Live in a hurricane-prone area? Here's how to prepare your home for flooding

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This week, NPR is talking about solutions for living and building on a hotter planet. Today, we go to Florida, where communities are still recovering from two hurricanes intensified by climate change. Jessica Meszaros with WUSF tells us how people are adapting around Tampa Bay.

JESSICA MESZAROS, BYLINE: Steve Papola is touring the wreckage Hurricane Helene left behind on his family’s one-story house in Hudson, just north of Tampa. It’s along a saltwater canal that connects to the Gulf of Mexico.

STEVE PAPOLA: And so if you look over there, I left the flood line in the garage.

MESZAROS: It’s hip high but goes up in other parts of the home. About 4 feet of storm surge pushed through, soaking the drywall, wood floors and electrical system. Now he’s rebuilding.

PAPOLA: Well, everything we do is going to be considered what we should or shouldn’t do because of flooding.

MESZAROS: So Papola is replacing the flooring with tile because floodwaters can’t penetrate it.

PAPOLA: We’re going to raise the outlets to 24 inches.

MESZAROS: He estimates all the repairs will cost $145,000. Flood insurance is covering this, but it likely won’t cover the price of elevating the actual house once the internal construction is done. Papola is one of at least tens of thousands in Florida reconstructing their homes after last year’s storms. They’re building to withstand the impacts from climate change, which is raising sea levels and making storms stronger and wetter. Santina Contreras specializes in urban planning at the University of Southern California. She says what these homeowners are doing is called individual adaptation.

SANTINA CONTRERAS: There’s a lot of ways that communities are, on their own, doing things to try to work towards building resilience that is kind of centered more on doing maybe smaller-scale approaches or things that they can do at the household level.

MESZAROS: Like the things Papola is doing, installing tile and raising the electrical outlets. Then there’s the larger-scale adaptations, like policy changes.

CONTRERAS: To sort of manage all of the different sorts of risks that are coming.

MESZAROS: Take Fort Myers Beach in southwest Florida, for example. Hurricane Ian nearly wiped out the town in 2022. Now some restaurants and stores there have to flood-proof their buildings if they want to stay at ground level with the tourist foot traffic. Some business owners are planning to just let the water come in.

JACKI LISZAK: We’re going to open the front door, open the back door, let the water flow through.

MESZAROS: This is Jacki Liszak. She’s president of the town’s chamber of commerce.

LISZAK: We’ve learned if the water flows through, in our case, ‘cause we have movement of the water, then mud doesn’t stick around.

MESZAROS: The idea is to unplug electrical appliances, like refrigerators and dishwashers, and move them to higher ground, along with any merchandise.

LISZAK: We’re calling it plug and play.

MESZAROS: Then all that’s left in the building is concrete walls and floors, and PVC furniture, bars and decks. That’s one solution to hurricanes, but Tampa General Hospital is taking a different approach. The nonprofit sits just 20 feet away from Tampa Bay.

DUSTIN PASTEUR: You can see our seawall here, a view of downtown Tampa.

MESZAROS: Dustin Pasteur is an architect, responsible for wrapping a portable wall around the facility. It takes three days to set up this wall, which can withstand 9 feet of storm surge and 130 mph winds. The panels protect fuel tanks for the hospital’s backup generators. Pasteur says the million-dollar Norwegian technology passed the storm surge test when Hurricane Helene sent the water in the bay halfway up the panels.

PASTEUR: We could see the risk, you know, in a clearer light and realize that it was worth the money and the effort to make an improvement like that.

MESZAROS: Civil engineer Justin Keller thinks about risk a lot. He helps multiple barrier island communities adapt to rising seas from global warming. The roadways there can flood — even on clear, sunny days — during a high tide event.

JUSTIN KELLER: One of the solutions that have been used throughout the country is, more or less, managed retreat.

MESZAROS: Managed retreat means strategically moving people and infrastructure out of risky areas. But for those invested in staying by the water, Keller says it will take elevating homes and the property surrounding them, like garages, driveways and seawalls. That way, the local governments can then raise the roadways and stormwater infrastructure.

KELLER: There is no magic solution to make this area hurricane-proof.

MESZAROS: Keller says the best thing to do is bring your home up to code. Steve Papola, the homeowner in Hudson, is doing just that. But it’s not for him — it’s for the next family.

PAPOLA: We have decided that once we rehabilitate and the house is put back in order, we’re most likely going to sell it.

MESZAROS: Papola says his wife has had a lot of weather anxiety since Hurricane Helene, so they’re opting for land versus waterfront property. For NPR News, I’m Jessica Meszaros in Hudson, Florida.

(SOUNDBITE OF FIGUB BRAZLEVIC’S “FROM A DIFFERENT CLOTH”)

MARTIN: We’ll have more stories about climate solutions this week on air and online at npr.org/climateweek.

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