Babcock Ranch — Shelter From The Storm
A year ago, in late September of the 2022 hurricane season, Jennifer Languell was sitting nervously in the living room of her modern, super-smart home in the sustainably-focused, planned community of Babcock Ranch located in the town of Punta Gorda near Fort Myers, Florida. As the eyewall of Hurricane Ian roared ashore making landfall nearby, she was watching updates on television while riding out the storm with several friends from nearby communities who sought refuge in Languell’s home.
Her friends felt safer there, knowing that Languell’s green building and sustainability development consulting firm had been a member of a multi-disciplinary team of engineering, landscape architect, environmental and other professionals that designed Babcock Ranch as a fully sustainable community. Languell said that as she sat in her living room watching the storm, she could feel her sliding glass doors bowing in and tapping the back of her chair as the wind pressures changed. As the storm approached, Languell pulled out her construction drawings to check wind speeds.
Down the street, Sydney Kitson, the Chairman and CEO of Kitson & Partners, the developer of Babcock Ranch, was also in his home when heavy rains and winds blew in. “This thing hit right on top of us. Sustained winds of 100 miles per hour, gusts up to 150,” Kitson said. “It felt like this massive freight train, and the thing I remember most about it was how it just wore you out. Just the constant beating and beating and beating when these gusts would come in. And all I kept thinking, was oh my gosh, what about my neighbors. All the promises I made. And here we are, just a couple of years into this, being tested.”
After a sleepless night, Kitson drove throughout the community the next morning. “It was one of the most surreal things I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “People were just outside wandering. They knew the devastation, the loss of life all around us ... but we were fine. We were back to normal that day.” Babcock Ranch residents never lost power, water, or internet service. There was almost no damage to physical property or the landscape, just a handful of trees down, some lost shingles, and a few torn porch screens.
Before Hurricane Ian, Babcock Ranch was known primarily for staking a claim as America’s first fully solar-powered town. And, remarkably, in a testament to good engineering correctly calculating the force loads of hurricane strength winds, none of Babcock Ranch’s 680,000 solar panels, enough to power 30,000 homes, were damaged or failed in the storm. Sustainability at Babcock Ranch, however, goes well beyond being fully solar-powered.
The former cattle and timber ranch, as purchased in 2006 under a special state preservation law, consisted of approximately 91,000 acres of which 73,000 acres were sold back to the state for permanent preservation. When fully built and occupied, the community, which began construction in 2015, is projected to include 20,000 homes, 55,000 residents and six million feet of commercial space. Sixty percent of the 18,000 acres of the town are set aside as open green spaces, including wetlands, greenways, and wildlife corridors. One important goal was to build a sustainable community in coherence with nature (which residents can enjoy using miles of bike and hiking trails).
Babcock Ranch’s experience enduring Hurricane Ian without material damage or loss of critical systems, illustrates the overlapping but distinct concepts of sustainability — whether a system or a community can survive and thrive over the long term (e.g., will water and energy resources remain reliably available over time; is the community fair and equitable?) — and resiliency — can it withstand shocks (e.g., can it promptly recover from extreme adverse events?).
Hurricane Ian brought into focus the challenges in building a highly resilient small city: A community that can not only withstand and recover from the multiple, ever-evolving challenges presented by extreme weather events and other natural disasters to physical property, power, water, and other infrastructure, but also meet community needs during potential disasters for reliable communications, stormwater mitigation, meals, and shelter. Babcock Ranch passed the test with flying colors, but also learned there will always remain room for improvement.
Ian was lethal, accounting for as many as 149 deaths in Florida, the deadliest storm in the state since 1935. The storm also caused more than $112 billion in property damage, the most expensive storm in Florida history and the third-costliest in United States history. Much of the death and destruction caused by Ian was due to a 10-15-foot storm surge hitting the Southwest Florida coastline communities of Naples, Fort Myers, and Cape Coral. Just off the mainland coast, Fort Myers Beach and Captiva, Sanibel and Pine Islands took the full force of Ian’s storm surge and Category 4 winds, which flattened or collapsed most of the structures in those locations.
The surge was not an issue at Babcock Ranch, as it is located some 15 miles from the coast at an elevation of roughly 30 feet above sea level, providing an important, even if obvious, first lesson in retreat-as-resilience: having an inland location and elevation above the reach of a storm surge is a great starting point when it comes to storm safety. But the hurricane, like rain-drenched atmospheric rivers which have become more frequent in the current era of climate change, also brought torrential rains, more than 20 inches from Ian in some areas, resulting in massive stormwater flooding well inland throughout central Florida.
None of the structures or critical infrastructure at Babcock Ranch flooded during or after Hurricane Ian. This was not luck or merely due to its advantageous location. Before laying out the master plan, the developers did extensive research, identifying natural flow-ways, reviewing topographical and soil maps, and studying tree surveys and reports on the hydrology, historical land use, and wildlife of the property. The development strategy was not to compete with Mother Nature, but to step aside and let her have her way.
Accordingly, for times when Babcock Ranch experiences an over-abundance of stormwater from a hurricane or other weather event, the town has engineered the means to complement natural environmental flows with a human-engineered stormwater mitigation system. The footprint of the town (seen here) includes several large, interconnected lakes that provide not only natural beauty and enable wildlife ecosystems, but which are also designed to replicate the water flows the landscape manifested during storm water events before humankind came onto the scene.
Using a “smart pond” concept, developed in partnership with the National Stormwater Trust, the town is able to actively manage through remote technology water flows among and between the various interconnected bodies of water within the community to divert water from places where it is threatening to overflow to other bodies of water with actual or projected lower water levels.
The smart pond technology incorporates live weather forecasts and under development is further pumping and draining infrastructure to move water as necessary, supplementing the ability of the lakes to drain themselves when a heavy rain event is forecast to increase flood storage capacity. Also, as an additional measure of resilience to flooding, if capacity of all the lakes is breached, the streets of Babcock Ranch are designed to handle overflows and steer water away from homes, the first floors of which are built at least two feet above street level.
According to Babcock resident Amy Wicks, the project’s civil engineer of record whose team provided the master planning for the overall project, the smart ponds system performed better than expected by her models without generating any street flooding. Flooding risk is also mitigated by swales in undeveloped areas, large recreational lawns, and other green spaces designed to take on excess water, with an overall storage capacity designed for up to 25-inch rain events. Many of these open spaces are surrounded by up to 300 feet of preservation land. The facilities of Babcock Ranch’s onsite water and sewer utilities are hardened and at an elevation to prevent flooding. Wastewater is reclaimed into reusable water for irrigation.
Using smart technology for infrastructure requires robust and resilient communications systems. Babcock Ranch provides residents and businesses One Gigabyte internet speeds via a fiber optic network (currently priced at $42 per month) while companies that require it will eventually be able to go up to Five Gigabytes and more internet speeds. The resilience of its broadband system enabled town management to monitor lake levels and residents to communicate with neighbors and the outside world when the hurricane was at its peak and afterwards. Nearby communities lost power and internet service for days and weeks.
Nervous or not, homeowners in Babcock Ranch, as promised by Kitson, were able to shelter in place during Hurricane Ian, but the community was also able to provide shelter to others seeking refuge from the storm. Although at the time not certified (it lacked a backup generator) or fully equipped (no cots) as an emergency shelter, the Florida Division of Emergency Management activated the community’s new field house as a regional evacuation shelter as the storm approached. The 40,000 square foot facility, which was built to serve in normal times as a community center, high school cafeteria and sports complex, has foot-thick concrete walls, up to 2-inch-thick glass windows and doors, and lots of sturdy bolts. The only ICC 500-certified storm shelter in Southwest Florida, it was built to withstand 180 miles per hour winds and can accommodate more than 1,300 people (and their pets).
Following Hurricane Ian, many of the residents of Babcock Ranch shared their good fortune and well-stocked freezers by providing meals and other comforts, including air mattresses and clothing, to those staying in the field house shelter. In a spur of the moment “take a lineman home” initiative, some residents invited regional powerline workers into their homes, providing them meals and washing their clothes, and demonstrating that resilience as a community value can be a force multiplier of relief efforts during an emergency.
Among resiliency lessons identified post-Hurricane Ian was the potential vulnerability of a utility substation located at Babcock Ranch. The substation draws power from the solar array or, when the sun is not shining and the community has depleted its capacity of 10MW of battery storage, from the grid. Because the community would have lost power if the substation had been hit by lighting or otherwise disabled, Babcock Ranch is now building a second substation to provide further resiliency through additional redundancy.
The broader lesson learned anew at Babcock Ranch is that building and maintaining resilient communities is an iterative process requiring layered redundancies. Five years earlier, when Hurricane Irma came ashore, Babcock Ranch lost power. This led to new concrete transmission poles running power from the solar panel array located on 800 acres of land just north of the community and from the grid to the substation, and to the underground transmission lines within Babcock Ranch. After Hurricane Ian, the town added a new 350-kilowatt generator capable of providing uninterrupted power to the field house/emergency shelter.
Throughout Babcock Ranch, eco-friendly green homes, rated to withstand winds up to 160 miles per hour (Category 5 hurricane), are built to meet or exceed Florida’s rigorous Green Building Coalition Standards. Landscaping minimizes turf coverage (limited to no more than 50% of the landscaping of a home) to lessen irrigation needs and utilizes native species well-suited to withstand the Southwest Florida’s regular cycles of storms and occasional wildfires. To further minimize wildfire risk, Babcock Ranch has a periodic burning program.
Babcock Ranch has become a test laboratory for next generation smart homes, attracting major builders such as Pulte Homes, D.R. Horton and Toll Brothers to develop home with features complementing the community’s sustainability and resilience attributes. Home designs along the town’s “Innovation Way” are incorporating elements such as insulated concrete forms for exterior wall construction, wi-fi enabled smart light switching systems, high efficiency impact windows, and residential grey water recycling systems. Babcock Ranch home sales have surged post-Ian and prices currently range from about $300,000 to more than $4 million, and the community is currently building about 1,700 lower cost homes and rental units. About 8,000 people live at Babcock Ranch currently, up from about 5,000 when Hurricane Ian hit just a year ago.
Babcock Ranch has been recognized for pioneering a model sustainable and resilient small city of the future, including a 2023 Edison Award for groundbreaking innovation in the resilient design category. But it remains to be seen to what extent its innovations are scalable to larger planned communities or can be adapted for resilience hardening of existing urban communities where land might be too scarce for million-panel solar arrays and less amenable to the civil engineering of the kind that underlies the waterflow management at Babcock Ranch.
Also, it is not clear that even in Southwest Florida, which has endured massive damage from major Hurricanes Irma and Ian in the last six years, the lessons of sustainability and resilience offered by Babcock Ranch are enough to offset the forces behind the unrelenting development feeding the population boom of Florida cities. This includes nearby Cape Coral, which, despite the considerable expense of storm recovery from Hurricanes Irma and Ian, is expected to retain its status as one of American’s fastest growing cities through at least 2060.
Author Michael Grunwald, who has written for two decades about what he has called humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with nature in Florida, warned about the vulnerability of Cape Coral after Hurricane Irma in 2016: “One big storm could write it off the map,” his article was headlined. Not quite, but after Hurricane Ian, Grunwald seems even more pessimistic. In a recent article, Grunwald expressed doubt that, due to the economic and political forces driving growth, Cape Coral and other Florida communities as a whole will learn anytime soon the disastrous lessons inflicted by Irma and Ian or embrace resilience solutions such as those demonstrated at Babcock Ranch:
“[T]he way things ought to be is not always the way things are. Sunshine, low taxes, and freedom from consequences can be a compelling vision, especially for the old and cold .... The next wave of newcomers won’t let concerns about boil-water orders or insurance crises deter them. The Florida growth machine has outlasted a lot of killer storms, and it will outlast this one too. We ignored what was coming, and we’ll forget what came. It would be nice if Cape Coral and the rest of the Gulf Coast could ... build back better. But nothing will stop it from building back.”
Nonetheless, Kitson calls himself an “eternal optimist.” He believes lessons modeled so well by Babcock Ranch are being embraced around the world. “First, if you're building a new community, do it resiliently,” he said. “If you can do something from the ground up, do it the right way; we already have the playbook, and we've proved it can work.” Second, for existing communities, Kitson advises:
“You have to start somewhere. No, you can't do it all at once. And so, start with working with your utilities, harden your utilities. So, when you build back stay out of those areas that create the danger, but certainly build in a resilient way, and if you're a town and municipality look at your grid, look at how you get power to your customers. Look at your water systems. Plant that seed and have it grow. When you have a storm, and you have this devastation, and you build back, you have to build back the right way. Don't do it the same way, because history repeats itself.”
“I believe that people know that this is just something you have to pay attention to,” Kitson adds. “I talk all over the country. Yes, sometimes it's on deaf ears. The problem is we think so short term. We need to be thinking long term.”
Kitson believes that economic forces such as costly or unavailable insurance are driving better building practices. He notes that Florida has, since Category 5 Hurricane Andrew in 1992, adopted increasingly strong building codes, and believes that sustainable, resilient and innovative development makes good business sense. “I probably saved tens of millions of dollars after Hurricane Ian came through that we didn't have to spend that surrounding areas did,” he noted. “We had minimal damage here. That return on investment was almost immediate. So, I would also argue that if you do it right from the beginning, it doesn't have to cost significantly more. It's the legacy issues that are the bigger problem; when you have that legacy infrastructure.”
Kitson acknowledges that even after Hurricane Ian, communities along the coast of Southwest Florida are building back. “It's going to be hard to tell people they can't,” he said. “Well, okay, if you're going do that then be aware of the fact that you're going to have storm surges. Build structures so that they can handle the weather, they can handle these storms.”
“Early on, I told my partners. We are going to invest in resiliency. We are going to be the most resilient community in Florida. And we're going to prove that with climate change, and with all the things that are now confronting us, that we can develop and build a community that can be safe for our residents.”
“If you look around, these storms, they're more violent, they're more frequent. If we don't build our homes, our towns to address this that is going to be just a travesty as we go forward. And our kids and our grandkids aren't going to appreciate the fact that we haven't paid attention to what's going on with climate change. Start these things now and your kids and your grandkids, great grandkids, are going to thank you more than you can imagine.”
“Our goal is to have this replicated, even if it’s just pieces of it. We hope we inspire people. What I want people to do is to take the playbook and do a better job. I really believe there are solutions to our problems. Each place is unique. What happens here in Florida is different than Arizona, which is different than Texas, than California. They all have unique problems but that doesn’t mean you cannot create a resilient community in those places.”
About the Authors:
David A. Cifrino, a Senior Editor of the Social Impact Review, was a 2021 Fellow and 2022 Senior Fellow in Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. David is also Senior Counsel at the law firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP where he is a co-founder of the firm’s ESG, Impact and Sustainability practice group.
Luis J. Perez, a Senior Editor of the Social Impact Review, was a 2021 Fellow and 2022 Senior Fellow in Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. Luis is a partner at the law firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP and member of the firm’s ESG, Impact and Sustainability practice group. He is known for his work in the energy sector, including renewable energy.
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Acknowledgements:
A special thanks to those interviewed for this article: Sydney Kitson, Chairman and CEO of Kitson & Partners and Jennifer Languell, President of Trifecta Construction Solutions. Photographs provided on behalf of Babcock Ranch courtesy of Lisa Hall, Hall+Media Strategies.