Sunny Day Flooding

It’s so commonplace that locals sometimes take rubber boots with them in outings in their coastal neighborhoods. In some areas of Southern Florida, folks buying real estate on the coast are seeing longer-term mortgages disappear. 15-year term loans are about as long as most can get. The fear, where residential real estate loans give lenders on default recourse solely against the purchased property but not otherwise against the borrower, is that with the expected flooding – which just might become a permanent coastal realignment – folks whose residences are surrounded by water might just walk away with substantial balances remaining on their mortgages… and the only people that would be left “high and dry” would be the lenders.

Higher average global temperatures are squarely to blame. Strange that one of the properties destined to be consumed by coastal sea rise is climate change scoffer, Donald Trump’s, Mar-a-Lago golf and tennis property. But it’s hardly just Florida.

Equally strange is that it is the federal government that is not only acknowledging the phenomenon but issuing dire warnings about how much worst such flooding is going to get. Carolyn Gramling, writing for the July 15^th Science News, tells us: “As sea levels continue to rise, many coastal U.S. cities will see an increasing number of days each year that streets flood during high tides, according to the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA]. For many parts of the country, particularly along the U.S. East Coast, that increase has already ramped up over the last two decades.

“From 2000 to 2019, these ‘sunny-day flooding’ events jumped by 190 percent in the Southeast, and by 140 percent in the Northeast, according to a report by NOAA released July 10. Such events can devastate coastal infrastructure — for example by disrupting traffic, inundating septic systems and salting farmlands.  

“In its fifth annual high tide report, NOAA details flood risks faced by different U.S. regions using tide gauge data collected at 210 stations around the country from May 2018 to April 2019. Officials’ definition of a ‘flood’ can vary, depending on factors including the shape of the land, urban development and storm-proofing. But across all U.S. coastal areas, tidal flooding occurred an average of five days during the study period — repeating a record set in 2015, the report says.

“Still, some regions saw tidal flooding far more frequently than the national average. The Chesapeake Bay region set new records in the last year, with 22 days of high tide floods for Washington, D.C., and 12 days each in the Maryland cities of Annapolis and Baltimore.

“‘It’s primarily an issue in the East Coast and Gulf Coast at the moment,’ said NOAA oceanographer William Sweet, who led the study, during a July 10 news conference. “Flooding in the densely populated Northeast, in particular, is influenced by ‘a very energetic system’ offshore involving winds and ocean currents along with sea level rise. The land surface in the Chesapeake Bay region also is slowly sinking, part of a delayed readjustment to the retreat of the great ice sheets that covered North America thousands of years ago (SN Online: 8/15/18). 

“The U.S. Southeast, from Florida to North Carolina, is expected to see an average of five days of tidal flooding through the meteorological year. The western Gulf of Mexico is set to record an average of six days in tidal flood events per year, a 130 percent jump relative to two decades ago…By 2050, what are currently the worst flood days in some cities will basically become a new normal, the results suggest.”

If the Republican Party, where either denying climate change or (de)regulating pollutants/ emissions without taking this accelerating reality into consideration is considered a basic policy directive, expects to have some level of traction with the younger generations who will be forced to live with the severe consequences of ignoring global warming, I am finally beginning to understand why so many in the GOP are no longer opposing the legalization of marijuana.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and I remember someone once telling us that “it’s not wise to mess with mother nature.”