Prologue: Tracking a Catastrophe

How We Survive

Marketplace

Business, News

5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2022

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A powerful hurricane was churning toward the southwest coast of Florida. It looked like it was going to be bad. So we hopped on a plane and headed first to Boston where we embedded with a team of catastrophe modelers who were tracking the disaster and calculating the potential losses.

The number they came up with is staggering high: $100 billion. And only $63 billion of that is insured.

We then visited Gasparilla Mobile Home Estates in Placida, Florida to see what these data points looked like on the ground, and talk to people who lost everything.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In late September, a massive hurricane was churning towards the southwest coast of Florida.
0:06.2	Evacuations are mandatory.
0:08.0	It looked like it was going to be bad.
0:09.6	The current track has Ian becoming a major hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico in the coming days.
0:14.3	Really bad.
0:15.2	Winds are up to 120 miles per year.
0:17.2	Just 10 miles an hour away from becoming a category for hurricane and that's expected.
0:21.2	Early on, it was projected to directly hit the Tampa Bay area where more
0:26.7	than 3 million people live something that hasn't happened in more than a century.
0:31.6	Now is on mass evacuations,
0:33.5	hundreds of thousands of people guys being asked
0:35.7	to leave their homes.
0:36.7	By the time Hurricane Ian was forming in the ocean,
0:40.5	I'd been reporting on the climate crisis and housing in South Florida for six months,
0:45.8	so I was anxious to see firsthand the aftermath of the storm.
0:50.3	But there was somewhere else I needed to go first.
0:55.0	Boston.
0:56.0	Hi, come on.
0:58.0	Hi, Karen, good to see you.
1:00.0	This is Karen Clark.
1:02.0	She's an economist, and I came to see her because 30 years ago she
1:06.8	transformed the insurance industry by using computer modeling to more accurately
	...

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