The extreme rainfall and flash flooding that killed at least 37 people in eastern Kentucky this week, washed away homes and cars and turned streets into raging rivers, is yet another example of how climate change is poised to crush infrastructure in the United States over the years to come.
“We have dozens of bridges that are down — making it difficult to get to people, making it difficult to get people water,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Bescher said Sunday. “We have entire water systems working hard to restore them.”
With power outages in many areas that set rainfall records, residents who survived the flooding were left to bake without air conditioning amid the latest heat wave to hit the area this summer.
Janey Camp, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University, told Yahoo News that the combination of climate change and the nation’s aging and neglected infrastructure puts millions of people at risk of severe flooding.
“No one is immune. I think Kentucky shows us that. It doesn’t matter if you’re in an urban area like Nashville or if you’re in the rural Appalachians,” Camp said, adding, “We’re seeing more of these intense rainfall events where there’s a lot of water dumped over an area in a short amount of time. And the infrastructure is not designed to handle that amount of rainfall.”
On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the Biden administration would provide just over $1 billion in grants to states to strengthen infrastructure against threats such as flooding and extreme heat.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a climate resilience financing event in Miami on Monday. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
“In recent days, deadly floods have swept across Missouri and Kentucky, washing away entire neighborhoods, leaving at least 35 dead, including infants and children,” Harris said of the still-rising death toll. “As reported, four children from one family. So the devastation is real. The damage is real. The impact is real.”
Camp said the action, whose funding comes from the bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021, is overdue.
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“We have a very outdated infrastructure, especially when you think about stormwater. A lot of communities don’t even have their own stormwater management department, it kind of falls to public works or the water department,” Camp said. “It’s only in recent years, in the last decade, that we’ve really started to think more about stormwater. Now we are affected by these extreme storms when stormwater infrastructure or other infrastructure designed to help carry water away from an area is overwhelmed.”
Climate scientists have shown that for every degree Celsius of warming, the Earth’s atmosphere retains 7% more moisture. When conditions are right, that moisture can be unloaded in the form of extreme rainfall events like those that dumped 12 inches of rain on eastern Kentucky last week and another foot of rain days later on Illinois. In fact, three so-called 1,000-year rain events hit the middle part of the nation in a few days this past week.
“It’s almost like you have to get hit by something, unfortunately, before the community wakes up and starts doing things differently,” Camp said, adding, “We can look at trends. We can look at the climate data on a smaller scale and say, “Hey, some of these things are starting to happen more and more.” What we’re seeing in many areas, especially in the Southeast, is more precipitation. We are starting to see these extreme weather events happening now. A lot of people want to say, “Well, that’s a one in 1,000-year event, that’s an anomaly, but we’re seeing it happen more often.”
A car destroyed by flooding in central Appalachia in Kentucky on July 30, 2022. (Wang Changzheng/Xinhua via Getty Images)
Cities and towns across the country are required by FEMA to formulate hazard mitigation plans, and many are doing so using Hazus, the department’s computer tool, which is described as providing “data to assess the risk of earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and hurricanes’.
While that’s a good start for assessing risk, Camp said, the problem is that many communities aren’t researching the worst-case patterns that climate change is making much more common.
“No one really analyzes a 1,000-year event. They’re doing a 100-year event and maybe a 500-year event to check the box and meet FEMA regulations for their hazard reduction plan,” Camp said. “We need to stop looking to the past and start looking to the future .. And that’s a challenge in a lot of communities because they don’t have a lot of resources or expertise to do that.”
Indeed, communities like those devastated in the Appalachians have not had the budget to upgrade infrastructure to meet the threat of climate change. But if the Biden administration’s allocation of $1 billion in grant funding for infrastructure upgrades sounds like too much money, experts say much more money will be needed. As if to support this point, initial damage estimates from the recent flooding in Kentucky were quoted at $1 billion.
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