As Milton barrels toward Florida, FEMA's capacity could be tested | Hacker News Reader

As Milton barrels toward Florida, FEMA's capacity could be tested

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Then you've got people voting against it: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/full-list-of-republi...

Sounds like what Puerto Rico experienced with Irma and Maria in 2017. 2 hurricanes, 2 weeks apart.

In PR Irma passed over the north. Mainly rain and some gusts. Nothing too bad on the sustained winds.

With everything still a mess, María hit. Not fully recovered yet.

Hope it fairs better since they can plan and coordinate driving in right after to clean, bring supplies, and help.

https://archive.is/Pz6C0

Wonder how Florida's insurance market will hold up ...

This topic seems to have triggered the organic US crazies, or a whole ton of agitprop bots.

Just wondering, but what would it take for something like parts of Florida, New Orleans, etc. to just flood and stay flooded? What if we had multiple hurricanes back-to-back-to-back for a month? a whole summer?

Permanent sea level rise or removal of any barrier islands/structures.

Back-to-back hurricanes only flood places temporarily due to storm surge.

Probably the collapse of the doomsday glacier. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/climate/doomsday-glacier-thwa...

The sea-level rise to wipe out FL also wipes out MANY other coastal locations all across the world.

Couldn't costs be defrayed by requiring forfeiture of certain classes of uninsurable assets (such as houses built on barrier islands) in exchange for receiving aid?

It might even be possible to go further, and prevent certain locations from receiving federal insurance for a period (say, 100 years) after a payout. Make the federal flood insurance program an incentive to rebuild elsewhere.

I think this is the only way forward in Florida. You can build for certain disasters but its a lot easier to just be inland.

While this makes a lot of sense in theory (I do agree that people need to be moving away from flood plains), this policy would create a nightmare of downstream effects. Such as, substantially increasing housing/land/construction prices elsewhere, as you have a flood of insurance filled wallets looking for new areas to move. It may even incentivize moving to nearby areas that were not flooded but still eligible for insurance, since they will just get paid out again. Not to mention all the political ramifications from the political willpower to pass this, to local/state electors crying against it.

Not to mention: decreasing the cost of housing in stricken areas. It would be much more appealing for people with low assets.

Talk about a crappy situation.

There is only a finite number of areas like that and most are already built on. Even if one person collects insurance ever year it would not be an issues as the insurance is for the property and it would have been destroyed anyway the actual recipient doesn’t affect the total payout.

How do non american areas fare & recover with several hurricans every summer? Also can a hurrica be steered via local weather manipulation?

> local weather manipulation

What do you mean by this?

I don't know what this particular post means, but I've seen a disturbing amount of online crazy talk about the government being able to directly control the weather.

I was nore in the fine granular weather simulation and then find a tipping point and apply local excess heat on the butterfly wing via laser by airplane camp.

There are some capabilities of controlling the weather, like cloud seeding, but not nearly to the extent that people are claiming.

Well, some high-ranking officials have pondered nuking hurricanes in the past, though fortunately saner voices prevailed.

> How do non american areas fare & recover with several hurricans every summer? Also can a hurrica be steered via local weather manipulation?

No, a hurricane cannot be steered. Use a bit of simple logic: how much energy does a hurricane carry, think about the winds, how much air mass is being moved by this force and try to think about what kind of human-generated work could move a fraction of that air mass through thermal processes to actually steer a behemoth atmospheric system with a radius many hundreds of kilometres.

What do you mean by non-Americans? There's a huge difference between Dominican Republic vs Japan, those are not the same bucket of society preparedness just because they are non-American, be more specific.

> Also can a hurrica be steered via local weather manipulation?

Yes, of course. Simply consult your local community wizard.

It’s really starting to look like they are a waste of resources unfortunately. The federal government is just not as effective, prepared, or capable as local responses.

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