Today, Explained - The ghost of Florence

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

Dozens died, millions of animals drowned, billions of dollars worth in damage done, and Hurricane Florence isn’t even over yet. Before rebuilding begins, the government offers a way out. ******************************** Tap here to find out more about Vox Media's new podcasts: https://www.voxmedia.com/about-vox-media/2018/9/24/17882894/vmpn-fall-2018-slate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quip makes an electric toothbrush that costs just a fraction of bulkier, chunkier brushes and it packs the right amount of vibrations to clean your teeth. They start at just $25 and if you go to getquip.com slash explained right now, you'll get your first refill pack free with your Quip electric toothbrush. And at the break in the middle of the show, we'll find out if you can get that whole process done in a minute. About two weeks ago, Hurricane Florence started building up in the mid-Atlantic. The hurricane dumped about eight trillion gallons of water on North Carolina. That's more than eight months worth of rain for the area. Thousands are still living in shelters

as the water slowly recedes. Food and water are being distributed as the long recovery process begins. At the moment, the ghost of Hurricane Florence is still continuing to haunt the Carolinas as part of that weather system is building into another one and more rainfall is projected for the region, worsening all the flooding that's already going on. Meteorologists and scientists are starting to grapple with just how extreme this event was, and they've determined that this was what they call a 1,000-year rainfall event. Now that doesn't mean that this is a storm that happens once every 1,000 years. It's something that has a 0.1% chance of happening in any given

year. That means we could have a similar event next year, or even another one this year, but it shows just how large and how rare these events are expected to be. Through the course of the storm, it dumped a record amount of rainfall on North Carolina and South Carolina. Roads were shut down, millions of animals were killed,

and at least 46 people died in the process of the storm. We don't want to lose any more lives, and we mourn for them and their families. People had to be evacuated from rooftops. People were evacuated by boat. People had to be carried out of their homes. There was also a desperate rescue effort for pets. People were, you know, breaking down fences and doors to try to rescue animals. Two volunteers would get them out, opening the gate. Those dogs rescued right into the floodwaters, eager to get out. Come on, puppy. It's okay. Come on. If you imagine sort of a bird's eye view of some of the neighborhoods that were hit by floods, you'll see still water. You won't see roads or lawns. You'll just see the roofs of cars and sometimes just houses peeking out over the water.

Two o'clock this morning, I came down and we already had three inches of water inside the lower level of the church. And while it looks calm and tranquil, that water is actually quite dangerous because it's soaked with a lot of hazardous chemicals and toxic waste. North Carolina is a major livestock state. And it is second only to Iowa in terms of hog production. It's the third largest poultry state in the country. And all those animals produce a good amount of waste. And that waste gets concentrated in these lagoons.

These are pits that are lined with clay. They're about eight feet deep. They smell awful. The neighbors hate them. But what they do is they allow bacteria to help break down the waste into forms that are less hazardous, and then eventually you can use that waste to be fertilizer. The problem is that these are open pits, so they're designed to accommodate a certain amount of rainfall, but when you get the overwhelming rainfall that we saw with Hurricane Florence, they can overtop and allow untreated animal waste into the water. Eastern North Carolina has 3,300 of those hog waste pools.

The state tonight confirms spills from two of them with another 20 or so that are close to overflowing. And that's just as disgusting as it sounds. There's a risk of bacterial infection and it's just gross and smelly. In fact, there are some satellite photos that you can see the runoff from the storm reaching the ocean. The runoff comes from many different sources, but some of it will inevitably include waste from the pigs. And that kind of illustrates just how much waste is being channeled into the ocean and into the ecosystem. So you're just saying there's a whole lot of shit running off into the ocean. There's a lot of shit in the water. This waste can be cleaned up, but it's going to be very expensive. It's going to be tedious. I mean, this is hazardous waste. So people are

going to have to wear protective equipment when they try to clean it up. Properties are going to be very well damaged. And then there's going to be some whole bunch of issues about liability. A lot of folks are going to be concerned that the livestock industry didn't do a good job of containing their waste. And a lot of homeowners in the region are going to be trying to find out who has to pay for some of that damage. So there's going to be some finger pointing. There's going to be some direction of blame here as well and a lot of environmental groups are saying this is something that the state should have seen coming the other issue is that many of these

lagoons are near waterways because you know animals need to drink water so they build a lot of these farms and facilities near sources of water which also happen to be sources that people drink from so there is that risk of contamination that's there. Another source of contamination is coal ash. That's been a big concern in North Carolina. Coal power plants, after they burn coal, they leave behind unburned material that can contain heavy metals like mercury. It can also contain radioactive material as well.

And that's toxic and dangerous for human health. They store this waste in ponds and basins. They store coal ash in ponds? These are artificial ponds. Okay. Yeah, these are basically— Created for the coal ash. Created specifically to store coal ash, correct.

Duke Energy, which is the utility that actually operates many of these coal plants and owns the 31 ash disposal sites, they're in the process of actually relocating these ash basins into more permanent storage sites in landfills. But it turns out that one of these landfills actually saw a breach during the storm. It's under construction and that exposed part was eroded by the storm waters and it caused an ash spill. Now, the company says that the spill has been cleaned up and they don't detect any contamination, but environmental groups are saying that you won't know until the storm waters actually recede just how bad the damage has been. So some of this toxic waste might still be contaminating walls and floors and lawns, or some of the dangerous bacteria might be

on a lot of food products, or mold may be growing on a lot of homes. And so that's going to be probably one of the lingering impacts of this storm is just the environmental health consequences of this storm. This is similar to what we kind of saw in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria last year. Like most of the devastation happened after the storm had already passed, after the infrastructure had failed, after water pumps shut off and people had to drink water from contaminated sources. It's not likely to be as devastating in the Carolinas as it was in Puerto Rico because, you know, the energy system is still there, the infrastructure there is better, and the response has been more robust so far. But that's still a risk.

Sea level rise is always an ingredient in these coastal storms. Before then-hurricane Florence made landfall, scientists crunched more than a century of historical ocean data for the Carolinas. They say water levels there are roughly half a foot higher now compared to 1900. That's making Florence and other recent storms worse. One in five of the homes that were flooded by Florence would not have been flooded were it not for sea level rise. The sea levels have risen about six inches since the 1970s across the coasts of the Carolinas. That's because of the

water levels getting higher, but it's also because the land is subsiding a little bit on the coast as well as people develop and the land kind of sinks underneath. Shouldn't North Carolina have known that all of this was possible? Yes, they should have. And in fact, in a lot of ways they did, but they chose to ignore it. Back in 2012, the state passed House Bill 819, which banned using accelerated sea level rise projections stemming from climate change in planning and in projections. This came after the state did a study that found that if you take into account climate change, coastal areas in North Carolina would be inundated with 39 inches of sea level rise by 2100. And instead, the state decided that they wanted to use a projection that only found

about eight inches of sea level rise. So if you don't like the outcome, legislate against it. Was that a hotly contested piece of legislation? Oh yeah, it was also heavily mocked as well. Stephen Colbert did a whole bit on this. If your science gives you a result that you don't like, pass a law saying that the result is illegal. Problem solved. I think we should start applying this

method to even more things that we don't want to happen. For example, I don't want to die. Basically, the issue was that if you take into account sea level rise, if you take into account the future impacts of climate change, a lot of expensive coastal properties become really hard to insure. Nobody wants to pay for something that they know is probably going to end up underwater. And in order to prevent that, in order to keep their economy viable, and in order to keep people

building and developing in these expensive areas, they had to come up with a scenario that essentially said everything is going to be fine for the time being. And that's the way they did that. So you're talking about economic viability. How much is Hurricane Florence going to cost North Carolina? Last year was one of the most expensive disaster years in U.S. history. And right now we're still, like I said, trying to grapple with the full extent of the storm. We won't know the full extent of the damage until the waters recede, but—

The storm's still happening. The storm's still happening, yeah. The remnants of it are still hitting this coast. And Moody's Analytics estimated that Florence would cost about $44 billion in damages and lost output. So it would put it in the top 10 most devastating hurricanes in U.S. history. Has anyone spoken out since Florence and saying like, oh yeah, we screwed the pooch there. We're going to have to reassess. I mean a lot of people are pointing back to that bill as an example of North Carolina and just many states' short-sightedness in terms of how they develop. It's a case study and maybe it's a little bit unfair to pick on North Carolina because a lot of states have made certain decisions or bets that essentially they're going to make trade-offs for short-term benefits against long-term potential harms. And that's something that, you know,

a lot of the country can learn from. I mean, plugging your ears and closing your eyes and saying, la, la, la, doesn't really fix the problem. And it's something that you will have to pay for one way or another. And eventually people are going to ask, you know, is it worth paying to continually rebuild in these vulnerable areas? As a society, they have to decide, you know, is this where we want to place our bets? Are we going to be planting our flag against nature and say that we're going to fight the next storm no matter what? Or are we going to make a measured retreat? Are we going to effectively give up to a certain extent?

Umair Irfan reports on the environment for Vox. Turns out, the United States government actually has a program where it'll pay you to save your own life, your family, your property. That's next on Today Explained. Okay, Izzy, yesterday we tried to get you to buy a Quip electric toothbrush at getquip.com slash explain in a minute. I think we failed miserably. I think we could maybe do a bit better today. Yes.

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I guess I need to upgrade my phone to have more room for all these podcasts. That's right. What do you got? What do you got there? I got a 10. Upgrade your 10? That's ridiculous. When people think about how we deal with floods, people tend to think about putting houses on stilts or building walls that block out the water. Managed retreat is one alternative to that. Miyuki Hino is a researcher at Stanford, and she wrote about this plan to battle rising, unreliable oceans and save lives and homes for Vox.

It's called Managed Retreat. Managed Retreat is purposefully moving people and things out of the most dangerous places where we know there's a high risk from flooding so that the land might flood, but there are no lives or houses in danger. So another name for Managed Retreat could be like, get out of the way. Yes, I often refer to it as moving out of harm's way, because that's absolutely what we're doing. How did you get into this jam? I was working in climate change adaptation consulting. So we would have clients that maybe were a city government or a transportation agency, and we would be helping them think through what's vulnerable.

So, you know, do you have really low-lying roads or wastewater treatment plants, and how can you manage those things? I felt like managed retreat was the elephant in the room that nobody wanted to talk about. It's such a challenging thing to grapple with, both politically, psychologically, financially, but it also seems like it could open the door for a lot of people. It sounds really simple, but in practice, it's really quite complicated to do. There's a lot of moving parts when you're trying to take land that used to have a building or house on it and turn it back into open space. First of all, the homeowner, whoever owns the house, their family, they have to be on board.

You also have to have money to do it. And so typically, the federal government is usually involved in funding it. So they've got to be willing to spend the money there. And then the last piece is the local government. So to do this kind of land use change intervention, the local government has to be willing to take the money from the federal government, pay it to the homeowner, take down the house and restore that land to open space. So there's three steps. First step is homeowner is willing to do this. Second step is government is willing to fund it. Third step is local government is willing to take federal government's

money. Yes, those are the three big pieces that have to be in place. In practice, it happens in weird orders sometimes. So sometimes it's the federal government and the local government see the need and they're going to come offer you money for your house, even if you haven't reached out for it. Okay. In other cases, households and communities come together and say, we really want this. And they push the local and the federal government to put together a managed retreat program for them. Has that happened? Has a community come together and said, like, listen, our entire neighborhood, our entire city, town wants wants to get out of Dodge and get away from the water.

It has happened. There are several villages in Alaska that have voted collectively to move, and they're still looking for funding to make that happen. There's another community in southern Louisiana that also has decided as a group to relocate, and they recently got money from the federal government to start that process. Even after Hurricane Sandy on Staten Island, there were a couple of parts that got hit really badly by Sandy that came together and said, we want to buy out. And they really pushed for the state and federal governments to put together money to

purchase a lot of their homes. And I think several hundred homes ended up being purchased and restored to open space as a result of that. What's the financial calculus here? I mean, how does managed retreat, taking an entire community and relocating it and sort of raising that community down to what it was before it existed compared to, say, flood walls and putting houses on stilts and those kinds of measures? There's a pretty substantial upfront cost because you're purchasing a lot of land and you're taking down a lot of houses. But after that, you don't have to pay anything. It's done. It's done, right? The land can flood. There's nothing there. In the other cases where you're building a big

flood wall or a levee, you're investing in that infrastructure consistently over time. Over 30 years or so, the option of managed retreat actually looks very good financially. And actually, there have been a couple of FEMA studies that have gone back in communities where they have bought out houses. They'll look at the floods that have happened in those places and said, how much damage would have occurred if we hadn't bought out those homes? And in those studies, they found that we're actually saving three to four dollars for every dollar we spend buying out a property. Right. But how do you tell someone who moved to the coast whose life is the coast that they're going to have to leave the coast?

Like I moved to Miami Beach for the beach. Yeah, I think that challenge is really real and nobody wants to be in that position. I don't want to be in that position. I can't imagine any local planner or engineer wanting to be in that situation. quite gotten to yet is starting the conversation early. So let's not wait until you've just been flooded to talk to you about buying your house and having you move somewhere else. Let's start this conversation when you're not really stressed out and when you're not scrambling to find the place where you're going to sleep tomorrow night. Let that conversation evolve over time. People can prepare for it, think harder about where they would move to if that were going to happen, make that process just much less daunting for the people going through it. Certainly, the goal is not to get into a situation where there's eminent domain, where there's threats, where there's forcing people out of their homes.

I think it's just more having a conversation that's ongoing and that allows people to reach whatever decision is best for them. When you mentioned this to people, managed retreat, this federally funded option, how do they react? One issue I often hear is people saying, we would never do managed retreat. We would never abandon this town and let it fall into the ocean. If I could tell people one thing about Manage Retreat, it would be that it's not all about loss. And it might sound that way because retreat is in the name, but it really isn't. I think if you're the head of a family that has gone through multiple flood episodes where you've had to evacuate, you've

been worried about your kids getting sick in a moldy house, you've gone through a painful rebuilding process multiple times, it's certainly scary and it's a huge ask for people to confront those kinds of changes, but it also is opportunity for a lot of people. Sea level rise is a real threat. The most recent national climate assessment has an intermediate estimate of three feet by the end of the century, going up to close to six feet by the end of the century. And I think there's a benefit in letting it be a tool in their toolbox as they think about how to manage the impacts of sea level rise. Miyuki Hino is a researcher at Stanford University. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Another day, another failed opportunity to buy a Quip electric toothbrush in under a minute.

We'll try again tomorrow. In the meantime, a reminder that Quip subscription is built for your dental health. It delivers you new brush heads every three months for just $5, including free shipping worldwide. The brushes start at $25 at getquip, G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained.