Who'll Stop The Rain?

Who'll Stop The Rain?

When Bertha, then Fran, hit NC in 1996, it made most of Eastern NC an impassable quagmire. Hurricane force wind and torrential rain made it as far east as Raleigh, NC, which is also the upper part of the Neuse River Basin. Eastern NC was already underwater. There was nowhere for the water to go.

Among other problems, there was not sufficiently detailed hydrographic mapping of Eastern NC to be able to predict what all that water would do. They still don't, but they got a good start on it, before the Austerity folks cut the funding.

Unlike Houston, little of this was compounded by hardening terrain with human structures. In NC, the primary sin of developers is building things on the fragile beaches and barrier islands for the storm surges to knock down. And they did succeed in getting the legislature to enact laws against inciting worry about coastal topography changes (HB 819 in 2012). The secondary one is to allow the operation of giant hog farms and industrial sites that dump all manner of things into the water, even before major flood events.

Risk management and restraint are hard for humans to do, apparently. The political and bureaucratic villains in this story aren't entirely wrong, except for the climate change denialism. Even those of my friends that voted for Trump, and question the causes and ultimate results of climate change, will admit that destructive weather events are getting bigger and more frequent.

But flood water management is hard, and expensive. Just look at the efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers, over the years, trying to tame the Mississippi. John McPhee wrote about that, back in 1987, when some of y'all weren't even born, yet.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya

Creedence Clearwater Revival-Who'll Stop The Rain?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIPan-rEQJA
https://projects.propublica.org/houston-cypress/

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