Q&A: USGS director sees ‘changed coast’ after hurricanes

By Michael Doyle | 10/15/2024 01:54 PM EDT

David Applegate talks about Helene, Milton and what they mean for the natural protections in place against future storms.

David Applegate smiles as he sits at a congressional witness table.

David Applegate, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, testifying at his 2022 confirmation hearing. Francis Chung/POLITICO

Geologist and natural hazards expert David Applegate detects the not-so-hidden hand of climate change in the recent one-two punch struck by hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Director of the U.S. Geological Survey since August 2022, Applegate said in an interview Friday that the back-to-back hurricanes were a distinct “climate signal” related to the unusual “amount of heat energy” stored up in the Gulf of Mexico. Applegate warns that more of the same should be expected, with the added twist that the next hurricanes will hit a weakened coast whose protective sand dunes have been whittled away.

This complex interaction between natural hazards, terrain and human habitation has long captivated Applegate, who joined the USGS in 2004 as the agency’s first senior science adviser for earthquake and geologic hazards and then served as an associate director for the Natural Hazards Mission Area since 2011.

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As a congressional science fellow with the American Geophysical Union, he spent a year working for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Along with a colleague, he helped form the bipartisan Congressional Hazards Caucus. It currently has about two dozen members in the House and Senate.

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