasbesoin• 9 years ago

This immediately made me think of this quite relevant moment from the television show, "The West Wing".

Watching this year's politics unfold, it's a bit amazing to me just how much of what we're currently encountering was reflected in "The West Wing". Then again, while the faces and ads change, much of our national policy and politics is actually of a long-standing nature.

I chose a YouTube clip of the relevant moment that also includes a couple of minutes in front of it, for some context. I added a time parameter to skip to the relevant moment within it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyqzPu5pX6U&t=120

The administration of the sitting President, President Bartlet, has negotiated his opponent in the upcoming election, Governor Ritchie of Florida, into having one "real" debate, as opposed to two debates with a format so constrained it would have allowed only for sloganeering. (Ritchie wanted less debates -- the reason he agreed to this.)

The first debate question, and response, speaks directly to the parent's point.

If you have never watched "The West Wing", might I suggest giving it a try? Yes, it is an ensemble show that therefore cannot exactly reflect the nature of the Oval Office and West Wing (i.e. there are more people involved). But it was advised by a number of key people from the Clinton administrations, and the writers speak very informatively and, ultimately, very elegantly, to key issues of our national policies -- and to the character of many people devoted to public service and that we wish to see in public service. On both sides of the aisle, actually -- as demonstrated in the show.

polotics• 9 years ago

I am amazed by the use of the word "conservative" in the interviews, used to describe the most reckless behaviour.

rootsudo2• 9 years ago

I remember reading this, and now this becoming a reality.

njarboe2• 9 years ago

First line: "The area is due for a major hurricane, ..."

Hurricanes aren't like earthquakes where something builds up over time to make an event more likely if there has not been one recently. It's like saying "The roulette wheel is due to hit number 2."

iaabtpbtpnn• 9 years ago

How about "The area is, due to climate change, in big trouble"

kobeya• 9 years ago

We don't understand how climate change will play out to a level of detail to be able to make such a claim.

johnchristopher2• 9 years ago

I am ignorant in these matters but do earthquakes likely occurrences somehow build up over time ?

moonka• 9 years ago

Stress between tectonic plates build up over time as they slide against each other, and they release over time, most of the time slowly slipping by, but sometimes they can jerk and release fast, causing an earthquake.

This is based off my memory of a class from years ago, so I am likely oversimplifying it.

cossatot• 9 years ago

moonka is describing a theory called the 'elastic rebound theory' that has been the dominant theory of earthquake mechanics since it was proposed by Harry Reid in 1910 after studying the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It basically states that the earth's upper crust is an elastic material, and (as they said) stress builds as the different sides of the fault move with respect to one another, but the fault remains 'locked', i.e. it's not slipping, usually from the surface to 10-20 km depth.

This produces both shear stress (i.e. stress that promotes sliding on the fault) and normal stress (i.e. stress that resist sliding on the fault due to friction).

One common manifestation of the elastic rebound theory says that there is some relatively fixed stress ratio at which the shear stress overcomes the frictional resistance to slip and the fault slides rapidly in an earthquake. The basic assumption (which is supported by data for some well-studied faults such as the San Andreas) is that the rates of strain accumulation are generally constant through time, and therefore earthquakes on a fault are quasiperiodic in time and have more or less similar magnitudes. These are called 'characteristic earthquakes'.

In this situation, then the likelihood of an earthquake on a given part of a fault does increase with time since the last earthquake. I wrote a blog post quantifying this for the southern San Andreas Fault [1], using data from the geologic record and only a few assumptions (basically just that the geologic record contains all of the earthquakes).

However, though very few researchers disagree with the fundamental principles of elastic rebound theory, there is an ongoing scientific debate over whether earthquakes are periodic and characteristic, or more or less random. Many statistical seismologists believe that they are the common form of 'random', i.e. that the likelihood of an earthquake doesn't change with time since the last earthquake. Some faults (and especially larger fault systems) seem to behave in this fashion, but for an individual fault this implies very different earthquake physics. There are huge fights in places like California between senior scientists over this topic when doing seismic hazard modeling. Additionally there are other statistical distributions than either characteristic/quasiperiodic and random (Poissonian) that produce different behavior [2,3]--with some models, the longer it's been since the last earthquake, the longer it will be until the next, and with others after some time for stress to renew on the fault, it becomes basically random.

For storms, floods, etc. the likelihood of a big event happening in a given year is more or less equal every year and therefore 'random' with the exception of some multiyear cycles such as El Niño. However, over shorter timescales, they aren't. Big storms are more likely to occur during rainy seasons rather than dry seasons, and big floods are more likely soon after previous big floods (i.e. days to weeks) because the meterological conditions that generate them may be persistent and the groundwater is still high, which means that it takes less rain to get the same river levels.

[1] http://rocksandwater.net/blog/2016/07/wrightwood-recurrence/ [2]: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3071/de51c5abc4f770b0b11ede... [3]: http://windofweef.jp/library/o_m/disaster_prevention/img/10....

loblollyboy• 9 years ago

your right but this isn't a statistics textbook, they're just saying sooner or later

tempodox• 9 years ago

Demonstrably not a question of “if”, but “when”.

Tampa Bay’s coming storm

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