Even when the water is gone, Houston will not be as it was.

Residents who fled their homes to escape Hurricane Harvey will return find their cars junked, their houses full of mold, their furniture destroyed. And they’ll have a visceral, first-hand experience of just how bad it can get when Houston floods.

The typical disaster includes everything from floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and major winter storms. We do find a migration response to an event like that. But for a very severe disaster—and Harvey looks like it’s going to be in that category—the response is twice as large.

That’s one of the things we were thinking that explains why a severe disaster in a prone area leads to more migration. If it is the case that disasters are getting more frequent and more severe with climate change, and you’re in the path of disaster activity, when you see that kind of thing happening, you say, all right, now is a good time for me to get out.

Read the source article at The Atlantic

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Sarah Zhang is a staff writer at The Atlantic.