EDITORIAL: What happens when resilience is missing

Oct. 13--That was close. Too close. And it could have been so much worse.

This area was spared serious damage from Hurricane Michael, which passed swiftly across North Carolina in less than a day Thursday. It was still a tropical storm by the time it arrived here from the Gulf of Mexico, and it knocked down plenty of trees, cutting power for about half a million customers and causing some flash flooding. But as we look at the astonishing damage inflicted on some Florida Panhandle communities, we feel more gratitude than annoyance.

We don't know how closely Michael's deadly power was linked to climate change, but we do know that some elements of a warmer climate contributed. The hurricane caught many forecasters by surprise. It developed unusually fast in the Caribbean and then rocketed across the Gulf. It didn't lose strength, as many storms do, as it approached land. It came ashore at nearly Category 5, pushing a storm surge of almost 15 feet onto a low-lying, flat landscape.

What made it accelerate and keep its strength? Warm water -- the Gulf's water is several degrees above normal again this year, just as it was when Hurricane Harvey nearly drowned Houston last year with record-setting rainfall. This time, the warm water may have added strength rather than water content, but the devastation was just as extensive. Officials on the Florida Panhandle say it's the worst damage ever inflicted on that region by a hurricane.

We can only hope now that Florence and Michael will be the end of our woes for this year, but we also know we've got another six weeks before the 2018 hurricane season officially ends.

We expect that Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Brock Long agrees. He and his staff have had a long slog through exceptional flooding and wind damage this year. The damages from just Florence and Michael may eventually top $10 billion. And as we see storm damage growing more extensive and expensive, year after year, we wonder if our ability to respond is sufficient.

Long, for one, finds the answer in readiness more than in the response. "A bigger FEMA is not the answer," he said last week. "We have to build correctly. Building codes, resiliency and pre-disaster mitigation is the answer. If we're going to rebuild we must do it right."

While there are some places where rebuilding should no longer be allowed, it's also realistic to believe that America's headlong population rush to the coasts isn't going to end anytime soon. The question becomes, how do we insure that buildings, roads, utilities and other essential infrastructure can survive these increasingly harsh tropical storms? Brock argues that, "The key to resiliency in this country is local and state officials passing building codes. We have to build to a higher standard. We must stop this vicious cycle of destruction and learn this storm-surge lesson."

We hope North Carolina lawmakers are paying attention to what Long -- a native of this state -- is saying. For too many years, a majority of our legislators have stood back and let real estate developers dictate the rules, even to the point of denying the threat posed by rising sea levels. This state has rich resources in its science and engineering ranks, including some of the country's foremost experts in coastal environmental issues. Those are the people who should be at the core of efforts to draw up the coastal and flood plain building and development codes of the future.

If we didn't learn that lesson from Matthew, surely we must have learned it from Florence. Didn't we?

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