Category: Environment

NEW YORK — In Louisiana and Mississippi, nearly 1 million people lack electricity and drinking water after a hurricane obliterated power lines. In California, wildfire menaces Lake Tahoe, forcing tens of thousands to flee. In Tennessee, flash floods killed at least 20; hundreds more perished in a heat wave in the Northwest. And in New York City, 7 inches of rain fell in just hours Wednesday, drowning people in their basements.

Disasters cascading across the country this summer have exposed a harsh reality: The United States is not ready for the extreme weather that is now becoming frequent as a result of a warming planet.

“These events tell us we’re not prepared,” said Alice Hill, who oversaw planning for climate risks on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “We have built our cities, our communities, to a climate that no longer exists.”

In remarks Thursday, President Joe Biden acknowledged the challenge ahead.

“And to the country, the past few days of Hurricane Ida and the wildfires in the West and the unprecedented flash floods in New York and New Jersey is yet another reminder that these extreme storms and the climate crisis are here,” said Biden, who noted that a $1 trillion infrastructure bill pending in Congress includes some money to gird communities against disasters. “We need to do — be better prepared. We need to act.”

The country faces two separate but interlaced problems, according to climate and resilience experts.

First, governments have not spent enough time and money to brace for climate shocks that have long been predicted: everything from maintaining and fortifying electrical lines and stormwater systems to clearing forests of undergrowth in order to reduce the ferocity of wildfires.

“We’re feeling all the effects of that deferred maintenance,” said Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But there’s a second, more sobering lesson: There are limits to how much the country, and the world, can adapt. And if nations don’t do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change, they may soon run up against the outer edges of resilience.

“If we already can’t cope with where we are, then there’s little hope that it’s going to improve in a warming climate,” Dahl said.

The country’s vulnerability in the face of extreme weather was punctuated by the downpour that flooded the country’s largest city. New York City has invested billions of dollars in storm protection since Hurricane Sandy in 2012 — investments that seemed to do little to blunt the impact of the deluge.

Rain poured down in furious torrents, turning the subway system into a kind of flume ride. Central Park recorded 7.19 inches of rain, nearly double the previous record set in 1927 for the same date, according to the National Weather Service, which issued the city’s first-ever flash flood emergency alert.

Before the storm, city and state officials activated preparation plans — clearing drains, erecting flood barriers in the subway and other sensitive areas, and warning the public. But the rainfall dumped more water, and faster, than what the city had factored into its new stormwater maps as an “extreme” flood event.

The pattern of damage reflects the relationship between climate exposure and racial inequality: Impacts were more apparent in low-income communities of color, which, because of historic inequalities, are more prone to flooding, receive less maintenance from city services, and frequently experience lax housing code enforcement.

Most of those killed in New York City drowned when floodwaters rushed into their basement apartments. Many such apartments do not meet safety requirements but have proliferated as affordable housing for the working poor and immigrants living in the city illegally, who may fear complaining to authorities about safety violations.

In one case, Tara Ramskriet, 43, and her son Nick, 22, drowned when water filled their basement apartment in the Hollis section of Queens so quickly that family members could not pull them out against the flow, and a wall collapsed, trapping them inside.

Neighbors were outraged, saying it took fatalities to bring city inspectors to the scene.

“This happens all the time,” said Jennifer Mooklal, 33, who lives across the street from the Ramskriets. “Even if it’s just rain, our basement gets flooded. We’ve been dealing with this problem for years and have been asking the city, but no one is listening to us.”

Damage from extreme weather, and threats to human life, will only increase as the planet warms. For every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming, the atmosphere holds about 7% more moisture, scientists have found. That means much heavier rainfall when storms do occur.

Across the continental United States, the heaviest downpours have become more frequent and severe, according to the federal government’s National Climate Assessment. The Northeast has seen 50% more rainfall during the heaviest storms compared with the first half of the 20th century.

New York City is particularly vulnerable to flooding. Three-fourths of the city is covered by impervious surfaces like asphalt, which means runoff is channeled into streets and sewers rather than being absorbed by the ground.

And the city’s century-old subway system was not designed for a warming climate. Even on dry days, a network of pumps pours out 14 million gallons of water from its tunnels and stations. Heavy rains can overwhelm the system, as they did on Wednesday.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has invested $2.6 billion in resiliency projects since Hurricane Sandy inundated the city’s subways in 2012, including fortifying 3,500 subway vents, staircases and elevator shafts against flooding. Still, this week’s flash floods showed that the system remains vulnerable.

One reason is that city and federal officials focused on protecting against the kind of coastal storm surge that Sandy wrought, according to Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design, a nonprofit group that works on climate resilience.

But in the case of Hurricane Ida, the main threat was rainwater flowing downhill, not storm surge pushing in from the coast. So much water fell that it overwhelmed storm drains, overflowed riverbanks and poured into basements, from the hilly parts of Manhattan’s Washington Heights to the inland flats of Jamaica in Queens.

The investments that protect against storm surge differ from those that guard against extreme rain, Chester said.

Coping with severe rainfall means more places to absorb and hold water, whether with so-called green solutions like parks, or traditional structures like underground retention tanks. And it means increasing the capacity of the sewer system to handle a greater volume of water.

Because New York has mostly been spared the type of severe rainfall that occurred Wednesday, officials have made it less of a priority.

Other countries have heeded the warnings of climate scientists and acted.

In the Netherlands, where much of the country lies below sea level, the government strengthened flood design standards and in 2007 created a program called Room for the River, which in essence authorized the wholesale redesign and rebuilding of dozens of vulnerable watersheds around cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The goal was to prepare for the sort of one-in-10,000-year floods that Dutch scientists were warning might become more frequent.

In that country, government water boards have the ultimate authority over land use. If they determine an area is needed for flood protection, its residents must move.

Specific taxes are dedicated to water management. There is no National Flood Insurance Program for residents in flood zones in the Netherlands because, the Dutch argue, the government’s job is to protect people from floods, not help homeowners rebuild in areas vulnerable to damage.

Among other things, Room for the River created dozens of new parks, enhancing underserved neighborhoods, resettling populations living in flood zones into new homes out of harm’s way, and girding the nation’s economy in the process.

In the United States, efforts to protect U.S. cities from damage by severe storms and rising seas have been plodding. There are many reasons, including government reluctance to impose on private property, a legacy of racial and economic injustice, and a system of governance and regulation that often moves far slower than the hastening pace of climate change.

Jainey Bavishi, director of New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, said the city has spent more than $20 billion on resilience since Sandy, and that work also includes some protections against extreme rainfall in addition to storm surge.

The city is about to break ground on a stormwater retention system in Queens. And various other programs have been created to soak up more rainfall: incentives to cover roofs and traffic medians with grass, rain gardens and other more permeable surfaces to slow down and absorb rainwater.

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which handles drainage and sewage, has been quietly working on upgrades for the system, improving and widening the catchment basins under storm grates, designing new systems to separate stormwater runoff from sewage, and even rushing out before storms to unclog drains.

But stormwater upgrades for the entire city amount to a massive, multiyear and multibillion-dollar project. It hasn’t attracted federal attention and support, particularly under former President Donald Trump when climate change preparation was not a priority. So far, officials have upgraded the stormwater capacity of just a fraction of the city.

The rules that govern federal disaster money have also complicated the city’s efforts to deal with extreme rain. Of the $20 billion that New York City has spent on resilience since Sandy, $15 billion came from the federal government, and much of that money had to be linked to Sandy, which meant focusing on storm surge and sea-level rise, Bavishi said.

“We know that intense precipitation is a risk,” she said. “Last night’s storm underscored that cities need access to proactive federal funding to get this work done.”

Even with the right projects designed and funding in hand, climate change is outpacing the speed at which American communities can fortify themselves.

“It’s happening faster than we’ve anticipated,” said Dahl of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who is 43. “I didn’t expect all of this to happen at this point in my lifetime.”

© 2021 The New York Times Company

Before the ravenous Caldor fire laid siege to South Lake Tahoe, California’s top firefighting priority lay just to the north, where the Dixie fire scorched more land than any other single fire in state history. Together, the two behemoths have already blackened more than 1m acres (4,000 sq km) along the Sierra Nevada range. And fire season in the American west is just heating up.

The climate crisis has helped create extreme fire emergencies, with huge, rapid-moving blazes tearing through a hot, parched landscape at lightning speed. Fires have hopped granite summits firefighters had hoped would slow their spread. Blazes have displayed erratic burn behavior, making their movements hard to predict.

The extreme conditions raise fresh questions about the ability of the country’s firefighting forces to control an emergency that has grown exponentially bigger year after year.

Roughly 27,000 firefighters have been deployed across the west this summer, according to officials. Local crews have received support from federal agencies, firefighters from other states, soldiers and national guardsmen.

There is no official or expert estimate for how many firefighters are needed, but it is clear their numbers have fallen short. More than 8,200 first responders battled to stop California’s Dixie and Caldor fires. They were armed with dozens of helicopters, hundreds of dozers and a multitude of equipment. While there have been wins and important progress made, neither fire has been contained.

Once-in-a-career blazes become routine

For the first time in its history, California’s fire agency, Cal Fire, in the 2020-2021 fiscal year was on track to spend more than $3bn fighting wildfires, according to a report from the California legislative analyst’s office released last autumn.

Since 2012, fire suppression costs in the state have risen sharply each year. With more resources needed to battle the blazes, there have been fewer available for preventing them. Firefighters are seeing the effects of a system under pressure on the ground.

Over the last six years, the work of fire crews has changed drastically as the frequency, quantity, and size of the fires have gotten worse, according to Tony Martinez, a Cal Fire captain who has worked with the agency for 28 years.

Once-in-a-career blazes of years past had become the norm, Martinez said.

In the past months, fire crews have been repeatedly reassigned, moving from one fire to the next as new ignitions take place. Difficult decisions have had to be made. Protecting human life is always the top priority followed by saving structures, and sometimes that has meant ceding acreage in mountains and forests.

“Firefighting resources are scarce,” said Isaac Sanchez, a battalion chief of communications with Cal Fire. “But we still have a responsibility to attack the new fire or respond to the new 911 phone call.”

During last year’s record-breaking fire season, when more than 4.2m acres across California burned, Cal Fire reported that the scarcity of fire crews was one of the greatest challenges faced by incident commanders. “The lack of crews became a significant operational liability,” officials wrote in a siege report on the harrowing year. “The mutual aid system in California was stretched to its limits as fires burned up and down the state.

“The destruction of watersheds, communities, lives and livelihoods was profound,” the report continued. “In the short term, air quality across much of the state was abysmal. In some areas, the sun was blotted out by smoke, making mid-summer temperatures feel akin to the dead of winter.”

Related: ‘We do it together’: how a Lake Tahoe community prepared to flee the Caldor fire

Burns this year are outpacing last year’s devastating season. In addition to 15 large blazes in California, firefighters are battling 86 others across the US.

A strain on firefighters’ health

The state of California has increased funding and expanded its hiring in recent years. Cal Fire added close to 3,000 temporary firefighters to its ranks last year and in March this year the governor approved $80.74m to add 1,399 mostly seasonal firefighter positions using emergency fund authorization. The state’s budget this year also includes $1bn to be spent over several years for wildfire prevention.

In addition, local firefighting crews have been reinforced by teams from out of state, the national guard and other state and local agencies. But firefighters still feel strained.

Martinez thinks Cal Fire is still understaffed. “The result of that falls on the shoulders of the firefighters on the ground.”

Sanchez said he thought current crew levels in California could manage the firefight ahead, and that crews and officials had prepared for the scale of the challenge. “But there are times when no matter what you do, depending on the conditions out there, fires are going to establish themselves and grow into the disasters we see now,” he said.

He added: “If I had it my way, of course I would have 10 times as many resources as we do now. But these are the number of resources,” Sanchez said. “They are finite.”

Sanchez said that the fatigue and emotional struggles among fire crews were real. He said he felt the same way. “The overall strain on wellbeing and energy levels is cumulative,” Sanchez continued. “It adds up and is certainly affecting folks as we speak.”

Contributing to the crunch is the Covid crisis. A 16-member Cal Fire strike team fighting the Caldor Fire had to be sidelined for two weeks, after the virus started spreading through its ranks.

Staff shortages on the federal level, too, are adding strain. US Forest Service (USFS) records showed that only half of fire engines were fully staffed at the start of the season. Martinez said the federal shortage put further strain on resources within California agencies. “We were warned before fire season started that the Forest Service has major shortages and people are quitting at higher rates than us,” he said.

“They told us that we are going to have more of a commitment because of their lack of resources,” he added. “It compounds.”

Internal USFS documents, reported on by the Pew Charitable Trusts non-profit newsroom Stateline, noted that a third of agency engines were understaffed. Staff positions went unfilled as low pay and low morale pushed more federal firefighters into other lines of work, the news report concluded. “The agency sought to fill 781 vacant permanent positions in California during spring hiring this year, according to the data. But it ended the hiring period with 725 vacancies. That’s a net gain of just 56 employees,” Stateline reported in July.

“During years of extreme drought and prolonged fire activity across the country, resources are stretched to their limits,” Babete Anderson, national press officer for the USFS, told the Guardian in a statement. “The firefighter staffing shortage is mainly caused by limited candidate pools and competition with state and private fire organizations in California that pay two to three times the base pay of federal firefighters.” The federal government, she added, had recently taken steps to support wildland firefighters while improving recruitment and retention efforts.

The federal government has made moves to increase firefighter pay, a step advocacy groups have called a good start. Last month, the USFS announced pay increases were coming and that firefighters wouldn’t make less than $15 an hour from 30 June to 31 December this year. The infrastructure package passed by Congress earlier this year also included $600m to raise wages by 50% and shift 1,000 seasonal positions to permanent.

According to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an organization of active and retired federal wildland firefighters, those pay increases aren’t sufficient. The increases falls “woefully short”, said Kelly Martin, the organization’s president, given “the extreme risk and consequences that firefighters face on the fireline”.

“Recruitment is very difficult because of the low wages and people can’t find housing,” Martin said. “We are seeing shortages – they just cannot fully staff to what is needed in a year like this.”

Organizations like Grassroots point out that the government still doesn’t recognize many federal workers battling wildfires as emergency responders; instead, it considers them forestry technicians, range technicians, miscellaneous administrators and resource specialists. The classification can mean those workers miss out on services and resources. The part-time nature of their employment also affects retirement and other benefits.

“We are at a turning point in the climate change battle and the demands on federal wildland firefighters at the frontline have become a year-round request,” the group wrote on its website. “The federal government has failed to keep pace with this changing dynamic and firefighters are left with increased mental illnesses, increased rates of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and pay that falls below minimum wages in many parts of the country.”

While staff shortages have made fighting fires harder, Martin emphasized that real investment was needed on the prevention side. Extreme fires will continue outpacing efforts to fight them, if more isn’t done to cull the dense, dry vegetation that fuels them.

“What we really have to think about is how we embrace and manage fire,” she said. “We have a dual need. We have to protect life and property but we have another need to put more good fire on the landscape and that’s where we are really short with resources, both from a fiscal and human capital standpoint.”