Idalia poses once-in-a-century threat to rural Florida

Hurricane Idalia slammed a region of Florida that is far less acclimated to hurricanes than other parts of the state, giving the area its most intense storm in nearly a century.

Although the storm swept through less heavily populated areas, meaning it posed a relatively low risk of death or injury, experts warn that the region lacks many of the resilience measures of big coastal cities — and could face destructive flooding or ecological damage.

“The thing that makes [Idalia] a little bit unusual is that it hit a part of the Florida coastline which has experienced very few hurricane-level landfalls in the last hundred years,” said hurricane professor Kerry Emanuel, who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  

Outsiders may associate the Sunshine State with densely populated coastal cities and the preparations they have made against frequent storms. On Wednesday, however, the Category 3 storm made landfall southeast of Tallahassee along what’s known as the Nature Coast. The area is dotted with pine forests and marshland rather than beaches and resorts, and it hasn’t experienced a Category 3 storm since 1950. The only such storm before that hit in 1896. 

Meanwhile, a Category 3 storm or above has never in recorded history passed through Apalachee Bay, which abuts an area of the state known as the Big Bend, according to the Tallahassee office of the National Weather Service (NWS) — until Idalia arrived Wednesday. 

“When you try to compare this storm to others, DON’T. No one has seen this,” the NWS office said in a warning.  

The Big Bend, a section of northern Florida that bridges the state’s panhandle and the wider Florida peninsula, was one of the areas in the state hardest hit by the hurricane.

“The good thing is, not very many people live there,” Emanuel said. “Where the surge was largest would be likely in a very unpopulated spot, we kind of dodged a bullet … a very bad bullet.” 

However, despite the sparse population of the area, the flatter topography means the effects of any flooding are likely to be widespread, said Carrie Stevenson, a coastal sustainability agent with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. 

“[T]hose who live there are going to get hammered,” she said. “The 130-mile-per-hour wind is going to take out homes, going to take off roofs, anything that’s one story is probably completely flooded. Anything that’s on pilings might survive it, but they’re not going to be able to access it very much.” 

Florida as a whole is no stranger to hurricanes, and climate change is not widely believed to be directly increasing the number of storms. However, “these storms are getting stronger,” Stevenson said. 

“They’re all, almost all major hurricanes instead of Category 1 and 2, and so that’s what’s really devastating,” she said. 

“The ocean temperature in the Gulf of Mexico this time of year is exceedingly warm, it’s like bath water,” said Jamie Rhome, the acting director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s National Hurricane Center in Miami. “Waters have been slightly warmer than normal this year, and that’s ample fuel for any hurricane to move across and strengthen.”

“In general, the science is indicating that climate change would allow storms to have a bigger impact, so you’d get the same number of storms but they’d have a bigger impact,” said Rhome. Meanwhile, he said, “Sea level rise makes the storm surge worse, and the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture,” creating the potential for heavier rainfall and more flooding. 

The Big Bend area’s “got a lot of marsh, but it’s also timber country, so there’s a lot of forestland there,” Stevenon said. “So winds like this will snap off the pines, they’ll blow them over and they’ll be bent.”

Much of Florida’s landscape developed under the threat of intense coastal weather, so “the direct threats from humans to the ecosystems are quite a bit larger” compared with those from events like Idalia, said Emanuel. 

However, Stevenson cautioned that despite the lower risk of human death or injury in the low-population area, the storm poses possible ecological threats that could have chain reactions with wider implications.  

“Anybody in forestry in that area is going to be impacted heavily because they’re likely going to have lost a huge number of trees, and the ones that did survive it, they’ll probably get pine bark beetles infest[ing] within a year,” she said. 

Previous beetle infestations have been “devastating,” according to the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Rhome said it’s too early to tell exactly what downstream ecological effects this specific storm may have, but that “based on my past experience, a storm of this impact would have a huge impact on the coastal morphology, the back bays and the rivers, and a massive change in the overall environment.” 

“There’s nothing particular about this storm that looks different,” he added. “It just hit an area that hasn’t been hit, based on our records, in a long time.”