Watching Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and seeing the images of so many people suffering, of loss of homes and property, and likely many more deaths and injuries makes me feel a little helpless. What can you do when Mother Nature decides to drop over 50 inches of rain on your city in less than a week, setting records for US rainfall? It reminds me that despite our ever-accelerating technological advances, even our most prominent examples of human civilization can be reduced to speck in the face of nature. It also reawakened my ongoing paranoia about climate change*, as well as questions about 1) if I should be doing anything more than sorting my recycling, eating less meat, and riding my car less and 2) what exactly is our city, state and federal governments are doing to help us become more resilient to the changes that are coming?

In the immediate term, as a homeowner in Cambridge, I worry every year about whether our house will be flooded. I know it’s so small (and maybe petty and selfish) in the scheme of things but for us personally, it would be a significant hit. Our condo occupies the ‘garden apartment’ (e.g., finished basement that is about halfway out of the ground) and the first floor of our 3-unit building and any real flooding is likely to soak our bottom floor at the very least. While it might not be the end of the world to have to re-do the drywall in our basement, what if the flooding was much more severe? Like it carried away a chunk of our entire building? What if, in the aftermath of the storm, people became afraid of buying real estate in Boston because of flooding risk and houses in the area become much harder to sell? (as is already happening in parts of Virginia – check out this NYT story of a woman who bought a home in 2005 for $320k but now would be lucky to sell it for half the price because of increased flooding risk in the neighborhood).

When I voice these concerns out loud, the reaction that I get is usually either puzzlement (Cambridge and Boston’s real estate market has been one of the hottest in the country for the last 15 years) and kind of a-pat-on-the-head-don’t-be-chicken-little tone. True, after Hurricane Sandy hit NYC in 2012, I was somewhat relieved to see that New York’s real estate market didn’t seem to be even fazed – maybe it will take much more persistent flooding and storms to make a dent in the market prices. But I fear that when people do start pricing in the flood risk, the prices will collapse rather than decline in a controlled way.

Some of the original forecasts for Hurricane Sandy predicted that Boston would be hit. But the storm ended up turning west and hit New York instead. During Hurricane Sandy, Battery Park had a water surge of 13.88 ft. According to various simulations, my neighborhood and house would have experienced significant flooding if we had been in the path instead.

Boston was cited as the 8th most vulnerable MSA for flooding and when I started to look for information online about what the different scenarios were and what our local city, state, and federal officials are doing to help us be more flood resilient, I was kind of shocked at how little information there was or at least information that I can readily comprehend. Apart from simulations put together by what appeared to be scientists doing volunteer work, the city of Boston offers this webpage which has almost no information on which neighborhoods are most at risk and what people can do now to mitigate flood damage. When I click on the link to the FEMA featured on this webpage (“Find a Flood Map for your Property“), I’m led to a page where I can download a zip file for my geography filled with incomprehensible .dbf, .prj, .shp, .shx files. The experience did not bolster my confidence in what our governments are doing to help prepare for the increased frequency and intensity of water-related disasters. You should also know that the National Flood Insurance Program run by FEMA, originally intended to be run entirely out of the premiums paid by policyholders, is now $25 billion in debt (to put that into context, it’s paid out $3.5 bn in claims in 2016). It suggests that FEMA’s estimate of how often flood damage would occur is way below reality. In short, the picture that I’m getting is that our government is woefully underprepared to help citizens deal with the increasing frequency of water-related disasters – whether it’s communicating to the public on how to best prepare, reforming our flood insurance approach so it can meet the challenges that are upcoming, or even having a realistic sense of how likely these events will happen. At the local level, we should be demanding that developers incorporate measures to increase resiliency to floods, including underwater holding tanks for overflowing storm water, separation of sewage and storm drains and the like. The only thing unfortunately that seems to be getting attention is the response to disasters, because that’s the most visible.

In the bigger picture, climate change will likely also cause disruptions in our food supply, increase disease burden, and lead to greater geo-political instability. But rather than jumping right to the apocalypse, the manifestations of climate change may creep up on us through a bit more mundane ways – more frequent storms,  inadequacy of our government to deal with the fallout, worrying about our homes and properties.

On my last note for this post (though not my last rant related to climate change), I highly recommend checking out Terry Gross’ latest interview with Al Gore who has still been working on climate change issues and has a new movie out – An Inconvenient Sequel

*Note: I understand that it’s hard to directly connect Hurricane Harvey to climate change. Maybe Harvey would have still struck Houston and dropped a record amount of rain even if humans were not pumping greenhouse gases into the air. But most scientists seem to agree that even if we can’t attribute climate change to one event, climate change is driving up the frequency of these high-intensity storms over time.