There was one terrible torrential rain when I lived in Chicago in 2014. It was crazy. Underpasses and streets filled with water. Basements flooded everywhere. I remember thinking, “How does a city this size not have adequate drainage?”

The sub-basement and elevator shaft flooded in my six-story 1960s building in Edgewater a block from Lake Michigan. (The common areas of the building smelled like mold the rest of the time I lived there.)

I was on the eastbound 77 Belmont CTA bus in a city where it was total traffic gridlock. The standing-room only bus had moved less than two blocks in an hour. We finally reached the edge of a giant pool of water in an underpass under a highway. The bus driver started to inch his way across the newly formed lake under the bridge. Water started rushing into the bus around everyone’s feet.

Next to me was a toddler whose mother was standing next to him with a smaller child already in her arms. The toddler started screaming so I picked him up. The mother smiled at me and said, “Thank you.”

The bus stalled with water just above the tops of my shoes.

We managed to get the doors of the bus opened and I waded through the water, holding the child above my shoulders, to safety. I walked home three miles soaked.

They called it a 100-year rain event. Except it hadn’t been 100 years since the last time it had happened. Not even close.

It hadn’t even been been five years since Chicago was hit again Sunday, Sept. 11. It had only been since last May when flooding torrential rains had hit the city.

As the water rushed in on Sunday, he wondered why the sump wasn’t working.

“Turns out, it wasn’t plugged in all the way. One of the dogs probably knocked it loose,” Meyer said. He pushed the plug further into the outlet and water began draining immediately.

He realizes he was lucky.

“A neighbor from a couple blocks away posted a video of a geyser of water shooting up from a sewer opening in the street,” he said.

While heavy rains and flooded basements may go together for a lot of Chicago residents, Sunday’s steady rains were unusual, at least in one respect, according to the National Weather Service.

The rainfall rates were more akin to those that can occur in tropical weather conditions or even during hurricanes, said Todd Kluber, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

“We were seeing total rain rates [that] were about 6 to 8 inches per hour,” Kluber said Monday. “Typical rainstorms are about 3 to 5 inches.”

That means if rain continued to fall at that rate for an hour, it would’ve accumulated to as much as 8 inches of water, but it only lasted about 10 minutes, which resulted in about 1 inch of water — still significant enough to induce flooding throughout the city.

Crazy. It won’t take too much more of this and a lot of people in Chicago won’t be able to get flood insurance.

If you visit South Florida even now, long after the extreme risks for the region from climate change became known, there are still construction cranes everywhere. High-rise apartment buildings and low-rise condominium complexes are being built at breakneck pace.

For developers, the calculation is an easy one. Governments still allow them to build in flood-prone areas, eager for the property taxes. And with around a 5-year window from the start of a project to selling out all the units, developers and real estate interests will have their money long before climate change forces property values down as everyone assumes will happen eventually in South Florida.

The rich get their money and the taxpayers end up bailing out the people and businesses wiped out by super storms. It’s the privatization of profit and socialization of risk. Because even the most MAGA-nutty person screaming about socialism will have his hand out when he loses everything.

But in one southern coastal city, municipal leaders are starting to crack down on building in disaster prone areas.

To preserve their fiscal bottom lines, municipal officials now beg, plead, and cajole whole neighborhoods (particularly high-end, property-tax-bearing ones) out of floodplains and other high-risk areas. In particularly hard-hit locales, governments may not have to twist many arms: As storms grow in both frequency and intensity, more people will likely be willing to accept buyouts—as most Staten Island residents did in the Oakwood neighborhood after Hurricane Sandy.

The buyout picture is likely to remain especially fraught for many African American communities where homes were undervalued by design, according to A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. In a number of those communities, properties were purposely situated in flood-prone areas that never enjoyed basic residential services and were redlined to keep property values down. Factor addressing inequities into the buyout calculus.

In Charleston, South Carolina, Dale Morris, the city’s chief resilience officer, believes that Americans need to reassess their relationship with water. The frequent recurrence of what Morris calls “storms of impact” that are more intense and longer-lasting has begun to influence the city’s decision-making in ways that even a historic storm like Hurricane Hugo in 1989 did not. Now home to 150,000 people, Charleston suffered extraordinary levels of inundation for several years beginning in 2015, a period that included Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Tropical Storm Irma in 2017.

Today, Charlestonians have a new appreciation of how rain, wind, and bodies of water interact. “People began asking questions like ‘What do we do about this new development that I think is causing flooding downstream? What do we do about larger land use policy, so we don’t make the mistakes that we made 50 years ago because things have changed?’” says Morris, who worked as a senior economist for the Netherlands Embassy for more than two decades and coordinator for Charleston’s Dutch Dialogues, an initiative sponsored in part by the Netherlands that helps local communities assess flooding issues.

With neighborhoods that regularly flood spread across a landmass that features a peninsula and the outflows of three rivers into the Atlantic Ocean, Charleston has taken an aggressive stance on managed retreat. The city has secured FEMA grant money for one neighborhood that already had nearly 50 homes purchased and demolished, and is regulating development in low-lying areas that in the past would be filled for development, such as the 100-acre Johns Island tract of land that would have sited 240 homes. Some city councilors were ready to ban fill outright, Morris says, but the city opted instead to regulate fill through stormwater regulations, so that it can be used “judiciously.”

These advances catapulted Charleston into the vanguard of proactive communities—for a reason. “Charleston has been so active because the risk is there, and they feel it,” says Morris.

You can read the rest of The American Prospect article by Gabrielle Gurley at this link.