In Charleston SC, Where Slow-Moving Storms Meet Rising Seas, Family Marks Fifth Flood In One Year

CHARLESTON, S.C. — When Tropical Storm Debby’s floodwaters surrounded Damon Black’s home in the heart of this flood-prone city, he and his family were ready. They pulled up rugs and moved furniture upstairs, because in little over a year of living there, they had endured five floods. “It’s virtually just a constant existential fear we have throughout the year,” Black said of the specter of floods in the historic Harleston Village neighborhood, near the tip of the city’s picturesque peninsula. In a December storm, water got inside the house; it didn’t breach the floorboards this time.

Debby is just the latest in a series of slow-moving, drenching storms that are threatening communities like this one, already vulnerable to hurricanes and even sunny-day floods and now facing the storms of a changing climate. Warmer global temperatures mean heavier downpours such as this one, which had dumped more than a foot of rain on parts of coastal South Carolina by Tuesday afternoon, with more rain expected. Flood risks are rising as sea levels surge, too. Here and across the American South, water is rising faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, according to a Washington Post analysis.

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Charleston is in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, a region of rivers, estuaries and marshes that extends southward to the Savannah River and the Georgia state line. It has always been a city vulnerable to storms. But sea level rise has made it even more so — Charleston’s average sea level has risen by seven inches since 2010, four times as fast as during the previous 30 years, according to The Post’s analysis of accelerating sea level rise across the South.

Seas worldwide are rising faster than ever because of human-caused global warming, the result of fossil fuel emissions and the greenhouse effect. Not only is that warming melting ice sheets, but it also causes water to expand. Minor floods that occurred in Charleston only a handful of times a year from the 1920s through the 1970s have over the past decade hit dozens of times every year, according to Weather Service data. That includes flooding that hit a record 89 times — nearly one out of every four days — in 2019.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/08/06/charleston-debby-flooding-curfew/

https://wapo.st/4fzhCxA