Want a peek into the future of Key West and the Florida Keys? While we’ve been eating leftover hurricane snacks and feeling darn special because Hurricane Helene did little more here than clean out the dead palm fronds, much of western North Carolina is, well, gone.

The wind didn’t do it. The water did.

Dry creek beds turned into raging rivers that wiped out towns, killed people, pets and farm animals and obliterated roads that serve as lifelines for dozens of bucolic valleys turned vacation destinations and second-home retreats. Western North Carolina has, over the past three decades, become the location of choice for folks who prefer mountains to seashores as their definition of paradise.

Safer in the mountains, huh? Thousands of feet above sea level and a great place to escape the hurricane threats that make June through November a challenge if one lives on an island.

Surely we’ve learned our lesson with Hurricane Helene: Water kills. One would have thought Hurricane Wilma with its devastating storm surge would have knocked some sense into Key West back in October 2005. Or maybe we chalked up September 2022’s Hurricane Ian flooding to a glitch in forecasting, which, by the way, wasn’t the case.

But, nah, we just dumped our appliances on the curb, tore out wet drywall and rebuilt stuff. Humans can be so willfully ignorant and so blindly forgetful.

I try really hard not to be Henny Penny screeching that the sky is falling and the world is ending. Creating panic isn’t helpful and anxiety doesn’t lead to solutions. That’s why I didn’t write this whole thing in capital letters.

But I am going to use caps for this: WHEN (NOT IF) KEY WEST AND THE KEYS TAKE A DIRECT HIT FROM A HURRICANE WITH 15-TO-20-FOOT SURGE AND FLOODING, LIKE HELENE CAUSED IN FLORIDA’S BIG BEND AND WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA, WE ARE GONNA BE GONE.

It’s going to be the water that does us in. We can build to withstand Category 5-plus winds. But there’s no way to survive that water. None. Just ask those lovely towns around Asheville.

Don’t give me the tired bravado that Key West has survived for two centuries, that climate change and sea level rise are a left-leaning conspiracy or that somehow we’ll figure out how to build a water-world paradise in the Keys. Ain’t happening. The best we can do — and we most assuredly won’t — is cope with the inevitable.

Hurricane Helene | Coping in the Keys

What does coping look like, you ask.

STOP ALL NEW DEVELOPMENT IN THE FLORIDA KEYS. All of it. For at least 10 years, until our infrastructure can catch up — maybe — to the horrendous paving-over of islands. We’re quibbling about whether we can accept 8,000 new development permits. Would 3,000 be OK or how about, say, 300 a year? We’re splitting hairs over evacuation times when rapid intensification, as with most of our hurricanes in the past five years, means we’re not going to get everyone out in 72 hours, much less the state-mandated 24. Where the heck would we go, anyway? Asheville?

No matter what they cheerfully say publicly, the government and private companies that provide drinking water, electricity, communications and transportation are blowing smoke when they tell us the Keys can keep doing what we’re doing. The best we can hope for is investing in infrastructure that might support today’s residents.

STOP REBUILDING IN THE SAME PLACE. This one will tick off homeowners and businesses who have survived wind and flood damage and “built back better” because the federal government dumped in billions of dollars and even the gawdawful, incompetent insurance companies paid out something. I’ll give ya this: Rebuild once, maybe twice, on the taxpayer dime, but after that no more.

Those houses falling into the Atlantic on North Carolina’s Outer Banks? Who in the world could have thought building in front of the dunes would be a good idea? Well, it’s equally ignorant to mitigate for wind and flood, as they say, when rebuilding in the Florida Keys. Even the Three Little Pigs understood building on sand is fruitless.

This country spends trillions of dollars trying to control the effects of rapidly intensifying storms with their aftermath of death and destruction. And yet we pave over wetlands, destroy mangroves, clear cut-forests and dam up river valleys. We’ve blithely ignored this fact: When water has nowhere to go, it kills. It kills people. It kills the economy. It kills the ways we like to live. We’d be far better if we spent those trillions returning fragile ecosystems to their natural paths — and paid to relocate entire towns.

Ranger Ed and I live on this island. It’s our only home. We pay $12,178 annually for wind, flood and homeowners insurance. That’s a pittance compared to many homeowners in the Keys because we are outside the worst flood zones, we have some mitigation in place and we have chosen the lowest possible coverage.

We know that when a 15-to-20-foot storm surge hits, our home will be gone. We won’t rebuild. We won’t come back. If we can, we’ll sell the land, probably to some unsuspecting off-islander who thinks it can’t happen again.

When. Not if.

Featured image photo credit to Mike Freas, former Key West resident, who now lives in Asheville. Mike did exceptional work during Hurricane Irma here in Key West in 2017.

Learn More

It will take years — if ever — to rebuild the roads in Western North Carolina

Hurricane Helene: Almost no one has flood insurance

Understanding storm surge

Compare Hurricane Wilma to Hurricane Irma

Follow the best coverage of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina

The lure of Asheville and how the population doubled