How to Flood-Proof a Hurricane-Prone Florida Town

In Florida, flooding is a huge cause of death and destruction from hurricanes. This video looks at how a town called Babcock Ranch was designed to withstand hurricane flooding through some smart engineering.

Yet this one town, Babcock Ranch, has been hit by four hurricanes and basically came out unscathed. There was no flooding at all. So we asked the engineer who helped build this town to break down its hidden designs.

Related: John Seabrook’s piece in this week’s New Yorker, In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods? (archive).

Vermont feels like the frontier of climate change in the Northeast. Farmers in the bottomlands, who previously planted wheat and barley, are beginning to plant rice, which can be underwater for two days without damage to the crop. The old roads that early Vermont settlers hacked out on hilltops, which lasted for more than two hundred years, are melting back into the forest. Extreme-rain events scour the roads down to bedrock ledges, rendering them impassable, and, because no one then uses them, any blown-down trees don’t get cleared. The next storm brings more blowdowns. A road that I went mountain biking on ten years ago, when it was a distinct pathway with old-growth trees on each side, lined by aged stone walls, is now such a tangle of fallen trees, branches, and rocks that it’s hard to tell a road was ever there.

Vermont is the second least populated state, after Wyoming, with fewer than six hundred and fifty thousand residents; it is also the fourth highest in disaster-relief funding per capita, nearly all of it flood-related. Washington County ranked first nationally in disaster declarations between 2011 and 2024. Annual precipitation in the state has increased six inches since the nineteen-sixties, and heavier-than-normal rain events in the Northeast are expected to increase by as much as fifty-two per cent by 2100. Vermont is a laboratory for the study of intense rainfall in steep terrain, and a proving ground for scientists, policymakers, regulators, and land-use planners who are on the front lines of a recurring catastrophe that traditional methods of prevention — dredging a river’s bottom, armoring its sides, berming its banks — have only made worse.

I live in Washington County so how communities are attempting to mitigate flooding is of great interest to me.

• climate crisis
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