THE DROWNING SOUTH - THE NEW FACE OF FLOODING

As this is not a political story- Offered for your consideration

On June 19, southern Mobile County, Ala., experienced torrential rain and severe flooding. Roads and some homes near the Fowl River were submerged.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/flooding-sea-level-rise-gulf-coast/

John Corideo drove the solitary two-lane highways of southern Alabama, eyeing the roadside ditches. It had been raining off and on for days and Corideo, chief of the Fowl River Fire District, knew that if it continued, his department could be outmatched by floodwaters.

It kept raining. Water filled the ditches and climbed over roads, swallowing parts of a main highway. About 10 residents who needed to be rescued were brought back to the station in firetrucks. More remained stranded in floodwaters, out of the department’s reach. “That week … we just caught hell,” Corideo said.

What the residents and rescuers of the Fowl River region faced on that day was part of a dangerous phenomenon reshaping the southern United States: Rapidly rising seas are combining with storms to generate epic floods, threatening lives, property and livelihoods.

In the Fowl River’s case, unusually high tides slowed floodwaters as they went downstream to drain. This increased the water’s depth and flooded a wide expanse — even several miles upstream. The result was deluged roads, washed out cars and damaged houses from a flood that was larger, deeper and longer-lasting due to rising seas.

These supercharged floods are one of the most pernicious impacts of an unexpected surge in sea levels across the U.S. Gulf and southeast coasts — with the ocean rising an average of 6 inches since 2010, one of the fastest such changes in the world, according to a Washington Post examination of how sea level rise is affecting the region.

The Post’s analysis found that sea levels at a tide gauge near the Fowl River rose four times faster in 2010 to 2023 than over the previous four decades.

The rapid burst of sea level rise has struck a region spanning from Brownsville, Tex., to Cape Hatteras, N.C., where coastal counties are home to 28 million people. Outdated infrastructure built to manage water, some of it over a century old, cannot keep up. As a result, the seas are swallowing coastal land, damaging property, submerging septic tanks and making key roads increasingly impassable.

“Our canary in the coal mine for sea level rise is storm water flooding,” said Renee Collini, director of the Community Resilience Center at the Water Institute. “Each inch up of sea level rise reduces the effectiveness of our storm water to drain and the only place left for it to go is into our roads, yards, homes and businesses.”

To explore sea level rise in the region, The Post analyzed trends at federal tide gauges and drew on satellite data to compare the Gulf of Mexico with the rest of the globe. The Post also worked with Bret Webb, a coastal engineer at the University of South Alabama, to closely study the 2023 flood in the Fowl River region. A sophisticated river simulation Webb produced showed how higher seas would have turbocharged the flood, making it worse — with deeper waters covering a larger area for a longer time — than if the same event had occurred in an era of lower seas.

These analyses showed how much the ocean is rising and how it’s affecting flooding across this region, a preview of what other parts of the United States and the world that are affected by sea level rise will face in coming decades.

Key findings

• The ocean off the U.S. Gulf and Southern Atlantic coasts has, since 2010, risen at about triple the rate experienced during the previous 30 years. In just the Gulf of Mexico, sea levels rose at twice the global rate over the past 14 years.
• There are now more dangerous rain-driven and flash floods reported within 10 miles of the coast in the region. Their numbers increased by 42 percent from 2007 to 2022 — a total of 2,800 events, according to a Post analysis of National Weather Service data.
• The Fowl River flood was caused by intense but not record-breaking thunderstorms that collided with high tides, according to Webb’s analysis. Working together, they caused the river to spill miles inland. The higher seas of today, compared with sea levels in 1967, would have increased the volume of the flood by nearly 10 percent of the river in its normal state, the analysis showed.

NOW THEY DIVE INTO CLIMATE CHANGE !

Human-caused climate change is driving an acceleration of sea level rise globally, largely because of the faster melting of the globe’s giant sheets of ice. Scientists do not know for certain why this region is experiencing a surge in sea levels beyond the global average, but one theory is that naturally occurring ocean currents are moving ever-warmer ocean water deep into the Gulf. This warm water expands and causes seas to rise. This comes on top of sinking land, which has long exacerbated sea level rise in the region.

“When I first moved here in 2007, the rule of thumb was a foot per century,” said Webb. “Well, looking back now in the last 20 years, we’ve gotten half of that in a fifth of the time.”

The Fowl River region is a quiet inland expanse of flat spaces and pine forests filled with large riverfront homes, more modest dwellings and a few mobile home parks. The wealthier inhabitants live along the wider stretches of the river and near the coast, and lower income residents generally populate rural areas upstream. The community is largely White, and the population swells in the summer, when people come to boat and fish in the river.

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