Real estate development practices worsened impact of Hurricane Ian

A century ago, the southwest Florida coast was mostly swamps and shoals, prone to frequent flooding and almost impossible to navigate by boat.

Since then, real estate developers manipulated coastal and riverine ecosystems through dredging and filling to create valuable, buildable land. The results of their efforts created coastal communities that were home to more than 2 million people when Hurricane Ian struck.

Many of the homes in the region sit just a few feet from the ocean, surrounded by canals that flow to the Gulf of Mexico. The devastating storm’s 150-mile-per-hour winds and massive storm surge smashed hundreds of buildings to pieces, flooded houses, and tossed around boats and mobile homes. Vast portions of cities including Fort Myers and Port Charlotte were destroyed in a few hours.

The extensive land tracts formed by tearing out mangroves and draining swamps damaged natural wetland marshes that would have protected properties further inland from the storm surge. Thus, the damaging impacts of Hurricane Ian were catastrophic for a vast swath of southwest Florida.

Only three hurricanes had made landfall in the region since 1960, and none of them caused catastrophic flooding. Ian broke that streak, and those who rebuild in destroyed areas will continue to be at high risk from storms.

BIFMA International recently announced formal American National Standards Institute (ANSI) approval and release of the ANSI/BIFMA e3-2010 Furniture Sustainability Standard. The e3 standard represents a structured methodology to evaluate the "sustainable" attributes of furniture products and constitutes the technical criteria of the level product certification program.

| Dec 20, 2010

Architect Adrian D. Smith on zero-energy cities, new technologies, and high density.

Adrian D. Smith, FAIA, RIBA, is co-founder (with Gordon Gill) of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Chicago. Previously, he was a design partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (1980-2003) and a consulting design partner from 2004 to 2006. His landmark structures include the Jin Mao Tower (Shanghai), Rowes Wharf (Boston), and Burj Khalifa (Dubai, U.A.E.), the world’s tallest structure. He recently collaborated with Gordon Gill to design the world’s first net-zero-energy skyscraper, Pearl River Tower, now nearing completion in Guangzhou, China. This account is based on his recent remarks at the Illinois Institute of Technology.