Florence’s Floods Reveal Exposure of Rural Areas to Climate Change

The severity of Hurricane Florence’s destruction caught some residents here by surprise, and they said local officials are overwhelmed, too. The storm’s devastating flooding is a sign that coastal states should prepare for future hurricanes to hit harder—and differently—than they have in the past, according to experts who study climate change. For now, few cities or counties have begun adapting to storms that promise to be wetter, from rain and higher seas, because it’s hard to believe such extreme conditions could be common enough to plan for, said Sarah Watson of the Carolinas Integrated Science & Assessments and the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium. Florence’s rainfall hit especially hard because the region was already saturated by an unusually wet summer. North and South Carolina broke their annual rainfall records, joining Texas and Hawaii to make four new state records in the past year, according to The Washington Post.“Our challenge is trying to manage the everyday [weather] that suddenly seems completely out of character,” Watson said. “The afternoon thunderstorm that sits over a localized area and drops 6 inches of rain in two hours—you can’t adapt to that. You can’t build infrastructure to manage that. Even if you could, you couldn’t afford it.”