Atlanta’s mayor on how the city is preparing as Hurricane Milton approaches

Dickens, along with White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi, spoke with reporter Sheryl Estrada about building climate-ready cities at wealthImpact Initiative’s conference on Tuesday. The timing of the conversation was painful; Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm as of Tuesday night, could be the strongest to hit Florida in two decades and is expected to make landfall Wednesday night.

Dickens is fresh off of Hurricane Helene, which ravaged the North Carolina mountains last week. “We didn’t know what was going to happen, so we prepared for the worst,” Dickens said. The storm ended up largely sparing Atlanta, but Dickens’s overall approach to preparation is based on one basic principle: “Don’t take any storm for granted.”

He went on to outline what he is doing as mayor to prepare for increasingly powerful storms brought on by warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico. His playbook includes cleaning the city’s drains, building a good communications network, and raising awareness among residents to prepare as best they can. “You don’t have your birth certificate or Social Security card in your basement,” he said. “You have to tell people these things.”

As Milton heads to Florida, the mayor said he is taking no chances and is currently using a “whole of government” approach. Whenever forecasters start mentioning a storm in the Gulf, the Office of Emergency Preparedness in Atlanta goes into preparatory action, Dickens said. With Hurricane Milton set to make landfall on Wednesday, people in Atlanta were encouraged to work remotely in an effort to clear roads. Emergency personnel will be on standby.

“It’s so important to be collaborative; I have to know everything, have a good feel for weather patterns and be able to communicate with the power companies and various entities that help us, and everyone has to have some resilience,” he said. “Our rail system, our water systems, our hospitals, our challenged communities, our seniors, those experiencing homelessness — do they have supplies? Battery backups?”

Zaidi, Biden’s climate adviser, called Dickens’ approach a “master class in climate crisis leadership.” He added that the Biden administration has focused on bringing federal climate change preparedness approaches to local governments.

“We tried to put all these tools in the hands of local leaders and recognize that a lot of it is investment,” Zaidi said. He added that the federal government has invested $2 million in climate preparedness in Georgia alone.

Hurricane Milton could mean catastrophic losses for millions of Florida residents, both in terms of casualties and economic devastation. “Milton should be a double-digit billion insured loss,” Wells Fargo said in a research note Tuesday, estimating those losses could reach $100 billion — or at least $20 billion dollars. Many families already suffer from high insurance premiums, a problem that is only getting worse; the average title insurance payout for single-family homes in the US is 52% above the pre-pandemic rate.