CALLAWAY, Fla. — They arrived by the hundreds last year after Hurricane Michael sliced through the Florida Panhandle, packing 160-mile-per-hour winds that snapped pine trees in half, mangled steel posts, ripped off roofs and upended people’s lives. Without electricity, potable water or reliable accommodation, a rapid-response labor force got to work carting away the wreckage.

In the ensuing months, the workers — nearly all of them from Central America, Mexico and Venezuela — toiled day and night across Bay County to reopen Panama City’s City Hall, repair the local campus of Florida State University and fix damaged roofs on several churches. In towns like Callaway, which saw 90 percent of its housing stock damaged by the Category 5 storm last October, they are still working.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 1.2 million Americans live in coastal areas at risk of significant damage from hurricanes. The increased frequency and severity of such disasters have given rise to a new recovery-and-reconstruction work force.

It is overwhelmingly made up of immigrants.

Like the migrant farmworkers of yesteryear who followed the crops, the hurricane workers move from disaster to disaster. They descended on New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Houston after Harvey; North Carolina after Florence; Florida after Irma and Michael. And as the United States confronts more extreme weather caused by climate change, theirs has become a growth industry.