Floods are increasing WAY faster than we expected

Flooding is getting worse, and not just from hurricanes or rising tides, but from increased heavy rainfall. In this episode, we dive into the changing landscape of flood hazards. First, we journey to New York, to visit Hoboken, New Jersey, and Hollis, Queens, two communities facing different flood challenges. Then, we explore First Street's groundbreaking new risk map, pinpointing high-risk areas. Want to take action against flooding in your area? Watch this episode for insights and solutions.

Weathered is a show hosted by weather expert Maiya May and produced by Balance Media that helps explain the most common natural disasters, what causes them, how they’re changing, and what we can do to prepare.

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[composthis]

Those of us in the Permaculture and ecological design community have been hollering and beating pots and pans about this for twenty years, it is SO FRUSTRATING that it took this long for this topic to make it into more mainstream conversations but it's so great to see folks finally talking about this issue and working on better urban design. Now let's find a way to put that water back into the use cycle, or at least into soil storage, and not just sending it out into the ocean.

[opossumboyo]

I work in agriculture in the midwest; our planting seasons have been very inconsistent the last five years. Last year we had very little rain for the entirety of the year; this year, we’ve gotten 6 inches of rain in the last three days. The soil wasn’t ready for it and we’ve had some flooding.

We don’t till our land and have a lot of soil conservation practices we follow, but our neighbors have had terrible erosion and it’s filling up the ditches we share, and it’s impossible to get out to some of the fields to get things set up because of how muddy it is.

I worry that farmers will be seeing another inconsistent season this year. Recency bias is certainly there but when I ask older folks in the community, they acknowledge that the weather has been “off”, but they get upset if you imply the climate has something to do with it. I’m not versed enough in meteorology to tell either way.

[purplebrick]

While this focuses on the USA in particular Canada has also seen huge changes. Living in Halifax, Nova Scotia I have seen huge changes in our weather over the last twenty or more years. The pace of the change in weather has also quickened. Last year I was evacuated when fire burned down 200 homes on the edge of the city. Yet only a few months later we had huge floods washing out roads and flooding many neighborhoods.
My concern is the lack of proactive thinking with urban development here in Halifax.

[YouGuessIGuess]

My street used to flood all the time. Since the local government installed a half dozen water collecting basins with big drains and absorbent plants, it hasn't flooded once.

[scpatlnow]

Mitigation efforts like retention ponds and rain gardens work really well. They are also nice additions to park spaces. We know they work, and we should be creating more of them. You can even create rain gardens at home if you have the space. It's better to get the water to seep into the soil than to enter an overburdened sewer system

[dementiasorrow]

I'm living through a flood right now. Southern Brazil state of Rio Grande do Sul. We had 600mm of rainfall in three days. This is horrible. Hundreds of people died. Thousands lost their homes.

[EmmaAnonymous]

Native New Yorker here. This is extremely important and scary information... but I just can't get over the way Maiya says "Hoboken" 💀

[tristanmills]

We have a rain garden, for which we got a rebate from the city, to help manage rain events. Other people use water tanks.
This not only helps take water away from the under capacity city system, it also directs water away from our foundations, which is one of the biggest water damage risks right here.

It's also the nicest part of our garden right now :)

Some streets around us also have rain gardens, and some new buildings are putting similar features in, which must help (and the street ones also have the effect of filtering out oil and tyre residue which would otherwise enter the local waterways).

[KristenRowenPliske]

We weren’t required to have flood insurance because our area wasn’t considered a flood zone.
Until Hurricane Harvey drowned Galveston & Dickinson. We had a foot of water in our house & fish in our front yard. Never lost power, oddly enough.
Our area is about 20-25 years old, a newer subdivision, and they built several retention ponds around us that worked great until Harvey overwhelmed everything.
I’ve lived here for 45years & I’ve been through many hurricanes & tropical storms (TS Allison, H. Alicia, H. Ike etc). I’ve never seen flooding higher than the curb until Harvey.

[jaymacpherson]

Thank you for covering this topic. As a hydrologist, it has been sad to observe the level of ignorance on what has been occurring for decades.

The added benefit of infiltrating runoff is recharge of aquifers…of which many are overdrafted.

[aylaallen]

I live in Livingston parish, Louisiana, where we had a "100 year flood" back in 2016. A lot of people had flood insurance, and a lot didn't. The one good thing that came from it was that we realized we can lean on our neighbors in times of need. People who had boats were rescuing people from their roofs, and a ton of local construction workers and other laborers worked for free to help people get their homes back together.

[Seven-Planets-Sci-Fi-Tuber]

When you suddenly get several weeks worth of rainfall in a few hours..

[Beryllahawk]

Thinking about this makes me remember the city I grew up in - Midland Texas. We all joked about "The River Wadley" - one specific street, Wadley Avenue, consistently flooded every single time there was a thunderstorm. I was too young to understand then WHY the flooding happened, but Midland is smack in the middle of the desert! Annual precip was usually less than 12 inches I think. However, all that dry, dry land becomes hard as rock when it's dry for nine months straight... and that's why flash floods were always such a huge risk, everywhere in the city, even though the storm drains were HUGE.
Where I am now there are lots of creeks and green, but the water table's pretty damn high and the soil is almost fifty-fifty clay/sand. The sand drains great, the clay doesn't, and it averages out to something that the city infrastructure can handle. Barely. As things get worse I expect that we'll see more and more flooding, and I hope like hell our city planners are paying attention to what's happening in far away places like NYC. We're nowhere near that built up obviously, this is Mississippi, everyone loves having green around them and there's quite a strong dedication to NOT paving over everything. But that doesn't mean we don't have problem areas, I can think of at LEAST two schools whose parking lots become lakes when it's a bad storm.
I've heard about lots of materials science trying to develop permeable pavements and other things that will act more like sponges and allow better control of runoff, but I'm praying that such things become super cheap super quick.

[KageSama]

My community has been stupid about flood awareness. We have a spillway going through the southern end of town and they decided to build houses on gravel along the spillway. Everyone knows the second we have a flood all those houses will instantly be washed away...

[ward]

Here in Texas we are seeing massive floods and droughts at the same time. Now Texas has always been this way but the pendulum swing between extremes has become noticably bigger in recent years.

[derekkeeneMusic]

Roughly every 25-50 years we get a catastrophic flood in my town in West Virginia (north central). The last one was in 1985 in which is still have Polaroid pictures of my father, back then a young man, rescuing residents from atop their roofs in a raggedy row boat. That same boat still sits under our car port, where my dad and I have maintained it since I was a kid just in case the town needs a hero again.

[fiberpoet]

In my hometown, Perry, Georgia (US)
We had a huge flood during a stalled tropical system in 1993 and it rained heavy for 3 days.
And every dam in the area busted and luckily our little town is on a hill but the surrounding areas were really affected.
We were stranded for weeks as all the roads outta town were washed out.

After that, our county hired engineers and planners and built a state of the art dam that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Instead of a wall.. it’s a row of big cement horizonal pyramids. And it’s never had issues again.

Also they got the county to put retention ponds at the end of every parking lot, and we haven’t had flooding since

[silviavalentine]

This is why when you make ANYTHING that's going to last long term, you should always think sustainability. For urban planning this is especially important cause not only do you have to worry about erosion, but you also have to worry about how the environment is going to change.

[raulgarcia]

I love all the series Maiya has been covering. I'm studying emergency management and about to start an internship with the state, so hearing about new and updated data like First Street has me excited about creating forward-thinking and equitable solutions.

[b_uppy]

Much of the problem with flooding in drylands is dry, compacted soil, with the biota withered or deeply challenged.
Adding raingardens and bioswales is a cheap way to increase flood resiliency instead of expanding stormdrains. It reduces ground subsidence which harms concrete structures, recharges watertables, regreens, reduces pollution and streetside trash, etc.