--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hurricane Florence has been making headlines for weeks, and it's still not over yet. The storm has dumped over 8 trillion gallons of water on North Carolina, causing widespread destruction and loss of life.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: About two weeks ago, Hurricane Florence started building up in the mid-Atlantic. The hurricane dumped about 8 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 breaking down fences and doors to try to rescue animals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Two volunteers would get them out, opening the gate. Those dogs rescued right into the floodwaters, eager to get out. 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 8 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 animals need to drink water.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Duke Energy, which is the utility that actually operates many of these coal plants and owns the 31 ash disposal sites they in the process of actually relocating these ash basins into more permanent storage sites in landfills
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 receive just how bad the damage has been.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 under the coast as well as people develop and the land kind of sinks underneath.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last year was one of the most expensive disaster years in US history. And right now we're still, like I said, trying to grapple with the full extent of the storm.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 US history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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, you know, North Carolina and just many states' short-sightedness in terms of how they develop.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 know, a lot of the country can learn from.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you okay is it yesterday we tried to get you to buy a quip electric toothbrush at getquip slash explain in a minute. I think we failed miserably.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think we could maybe do a bit better today. Yes. Let me know when you get to getquip.com slash explain and I'll start the clock.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm already there and I clicked on shop. So I'm at the purchasing part. We know there's a $10 credit. Yes. Go for it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Walk us through what you see now. So I have starter sets and prepay deals. The prepay deal is $65, but that's like for a whole year. That's a pretty good deal.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's progress. Okay, so I have to sign up. Oh. I don't know if we're going to be able to do this in a minute. No. I'm going to be able to do this in a minute.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe this is just us figuring out that you cannot do this in a minute. This is the real experience. I mean, it's not bad. Three minutes to buy something is not terrible. One minute's kind of unrealistic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How about tomorrow we try and have you sign up first, and then we can see if that expedites this process. I'm looking forward to it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, one more thing. Izzy, you like podcasts, right? I love podcasts. Did you know that Vox Media is launching a bunch of new podcasts for the fall season?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I did. I only listen to podcasts, so this is great. Have you heard of any of them specifically? I know that the Ezra Klein show is going to be twice a week now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I love the impact. Did you know about Kara Swisher's new show? It's Recode's Kara Swisher. There's a new show called Pivot. It's her and a cat named Scott Galloway, and they're going to predict the future of tech and business every Friday.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A cat? There's Start to Sail, a new show from Eater about what it takes to build and manage a business with two female entrepreneurs who've done just that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The more the better. And a new sports show from SB Nation, like an in-depth sports documentary show called Seemed Smart, about all the absurd stories from the diabolical and entertaining world of sports trickery.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't understand sports, so I should listen. Perfect. 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I got a 10. Upgrade your tent. 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Has that happened Has a community come together and said like listen our entire neighborhood our entire city town wants to get the out of Dodge and get away from the water It has happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a pretty substantial upfront cost because you're purchasing a lot of land and you're taking down a lot of houses. Yeah. 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the other cases where you're building a big flood wall or a levy, you're investing in that infrastructure consistently over time. Over 30 years or so, the option of manage retreat actually looks very good financially.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in those studies, they found that we are 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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. To me, one big piece of it that in the U.S. anyway we haven't quite gotten to yet is starting the conversation early.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 manage retreat. We would never abandon this town and let it fall into the ocean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained. Another day, another failed opportunity to buy a Quip electric toothbrush in under a minute. We'll try again tomorrow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 five dollars, including free shipping worldwide.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The brushes start at $25 at GetQuip, G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash explained.
