But fathom it those cities must, if they want to survive yearly hurricane seasons that appear to be worsening. In Miami, dramatic action might be necessary the soonest. The city, which some experts predict could be mostly underwater as sea levels rise in the next century, is perhaps the most ill-equipped to deal with a direct hit from a hurricane, although surprisingly considering its location, it rarely has to.

At least in one domain, Miami and other Floridian cities are much better positioned to withstand hurricanes than they used to be. When Hurricane Andrew destroyed whole neighborhoods in cities across the state in 1992, one key factor in its destructiveness was the flimsiness of Florida homes. Then, a shoddy set of building codes in different municipalities led to thousands of homes whose builders made the kinds of decisions—roofing staples instead of nails, particle board instead of wood, and leaving mobile homes completely unmoored—that might not even have passed muster inland, let alone in a peninsula intersecting the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

But since then, Florida’s buildings have gotten their act together. In 2002, legislators passed a statewide building code that requires buildings to at least be able to withstand winds of up to 111 mph, and requires homes in “high velocity hurricane zones,” like Miami-Dade, to meet requirements of up to 130 mph. Evidence shows that those new building codes have helped, as insurance claims have dropped both in number and dollar amount since their implementation. Outside of Florida, the implementation of hurricane-resistant building codes has been pursued to minimize the destruction of hurricane-force winds, from the Outer Banks of North Carolina to the United States Virgin Islands.

The integrity of homes and buildings are only one part of the equation, just as wind is only part of the equation with hurricanes. As construction in the United States has evolved to withstand more extreme winds, the threats from storm surge and floods have increased. And saving the city might mean thinking similarly to Galveston way back when. As outlined in a 2013 article in Rolling Stone, the 20-year-plan to keep the city from sinking includes overhauling city drainage systems, adding more stormwater pumps, and elevating new roads and homes. Greater feats of engineering, like building a seawall and maybe even lifting the entire city, are also in the realm of possibility.

But Miami’s example, where the city’s plan to deal with hurricanes requires taking the Galveston model and scaling up to ever-more-complicated and grandiose construction projects, might not be sustainable, and ultimately doesn’t address one of the reasons why flooding is so bad: the design of cities themselves. “The approach is to engineer the problem away,” says Philip Berke, a professor of land use and environmental planning at Texas A&M University. “So what's exposed in the floodplains from hurricanes and floods is just dramatically increasing from one year and one decade to the next.”