【Randy Spears Archives】

A lot has changed since a major hurricane last hit Florida,Randy Spears Archives in 2005.

Twitter was not a thing. HBO was best known for The Sopranos. Barack Obama was a guy who gave a moving speech at the Democratic National Convention

SEE ALSO: Watch as powerful Hurricane Matthew heads toward Haiti and Jamaica

Since that time, the coastal population along the southeastern United States has ballooned. Many living in coastal communities there now have never experienced a major hurricane, defined as a storm of Category 3 intensity and stronger.

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Hurricane Matthew is expected to change this on Thursday, when it may hit Florida as a Category 3 or 4 storm.

The hurricane may travel several paths from there, but should it plow north along the East Coast, it would be the first major hurricane to hit South Carolina since Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Should Hurricane Matthew make landfall in Georgia after skipping off the Florida coast, then it would be the first major hurricane to hit there from the Atlantic since 1898, although many storms have passed through the state since then.

Florida's total population climbed from around 17.8 million in 2005 to about 20.2 million in 2015. The population of Miami-Dade, an east coast county in the state, shot up by around 150,000 people from 2010-2015 alone, an increase of 6.3 percent. The population in Broward County rose 4.5 percent during the same period, an increase of about 80,000 people, to a total of 1.8 million residents. In Duval County, currently under a voluntary evacuation, the population has risen 4.8 percent in those five years, to more than 900,000.

South Carolina's increase in coastal population since their last major hurricane is more stark, given it's been close to three decades.

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Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Coastal Horry County was home to just 144,053 people in 1990, a year after Hurricane Hugo. In 2015, it was home to 309,199. Charleston County, where 295,039 people lived in 1990, was inhabited by 389,262 people in 2015.

In Georgia, the state's population has risen from just under 9 million in 2005 to more than 10 million a decade later.

That's a lot of residents without hurricane experience, but Gina Eosco, a risk communication expert who advises the National Weather Service, said she isn't too worried.

"I think they are knowledgeable, they are probably equally prepared," Eosco said of residents who haven't lived through a hurricane in southeastern coastal communities.

"I would say people who live in the coast who have not experienced this directly, they may have heard indirectly from others in the community who have lived there longer... and they may have heard from emergency managers."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The years-long lull in the region's hurricane activity hasn't dulled preparations made by emergency managers, Eosco said. And in the 10 years since a major hurricane has hit Florida (or anywhere else in the country, for that matter), the number of ways emergency managers can reach residents has exploded, making alerts easier to disseminate.

So long as people are good about verifying the source of their information, Eosco believes they will be well-prepared to evacuate or ride out the storm.

The Florida governor's office has already issued evacuation warnings (both voluntary and mandatory) for four counties, and says they've made preparations to make sure roads and lines of communication stay up and running as best they can.

The goal for everyone involved is to make sure residents of the southeastern coast -- whether they're hurricane veterans or new to the area -- don't look back on Hurricane Matthew with regret.

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