America’s Flood Mitigation Math Problem

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1:54Podcasts. Radio. News. I was out in Kerrville and Kerr County. That's our reporter, Kara Carlson, who's based in Texas. She's been speaking with people who survived the flooding in Texas on July 4th. And one story in particular has stayed with her. I have this thing about watching storms, interactive maps. It really struck me. She was actually up, you know, watching the storm, watching a lot of the alerts, and was still really caught off guard in a lot of ways. I was really watching where the lightning was striking because it was intense. It was scary. It was like really close. So I went outside and I noticed the water in the driveway was about a foot high.

2:43And I thought, oh, that's weird. I've never seen that before. Rena Bailey lives in Hunt, a small community by the side of the Guadalupe River in Texas's hill country. She lives in a house that was built in 1923. It survived other floods, many other floods. Hunt is mostly a rural area, with hills and farmland and wineries, a place Kara says many Texans visit as a summer getaway. It's a little better climate in the summer than a lot of other areas in Texas. It's kind of an idyllic area on the river, generally. But some of the things that make this part of hill country so idyllic also make it risky.

3:23They call this area of Texas Flash Flood Alley because the steep terrain, shallow soil, and intense storms make it exceptionally prone to flash floods. I think what most people are thinking of when they hear flash flooding is maybe stay off the roads, you know, stay out of certain areas. They aren't necessarily expecting it to come to them. Rena was used to floods, but she was shocked to see the flood water in her driveway in the early morning hours of July 4th. And then the water kept rising. All of a sudden it jumped up. And I saw the hunt store and her start to disintegrate. I saw the post office start to disintegrate.

4:05The office next to it. And then this wall of water. She saw the water sweep their truck away. Her husband was still asleep. I went and woke him up. And when he saw it, it was coming up the steps. like, there it was. And he said, we have to get out of here. Rena wears a back brace, and she says she sometimes has trouble walking. So her husband helped her out through a window and across their yard, towards a narrow gap in the fence. There's a seven-foot concrete wall, and there's a metal fence, a gap that wide. That gap hadn't been there, really did. The official death toll has risen to over 100 people, including dozens of children, most of whom were at Camp Mystic.

4:58Over 100 people from Kerr County are still missing. The Baileys made it to higher ground. They climbed the hill behind their house and headed for a log cabin on their property where they could take shelter and wait out the storm. In the wake of the floods, dozens of stories like Rina's are emerging. Stories of families barely managing to evade danger, who were woken up in the middle of the night by thunder, or by their dogs barking, or by their neighbors, but not by an official warning system. These accounts are raising questions about why Kerr County residents were caught so off guard, and what, if anything, could have been done to save more lives.

5:38Should there have been a slightly different alert? Should the campgrounds maybe have been evacuated sooner? You know, there's a lot of unanswered questions that are still being looked into. Questions that have repercussions far beyond Kirk County, as storms become more intense, more deadly, and more frequent due to climate change.

5:58I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, what the floods in Texas reveal about the growing risk of flash floods as the climate changes, and the difficult economic choices facing communities that are grappling with these new risks. Flooding is the most expensive natural disaster we face. Joshua Sachs is the director of the Adaptation Program at the Georgetown Climate Center. And it can destroy communities. It not only impacts loss of life, but someone's home traditionally is their majority of their wealth. As we have warmer temperatures, the atmosphere can hold more water, more moisture.

6:42And so then when you have these storms, they're able to dump more rain. Zahra Hirji covers climate for Bloomberg, and she spends a lot of time thinking about how our understanding of risk is currently evolving in a warming world. So Texas is actually a state that has a ton of resources. It has one of the best emergency response offices and teams and capabilities in the country. Most states are not like Texas. Zara says Texas is the gold standard when it comes to its emergency response capabilities. But it also faces a wide variety of disaster risks, from hurricanes to extreme heat. And even if it has a lot of money to spend on disaster response, it faces difficult choices about how to spend it.

7:26And on the ground, localities face their own budgetary tradeoffs. We know, for example, that Kerr County considered installing a warning system that could have involved sirens in high-risk areas, but it didn't. We have heard from officials in Texas that one of the reasons why they had not built a flood detection warning system in this area, say in Kerr County, where some of the worst flooding was, is because of the cost, right? So it was Care County Judge Rob Kelly who told the New York Times that local residents whose taxes wound up to fund such a system balked at it. How much does it cost to develop a really effective early warning system for these emergencies?

8:10I think it depends on the community and the type of warning and the type of area that you're trying to cover. But obviously it's an expense and every local government and state government has a lot of things on their plate. And I'll say mitigation often falls to the bottom of that. There are traditionally federal grant programs that communities or individuals can apply for. Joshua Sachs again. Like putting their homes higher up or elevating their homes or elevating air conditioners, water heaters, things like that. Sometimes there are state grants, but for the most part, people and communities are having to ask the government for money.

8:51And there isn't nearly enough money to go around to solve all the problems we're facing. Zahra says at this point, federal government funding has become more and more integral to emergency management efforts. And it really speaks to what's at stake. If the Trump administration kind of pulls back on this funding earlier this year, There are a couple of times when the Trump administration paused a huge number of federal grants, specifically FEMA. And these are grants that are tied to this mitigation, this resiliency, this prep. All of this, worsening storms, the challenges and costs of investing in better infrastructure, has also made the predictive data we get from the National Weather Service even more critical.

9:35The service is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They're the ones that track environmental disasters and put out weather advisories and warnings. NOAA has a responsibility, especially through the National Weather Service, to put out a series of, one would say, progressively more action-oriented messages. Rick Spinrad served as the head of NOAA until January of this year. He says those action-oriented messages include the watches and warnings you get on your phone or in weather apps. A flood watch did go out for Kerrville for the Guadalupe River at 1.18 p.m. local time on July 3rd.

10:17And a flash flood warning, signaling that the hazardous weather event is imminent or already happening, went out about 12 hours later. It was tagged considerable, meaning it automatically triggered wireless emergency alerts on mobile devices. That particular warning included phrases that this was going to be a considerable and catastrophic event. That is the cue to emergency managers to start getting people to evacuate, to start pre-positioning materials and personnel and equipment needed to protect people from the event. The most perfect forecast is only as good as how it is implemented by the ones who need to use it.

11:05To make sure these forecasts reach the local officials in charge of making public safety decisions, there are Warning Coordination Meteorologists, or WCMs. WCMs. The WCM doesn't wait for the phone to ring, but actually gets out there and begins the discussion and ensures that all of the sheriff's offices and rescue companies and emergency managers are online with him or her. They know the nature of the alert that went out, and they are there to tell them what they think is going to happen with respect to the river levels, increased precipitation, win, that kind of thing. It's too early to know exactly what might have made a difference for the flood victims.

11:47There are still questions about how local officials responded, and reporting is ongoing. But there was no WCM in the forecast office for the area that flooded. He left his position in April. He took an early retirement offered by the Trump administration as it moved to cut NOAA's staff and its budget. It's disturbing to know that in the San Antonio-Austin WFO, The WCM position is vacant because that person left the agency as a result of the cuts and I would say coerced retirements that the administration put on the weather service. The legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, Tom Faye, told NBC News that while the San Antonio Weather Forecasting Office did have vacancies in two of its top positions, it was down a WCM and a permanent science officer, The offices in the area had, quote, adequate staffing and resources to respond to this event.

12:48What happened in Texas is it happened in the middle of the night. And it happened in an area that doesn't have great or extensive cell coverage. My colleague Zahra Hirji, again. So even if warnings had gone out and alerts had gone out to people's phones, maybe they didn't get it and they didn't hear it. And you can imagine if there was a siren that went off, that is something that someone who is camping would have noticed versus a buzz on their phone if that buzz ever happened. At a press conference on Tuesday, four days after the disaster, as rescue and recovery efforts were underway, Governor Greg Abbott wasn't inclined to discuss what, if anything, he believes went wrong in preparing Kirk County for this flood.

13:33Who's to blame? Know this. That's the word choice of losers. Let me explain one thing about Texas. And that is Texas, every square inch of our state, cares about football. You could be in Hunt, Texas, Huntsville, Texas, Houston, Texas, any size community, they care about football. And know this, every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who's to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, don't worry about it, man. We got this. We're going to make sure that we go score again, that we're going to win this game. Texas officials say the state legislature is planning a special session later this month to discuss flood warning systems, flood emergency communications, and natural disaster preparedness.

14:23They'll also consider relief funding for the Hill Country. So what communities are most vulnerable to flooding in the U.S.? And what can they do to protect themselves? That's after the break. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful.

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16:54One of the main tools that communities in the U.S. have to understand their flood risk are maps made by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 2019, FEMA estimated that over 8 million properties are at risk for severe flooding from what's known as a once-in-a-hundred flooding event. My colleague Zahra Hirjis, says those maps are used for everything from emergency planning to calculating flood insurance premiums for millions of people all across the country. But calculating the true level of risk out there is complicated. One of the things that's changing with climate change is places that haven't even flooded historically, like places in Kentucky, have experienced flooding that they never even thought was possible.

17:38And so you're having more places effectively become like Kear County. Updating these maps to match our evolving climate is possible, but it takes investment in technology and research. Some private companies, like First Street, which does climate risk financial modeling, have more up-to-date flood maps. In 2020, First Street released a report identifying nearly 6 million additional properties nationwide that were at the level of risk that FEMA considers severe. A total of 14.6 million. It is rarely a surprise when a flood hits a place. That's Joshua Sachs from the Georgetown Climate Center again.

18:18The issue is simply, when are we going to start as a country to act on these things? When are we going to take this knowledge and build it into public policy? To address these climate impacts, to make ourselves safer, is going to cost an inordinate amount of money and require some levels of personal sacrifice. Some people who may not want to move are going to have to move. Some road segments that flood regularly might have to be abandoned. And these are not popular choices. That's because those individual sacrifices can also have consequences for the whole community. A locality cares about its property value.

18:58If they encourage people to move out of beachfront property, they might be hurting their own revenue. Or there are other people who live in flood-prone areas who simply can't afford to go somewhere else. Their home is their only asset. And until the government or someone decides to step in and help them, they're stuck. Every time you see communities try to adopt new flood maps and higher flood standards, there is always at least a part of the community that fights against it. If a vulnerable community does acknowledge its risk and encourages people to relocate en masse, that can drive down housing prices in riskier areas and drive up demand in safer ones.

19:40And for those who stay, it can become more costly and more difficult to get insurance. We can see this if we look at places like the Outer Banks and the Carolinas and how homes are falling into the ocean. We can see this if we look into what people call the insurance crisis, of how insurers are pulling out of homeowner insurance because they're finding the risk is too severe to cover. This has put pressure on the federal government itself to offer flood insurance. That's the program Zara was talking about earlier. Congress created the Federal Flood Insurance Program in 1968, basically because the private insurance for flooded risk failed and private insurers pulled out of that hazard.

20:27They said, we're not going to cover this anymore because they didn't feel like they could price policies affordably enough for most of the homeowners who are in that area of risk. And we've seen federal flood insurance rates go up because it turns out the risk is really high. And one of the problems is there have been so much flooding, and so they've had to make so many payouts that they've run out of money. And they keep having to go to Congress and say, we need more money. So it's not a sustainable program, and you can sort of understand how and why the insurance market got out of it. There are ways to reduce those risks, which brings us back to mitigation.

21:08Zara says research shows spending more upfront money on mitigation turns out to be significantly cheaper in the long run. In 2019, there was a report that was partially funded by FEMA and the federal government looking specifically at mitigation. It was called the Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves 2019 report. And it had found that every$1 in federal grant money spent on hazard mitigation saves$6 in disaster damages in the future. The cost of cleaning up a disaster like the flooding in central Texas can be staggering. A preliminary estimate from AccuWeather Inc. puts the total damage and economic loss from the floods in Texas in a range of$18 billion to$22 billion.

21:56And more than that, the return on investment is even higher for federal grant spending on riverine flooding mitigation. So I'm talking about the mitigation that would specifically go towards helping or preventing the type of event we saw in Texas. And so in that case, by granting$11.5 billion to help states build up river defenses between 1993 to 2016, the federal government and society at large avoided$82 billion in losses from deaths, from likely flooded damage, from business disruptions associated with the flood. So as the study author, one of the study authors of that report told me, mitigation or preparedness saves lives.

22:41And he didn't say this, but what's clear is it also very much saves money.

22:50This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. The show is hosted by me, David Gurra, Juan Ha, and Saleha Mosen. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patty Hirsch, Rachel Lewis-Kriske, Naomi Ng, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Sugiura, Julia Weaver, Yang Yang, and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday.

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