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On entering the cone of uncertainty

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Steve Otto

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: June 3, 2009

F lorida always has been a gamble. It is a land ripe for speculators, hustlers and anyone willing to risk buying a few acres of swamp or maybe a chunk of dredged-up muck on which to build, say, a 30-story condo.

It's where we come to find our dream, which still is possible as long as you turn a blind eye to sinkholes, creepy-crawlies in the night, and the unholy alliances between developers and politicians out to finance their dreams at your expense.

The lure of stuccoed palaces, complete with a hot tub overlooking a lake, a river or the Gulf, is as strong as ever, even if lately we have been putting up instant ghost town subdivisions and empty condo towers.

None of this has changed, even as we get deeper into the 21st century. Gambling has, in fact, become the backbone of state government. Our schools operate on the good faith that you will stop by the convenience store every week and pick up a handful of lottery tickets.

Lottery season

This week begins the biggest annual gamble of them all in Florida: the start of hurricane season. Between now and sometime right before Thanksgiving, Floridians will keep a weather eye on those tropical depressions that start somewhere off the coast of Africa and for weeks make us more and more nervous before swinging off at the last moment to terrify somebody else.

It's the rare occasion when they don't swing off in another direction that adds the special thrill to our game - and keeps us buying batteries and cans of tuna fish.

Living in a state that dangles out there like a pinata waiting to get whacked, you might think we would be a little more thoughtful about these killer storms than we are.

Florida does have something called a Hurricane Catastrophe Fund. The state came up with that after Hurricane Andrew rolled across the peninsula in 1992, coming in south of Miami and exiting near Everglades City. Andrew was a monster that fortunately missed much of Miami and rolled across swamps and farmland before moving out into the Gulf. As it was, it left dozens dead and some $16 billion in damage.

A little bit of luck

I drove down there and retraced its route a few days later. It was like following the trail of a gigantic lawn mower. I wondered then what it might have been like had it hit a few miles to the north in downtown Miami and then crossed over into maybe Naples or Fort Myers. Or what if it had swung up the west coast to the Tampa Bay area? The numbers would have been Katrina-like.

The Cat Fund, as it is called, was put together to persuade insurance companies to hold tight. But today, Florida is one big storm away from a financial catastrophe that will hurt all Floridians with extra fees even if the storm strikes some other part of the state.

But we're gamblers, aren't we - more than willing to sit out the summer staring at the "cone of uncertainty" on the weather shows, wondering if our luck finally has run out.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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