One week after eviscerating the tourist mecca of Acapulco, Mexico, Hurricane Otis is assured of long-term notoriety for two reasons. The first is its sheer ferocity: a Category 5 monster with gusts of up to 205 miles an hour, Otis ripped apart large high-rises, claimed at least four-dozen lives, severed all water, electricity and internet service and left a tattered landscape of denuded trees and streets jammed with mud and debris.
But the second reason for Otis’s historic significance is the speed with which it ramped up. When Acapulco’s residents went to bed Monday night, they expected no more than a tropical storm, with maximum winds of 60 miles an hour. Yet within 24 to 30 hours (Otis made landfall at 12:25 a.m. Wednesday) the storm’s winds had gained more than 100 miles an hour, a virtually unprecedented rate of strengthening that caught forecasters off guard—and a city of 800,000 flat-footed and unprepared.
In some ways, however, none of this should have been a surprise. Climate scientists have warned of just such rapid intensification for at least six years, starting with a 2017 paper titled, “Will global warming make hurricane forecasting more difficult?” Nor is this a problem limited to the Pacific basin, where El Niño gets a lot of blame for spawning Hurricane Hilary in August—the first tropical storm to hit California since 1939—and now Otis. Just two weeks ago a New Jersey-based researcher published a paper contending that “quickly intensifying tropical cyclones are exceptionally hazardous for Atlantic coastlines.”
The number of tropical cyclones (aka hurricanes) in the Atlantic that intensify from category 1 (or weaker) into category 3 (or higher) within 36 hours has more than doubled over the past couple of decades, according to the author, Andra J. Garner. “Many of the most damaging tropical cyclones to impact the U.S. in recent years have been notable for the speed at which they have intensified,” Garner added, in part because such rapid development “can create communication and preparedness challenges for coastal communities in the storm’s path.” Translation: hurricane-prone coastal areas that once could have a week’s advance warning of a brutal storm may now have only a day or two.
Public recognition of this changing reality, however, is sadly lagging. This cognitive dissonance is notably on display when municipal planners and private developers get to talking about RV parks and campgrounds, which all too often are seen as suitable for low-lying and flood-prone areas that would never get approved for residential development. RVs, goes the thinking, have wheels—what could be simpler than to pull them out of harm’s way? No harm, no foul, and otherwise “wasted” land can be put to productive use.
Just such a rationale was evident in Citrus County, Florida, where opposition to a proposed glampground was based, in part, on concerns about the low-lying coastal area’s vulnerability to hurricanes. Pish-posh, retorted Stephen Hill, a glampground supporter, who claimed in a letter to a local newspaper that “the tourist industry stays a week or more ahead of storms” and so has plenty of advance notice of a potential problem. “All visitors will be off the property well before locals, who tend to delay, decide to evacuate,” he added.
Similarly, in the North Carolina town of Leland, a proposal earlier this year to allow RV parks in flood hazard zones came with a suggestion that such sites “have a sign indicating that the RV shall be removed from the site within 24 hours of the town declaring a state of emergency for a potential flooding event.” The town eventually agreed to allow RV parks in the flood-prone areas—but also apparently decided such warning signs would not be necessary, perhaps because they would have created some liability for the town if it failed to give timely notice of “a potential flooding event.” Instead, caveat emptor!
The problem with both rationales, as Otis underscores, is that there is no longer any assurance that the tourist industry can stay a week ahead of storms, or that a town could declare a state of emergency more than 24 hours in advance of a cataclysmic rainfall or hurricane. Tropical cyclones, it’s becoming clear, can sweep in as suddenly as a forest fire, a week-long life-cycle compressed into mere hours. Wheels or no wheels, in such circumstances an RV can be just as much a sitting duck as any bricks-and-mortar dwelling.
None of this is to say that an RV is a preferred shelter anywhere when a Cat-Five storm hits; as photos of see-through high-rises in Acapulco attest, even the sturdiest of buildings can be stripped down to its skeleton by such winds, never mind a tin-can of a home that quite literally can be kicked down the road. But that doesn’t justify adding another layer of risk by putting those tin cans on land that we know will flood because, you know, they can just roll out of the way.
Renting Dirt 