It’s been a helluva week on the weather front, and nowhere more so than in Marianna, Florida, where a likely tornado smashed through the Florida Caverns RV Resort. The Tuesday twister “obliterated the laundromat at the campground, peeled the roof off the gas station and restaurant and damaged or destroyed a number of one-bedroom park models and mini-cottages,” according to reporting by the Tallahassee Democrat. It also wasn’t kind to RVs, an unspecified number of which were totaled.
All that is bad enough, but such misfortune becomes farce when one learns that the relatively new owner of the campground, Tallahassee businessman Erwin Jackson, had just paid the final bill for $2.5 million in damages caused by Hurricane Michael. Michael, a Category 5 tropical cyclone, plowed through Florida and Georgia in late 2018—so just a bit more than five years ago, and only days after Jackson had bought the property. Now Jackson, despite declaring that “we actually had more damage with this than with Hurricane Michael,” says he will rebuild yet again.
Call him plucky—or maybe just foolishly stubborn, like those oceanside homeowners who insist on rebuilding despite rising seas and ever more violent storms. Einstein’s aphorism about the definition of insanity jumps to mind, but perhaps King Canute’s vain exhortation of the tide is more on point, a delusional belief in one’s god-given power to do as one pleases, elemental forces be damned. Or maybe there’s a different calculus at work, a bet that surely lightning won’t strike in the same place a third time?
Yet as suggested by several new reports and studies, also released this past week, the odds of a third strike are both dismally high and rising with each passing year. Not only was there confirmation that 2023 was the planet’s hottest year on record, a statistic that measures ambient air temperature, but there was the fresh news that the world’s oceans have gotten hotter with each passing year since World War II—and are heating faster than at any time in the past 2,000 years. That’s according to a study published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which found that ocean surface temperatures were “off the charts” last year, contributing to ever more extreme weather events.
No surprise, then, that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration separately reported that the U.S. endured 28 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023, readily eclipsing the previous record of 22, set in 2020. The average time between billion-dollar disasters was less than two weeks, a fraction of the average interval of 82 days in the 1980s, according to an analysis by a nonprofit group of scientists called Climate Central. The 2023 toll included $92.9 billion in damages, although that almost assuredly will increase as the bills keep coming in, as well as nearly 500 deaths.
For the RV industry, it’s worth noting that two-thirds of the billion-dollar disasters occurred during peak camping season, May through September, not to mention numerous “smaller” disasters sprinkled throughout. In other words, the kind of trauma experienced by campers at the Florida Caverns RV Resort this past week will become increasingly more commonplace, whether from extreme hailstorms, flooding, tornados, hurricanes or forest fires. Those affected will include not just campground owners and vacationing RVers, but a growing number of people who now live in campgrounds as their housing of last resort.
Still, despite all these clanging alarm bells, there is no discussion within the RVing “community” of what this all means. No discussion of the unsuitability of untethered RVs for long-term housing—unlike trailer parks, for example, which are required in hurricane country to have their mobile homes strapped down. No discussion of the idiocy of building RV parks and campgrounds in flood zones, as continues to be a widespread practice. No discussion of the long-term precarity of the whole RV park business model, which entices people to spend beyond their means to buy ever more blinged out homes on wheels to be pulled or propelled by internal combustion engines that burn ever greater quantities of fossil fuels, thereby perpetuating a vicious cycle.
That’s in marked contrast to less myopic business and financial leaders, who are taking environmental concerns very seriously, indeed. Among the many relevant reports out this past week was The Global Risks Report 2024, the 19th edition of an annual risk assessment prepared by the World Economic Forum, in partnership with Marsh McLennan and Zurich Insurance Group. Drawing on “the collective intelligence of nearly 1,500 global leaders across academia, business, government, the international community and civil society,” the study found that environmental concerns “dominate the risks landscape” both short- and long-term, with extreme weather as the leading risk. (Other environmental concerns include biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse.)
That ranking puts extreme weather ahead of AI technology, social polarization, inflation or other economic concerns as threats to business as usual, but as Erwin Jackson’s resolve indicates, when it comes to RVs and campgrounds, business-as-usual is the rallying cry. His peers will sympathize with his plight—as is to be expected—and most will cheer him on and possibly extend a helping hand; that’s understandable and even commendable, if shortsighted. But if history is any guide, no one in the industry will question whether rebuilding is actually a smart thing to do, or if there’s an alternative, or whether enabling self-defeating behavior is more unkind than demanding a reality check.
Mother Nature is talking, but is anyone in RV-land listening?
Renting Dirt 