![]() A USGS report indicated nine river gauges reported floods exceeding their 1-in-500 year expected return intervals. Record river flooding developed over the next several days along the Cape Fear, Northeast Cape Fear, Lumber, and Waccamaw Rivers, destroying roads and damaging thousands of homes and businesses. A station in Loris, SC recorded 23.63 inches rain, setting a new state tropical cyclone rainfall record for the state of South Carolina. Over 30 inches of rain were measured in a few North Carolina locations, exceeding the highest single-storm rainfall amounts ever seen in this portion of the state. the storm spent the next two days producing record-breaking rainfall across eastern North Carolina and a portion of northeastern South Carolina. After the eye crossed Wrightsville Beach, NC at 7:15 a.m. Hurricane Florence, a large and slow moving category one hurricane, made landfall during the morning of September 14, 2018. Peak wind gust at the ILM airport was 105 mph and lowest pressure was 28.51 inches of mercury or 965.5 millibars. Local officials, besieged with complaints from residents and real estate agents, took the signs down.Hurricane Florence one-minute pressure and wind gust data from Wilmington, NC. ![]() He recalled that after Hurricane Ike struck the Texas coast in 2008, Fema paid for signs in the community of Clear Lake, near Houston, that were intended to tell homeowners how high surge waters from a major storm would rise there. Jim Blackburn, a professor of environmental law at Rice University in Houston, said that the bond measure was a start, but that attitudes had not changed enough after years of sprawling development and inadequate flood planning. This year, voters in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, passed a $2.5bn (£1.8bn) bond measure after Harvey to better protect the area from future storms and to buy out homes in some of the riskiest areas. New Orleans got $20bn (£15bn) in new hurricane protection from federal, state and local sources, but only after damage from Katrina cost the region some $135bn (£102bn). When governments do act, it is often after disaster has already struck. But the problems stem not only from personal choices but also from a lack of national will to make things better, he said. “If you live on a street named River Road,” he said in an interview, your home “is going to flood”. Russel L Honoré, the retired Army lieutenant general whom president George W Bush placed in charge of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts after initial stumbles, has more blunt advice in the title of his new book: Don’t Get Stuck on Stupid. That means that any steps we take to avoid building in places with flood risk should minimise the cost of disasters. The geographer Gilbert F White, known as the father of floodplain management, wrote in 1942 that “floods are ‘acts of God’, but flood losses are largely acts of man”. Our propensity to engage in poor planning is not newly discovered. In flood-prone areas, rapid development often means paving over much of the landscape that might absorb floodwaters, which was certainly a factor in the Houston area when Harvey came. The population of the Atlantic and Gulf Coast regions jumped from 52 million in 2000 to nearly 60 million in 2016, according to the Census Bureau. ![]()
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