The trends suggest that the climate is warming, and whether you believe it’s happening because of man’s carbon footprint or naturally, the response should be one of preparing for the worst.
In our cover story, Fixing Flood Insurance, we deliver the latest on the troubled National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and the problems that plague it, namely an accumulated debt of nearly $25 billion.
We switch gears in The Creeping Disaster and talk about devastating drought and how Texas dealt with it in 2011 and 2012. We also try to explain some of the weather phenomena in the discussion with Mathias Collins, a hydrologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Collins, our Major Player, studied stream gauges from the last 100 years in the Northeast and found a trend toward more frequent floods of greater magnitude. It was an interesting discussion about future models and climate change, all of which is to say, we’re not sure what will happen in the future but according to the models, we have more flooding to look forward to.
And drought too. A warming climate means more flooding and also more drought — and not necessarily in different regions. That’s because warmer winters and springs tend to produce more flash floods in the spring, and without means to reduce runoff and capture water, that could mean drier summers.
A study by a World Bank economist projected costs of flooding to grow from $6 billion to $1 trillion by 2050. That doesn’t bode well for the NFIP unless it is reformed, which is the subject of Fixing Flood Insurance.
The Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 attempted to do what’s needed: make flood insurance costs reflect risk. But the results proved too drastic and legislators backtracked and instead came up with the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2013, which President Barack Obama signed in March.
The new law gives FEMA a chance to work on affordability and buys some time, although true reform is probably still far in the offing.
The Creeping Disaster outlines the various communications and actions that take place before and during a long-term drought. You see all the different entities involved when it comes to addressing such a scenario, and the various hazards that can spring from drought. We hope we provided some lessons learned in this article and the others as well.
It is not enough to prepare for what we think may happen as evidenced by recent storms. Emergency managers know they have to go beyond that, and some of that means taking a changing climate into account.
