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Goal 7. Coastal Hazards: Respond to Shoreline Change and Coastal Hazards
As coastal communities have grown, Florida has experienced higher property losses and relief costs, more business interruptions and failures, greater social disruption and dislocation and more natural resource damages than perhaps any other state due to its geographic location within the potential track of hurricanes. Florida has 20 metropolitan statistical areas and 16 of them lie around a bay or estuary or at the mouth of a river that flows into the sea.
Florida’s sandy coastline is about 825 miles long. There are over 400 miles of eroding beaches, with a large percentage critically eroding and the percentage is continuing to increase. Beach use in Florida creates a huge economic impact, but both life and property are continually threatened by living, working or playing so near the shore.
In 1992, Hurricane Andrew, killed 43 people in South Florida and caused about $20 billion in property damage. In 2004, for the first time in history, four major hurricanes, Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, made landfall in Florida during the same year, causing statewide damage at a level about equal to that of Andrew.
About 30 people drown each year after being caught in rip-currents while using the beach in Florida. It is clear that Florida’s coastline attracts both people and money, but at the same time can present dangerous and serious threats.
The fact that more and more people will continue to move to the coast means that more people and more property will be affected by shoreline change and coastal hazards. Both the public and private sectors thus need to determine ways to protect the natural shoreline and environment and determine ways to make people and property safe from natural events. Response to these events and the shoreline will necessitate university cooperation with state and federal agencies and it will require both basic and applied interdisciplinary research, education and technology transfer.
The broad goal is to improve the ability of coastal communities to identify risks and potential losses of human life, property and natural coastal environmental systems from natural coastal processes and from storms and natural hazards and to reduce the losses and increase the cost effectiveness of mitigation measures.
The audience for this goal area includes the home building industry and its associated sectors such as property management companies and realtors, the insurance industry, public agency planners including state building code inspectors, community decision makers and emergency preparedness officials and environmental consulting firms that focus on coastal issues relating to natural systems and coastal restoration and protection projects. A high level of interaction will also be maintained with the Bureau of Beaches and Coastal Systems, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Florida Shore and Beach Preservation Association, the Florida Department of Community Affairs and the Institute for Business and Home Safety, among others. Audiences also include citizens that live along the coast and the portion of the 78 million tourists each year that visit the state to enjoy its shorelines and beaches.
Products and activities for work in this area include publications in trade and scientific journals, technical reports, seminars and workshops. Research faculty and communications staff will play a key role in delivering the products and activities directly to the principal audiences, while the extension faculty will deliver more general information to the public via newsletters.
This is a very difficult area in which to assign performance indicators due to the magnitude of the problems being faced. However, such indicators as the completion of workshops by planning officials, decreases in post-storm erosion and damage estimates (after recommended mitigation measures are in place), reduced losses of life and injuries from coastal events and hazards, the adoption of retrofitting techniques into building codes and increased mileage of restored shoreline can be used, depending on the specific work that is undertaken.
A. Develop mitigation techniques and products
- Determine who pays, who benefits from storm loss prevention techniques.
- Design retrofitting techniques for homeowners and educate them on techniques.
- Determine ways to evaluate severity and recurrence of hurricanes as it relates to building practices and land use, including ground level wind measurement.
- Evaluate cost effectiveness of storm mitigation measures.
B. Establish technical basis for risk sharing, pricing and financing programs.
- Determine standards to rate dwellings in risk areas.
- Determine market, tax and legal incentives to cause retrofitting and mitigation.
C. Incorporate ocean, coastal and shoreline process and change data into coastal planning.
- Develop coastal construction and design practices related to reducing shoreline erosion.
- Determine role of shoreline in reducing wave and flood damage, including ways to implement shoreline protection measures that do not damage the coastal onshore and offshore environment.
- Improve prediction techniques that warn coastal users of dangerous conditions.
- Participate in outreach and communications projects related to coastal ocean observing systems in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
D. Refine public policy for storm mitigation and preparation.
- Develop and recommend policies, mitigation techniques and update redevelopment policies that affect coastal natural systems and their relation to growth management.
- Determine public clean-up costs, infrastructure damage and replacement costs, business failure and job/loss interruption costs.
- Create ways to advise decision makers on public policies that reduce social and economic costs of mitigation and preparation.
- Design incentive measures that cause mitigation through building standards, development regulations, critical property acquisition, taxation, etc.
E. Document lessons learned from the landfall of four hurricanes in Florida in 2004.
- Create technical fact sheets related to hurricane protection, particularly from a natural coastal resources perspective.
- Participate in constructive dialogue among various stakeholders to evaluate the usefulness of beach renourishment projects on shoreline protection.
The priorities outlined in this area are vastly beyond the financial capabilities of Florida Sea Grant. However, they are a priority where university research faculty have the expertise to contribute to the overall goals of the state relating to coastal processes and coastal hazards. In particular, Florida Sea Grant does not have a coastal engineering and hazards extension specialist and work on many of the educational and training priorities will depend on acquiring this expertise through additional funding. An extension specialist did work in this area until the mid-1980s, when federal funding cuts caused the elimination of the position.
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