It’s a critical question, one came up at Friday’s tsunami preparedness hearing at the state Capitol.

Mike Levine reports in DC808 today that as towns look to rebuild in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, some are asking whether it makes sense to keep rebuilding towns that keep getting washed away.

What would that mean for Hawaii? As Hawaii State Civil Defense‘s Doug Mayne told lawmakers and Honolulu city council members on Friday, the state ought to get out in front of a future disaster by coming up with some planning guidelines for rebuilding (or not) after a major tsunami or hurricane. Such planning is part of the National Disaster Recovery Framework. [pdf]

Take Hilo, for example, Mayne says. After the 1946 tsunami wave that killed 159, Hilo did not rebuild the same structures exactly where they had stood. Instead, they turned part of the area into parkland and moved businesses back off the shore.

Here’s the DC808 recap of the issue at a national level:

There’s an interesting piece in the New York Times today about a small Alabama island that’s used federal money to rebuild again and again in the wake of natural disasters. The question: Is there a better way to do this?

Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas. If history is any guide, a large fraction of the federal money allotted to New York, New Jersey and other states recovering from Hurricane Sandy — an amount that could exceed $30 billion — will be used the same way.

Tax money will go toward putting things back as they were, essentially duplicating the vulnerability that existed before the hurricane.

“We’re Americans, damn it,” said Robert S. Young, a North Carolina geologist who has studied the way communities like Dauphin Island respond to storms. “Retreat is a dirty word.”

Read the full article here: As Coasts Rebuild and U.S. Pays, Repeatedly, the Critics Ask Why

There are potential implications for Hawaii, which suffered comparatively minor damage from the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and endures occasional tsunami scares and hurricane warnings. In the event of serious damage, should the federal government pay to put things back as tehy were, or pay people to move away from the shore?

— Michael Levine

The image below, courtesy of NOAA, taken as the 1946 Hilo tsunami struck: