one ec recovery mission ellicott city flood recovery

In some communities where Superstorm Sandy flooded homes and businesses, building codes now require construction of what’s known as freeboard, the space between where 100-year flood levels are projected to rise to in major storms or floods and the start of the building.Ĭities and counties thinking about development patterns could go even further, she said. Some communities in Louisiana have already begun such adaptation, including requiring higher minimum elevation of new structures and requiring older ones to be raised higher to qualify for lower flood insurance rates. Today’s 500-year floodplain, tomorrow’s 100-year floodplain?

“How many of those people have built infrastructures to withstand flooding? Are they building homes in the 100- and 500-year floodplains?” said Cutter, who has helped create a federal framework for measuring community resilience to climate change and other hazards. They’re all factors that communities must consider as climate change creates uncertain weather patterns, said Susan Cutter, a geography professor and director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina. Coupled with sea-level rise in some places, such rain events could also affect how emergency response teams issue storm warnings or prepare people for weather events. It could also radically shift how engineers and architects design buildings. More frequent events could defy traditional methods of planning for floods, like using 100- and 500-year floodplain maps to plan communities and develop flood insurance rates and who has to have it. With rising global temperatures, the 2014 National Climate Assessment predicts that many communities will see such extreme precipitation events more frequently. What climate scientists do know is that the intensity of extreme precipitation events is on the rise. It’s an emerging field of study, but climate scientists are working on models that could determine whether specific extreme weather events are caused by climate change ( ClimateWire, June 14). Yet climate change also likely played a role, if mostly to intensify the amount of rainfall because of an increased amount of water vapor in the atmosphere caused by higher temperatures. The same was true for a July 30 flash flood in Ellicott City, Md., which killed two people and swept a wave of destruction through the historic downtown when 6 inches of rain fell over several hours. The 39-hour rain event in Louisiana, which killed at least nine people and flooded upward of 40,000 homes, was a radical weather system that would have done plenty of damage, global warming or no. “These issues, they are happening and they’re going to become worse, and the changes are occurring within a context where we’ve designed cities to reflect a previous climate,” he said. “One of the great challenges is to recognize that a lot of communities, a lot of cities, a lot of human settlements in general were designed to reflect the climate of the past,” said Smith, who also served as the director of the Mississippi Office of Recovery and Renewal after Hurricane Katrina. One of the first shifts that must happen, many experts in hazard mitigation say, is to stop using the climate of the past to plan for the future. They could be doing much, much more to adapt-not just people and how they respond to climate change, but homes, buildings, roads, and levees and other infrastructure, said Gavin Smith, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence and a research professor at the University of North Carolina’s Department of City and Regional Planning. The answer in many communities is no, it’s not enough. Now many are asking themselves: Are they doing enough to plan for and to adapt to large rain events that climate scientists predict will become more frequent and more intense as global temperatures continue to rise? These extreme weather events are forcing many communities to confront what could signal a new climate change normal. Over the past year alone, catastrophic rain events characterized as once-in-500-year or even once-in-1,000-year events have flooded West Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and now Louisiana, sweeping in billions of dollars of property damage and deaths along with the high waters.

One ec recovery mission ellicott city flood recovery