FLOODS - The American Midwest

"Flooding devastates parts of the Midwest after huge winter storm" PBS NewsHour 3/18/2019

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SUMMARY:  Parts of the Midwest are reeling from major flooding this week due to a massive late-winter storm.  Across Iowa and Nebraska, thousands of people had to be evacuated, roads and other infrastructure were destroyed and buildings were submerged by rising waters.  Rivers hit record levels in 41 places across the region, including 17 in Nebraska alone.  William Brangham reports.

"Roads, towns and livelihoods are washed away in Midwest floods" PBS NewsHour 3/22/2019

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SUMMARY:  Ongoing flooding across the Midwest has left thousands of homes damaged and vast swaths of farmland underwater.  Residents and public officials alike are trying to cope with washed-out roads, lost livestock, ruined crops, and a lack of supplies.  Meanwhile, weather experts are predicting a “potentially unprecedented” flood season.  Judy Woodruff speaks to Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts for more.

LOUISIANA - Historic Floods

"How Louisiana plans to rebuild after historically damaging floods" PBS NewsHour 8/18/2016

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SUMMARY:  As the Louisiana flooding begins to subside, the state looks toward rebuilding.  The disaster affected over 20 parishes, including areas outside flood zones -- meaning residents there do not have flood insurance.  William Brangham speaks with Billy Nungesser, Louisiana's lieutenant governor, about how the state is planning to use FEMA funds, the help of volunteers and Red Cross shelters to recover.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour):  As the flood waters start to recede, the hard work of assessing and rebuilding begins.

CLEVE BROWN, Baton Rouge Resident:  Basically, we lost everything, you know, other than our lives.  Couple of hours, we probably had six-foot of water.  Water is probably one of the worst Mother Nature beasts there is.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  An estimated 40,000 homes were damaged in the flooding that inundated Baton Rouge and Lafayette, killing at least 13 people.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson got a first hand look today.

JEH JOHNSON, Secretary of Homeland Security:  The federal government is here.  We have been here.  We will be here as long as it takes to help this community recover.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  Four thousand people are still living in shelters across the state.

GAIL MCGOVERN, Red Cross President and CEO:  This is the largest operation that the American Red Cross has responded to since 2012, Superstorm Sandy, and driving s around the affected area, it's really devastating.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  In the most damaged areas, only about one out of every eight homes is covered by flood insurance, because these areas weren't considered likely to flood.

CLEVE BROWN:  No one was expecting this.  This is, I mean, you can see, I might have gotten from here at it's worst to up here.  So, that's why no one was expecting it.  So, they're not going to have flood insurance.  They were, you know, they thought they were high and dry.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  More than 9,000 insurance claims have been filed so far.

For more on how Louisiana is doing, I'm joined now by the state's lieutenant governor, Billy Nungesser.  He joins us from Louisiana Public Broadcasting in Baton Rouge, where many of our colleagues there have also been flooded out of their homes.

SURVIVING DISASTERS - Rising Sea Levels, Two Cities, Two Responses

"Two cities, two very different responses to rising sea levels" PBS NewsHour 7/2/2015

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SUMMARY:  While New York City is taking aggressive action to prevent future catastrophes like Hurricane Sandy; other vulnerable cities, such as Charleston, South Carolina, are not tackling the threat of rising sea level and climate change with the same urgency.  Special correspondent Jackie Judd reports.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Tonight, the NewsHour begins a series on the way communities prepare and survive disasters, both natural and manmade.

NewsHour special correspondent Jackie Judd brings us a tale of two cities, both on the Atlantic Seaboard.

JACKIE JUDD (NewsHour):  The crane towering over Rockaway Beach is a symbol of New York City’s urgent, almost frantic effort to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy nearly brought the city to its knees.

DANIEL ZARRILLI, Mayor’s Office and Recovery and Resiliency, New York City:  We have 520 miles of shoreline. We have always been at risk of coastal inundation, but Sandy really changed the way we think about that risk and how we engage with the waterfront.

JACKIE JUDD:  The response is not simply about minimizing hurricane damage.  The larger issue, the issue making hurricanes more destructive, is sea level rise caused by climate change and a warming planet.

BENJAMIN STRAUSS, Climate Central:  We’re not labeling things with sea level rise when we should be.

JACKIE JUDD:  Ben Strauss is a scientist with the research organization Climate Central.

BENJAMIN STRAUSS:  A storm comes in, we have a damaging flood, and we say we had a storm, we had a flood.  But every flood is deeper, bigger, and more damaging because of the sea level rise we’ve already had.

JACKIE JUDD:  In the last century, the sea rose at least eight inches, and the rate has been accelerating since the 1990s.

In the Rockaways, Mayor Bill de Blasio, recently and with great fanfare, opened the first stretch of a new concrete boardwalk built above the floodplain to replace the wooden one Sandy destroyed.

COLORADO - Bluegrass Festival Lifts Lyons

"Bluegrass festival keeps Colorado town afloat after flood" PBS NewsHour 7/31/2014

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JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  The song is called “Little Rain,” but it’s about a very big rain and its aftermath, the flooding of the town of Lyons, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rockies last September.

K.C. Groves is in the band Watermills, formed after the disaster.

K.C. GROVES:  We were trying to address what happened and also represent, you know, the — our strengths and even strength of spirit and our joy even that we still had in this town, but still express the gravity of what happened.

JEFFREY BROWN:  What happened is something that no one here had ever seen, the St. Vrain River jumping its banks.  Video shot by local residents captured the scene, as the river divided Lyons into a series of islands, cutting off this small town of 2,000 from the world for three days.

One person died; 200 houses were damaged.

Musician David Tiller talked to the NewsHour just after he was evacuated.

DAVID TILLER:  Seeing the faces of the houses blown on and realizing that there was nothing salvageable, really, that — nothing of the house that I could tell that may be salvageable, I don’t even know how to describe it.

LOWLANDS - Lessons From The Netherlands

"What the lowlands can teach the U.S. about warding off high water" PBS Newshour 10/29/2013

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SUMMARY:  Superstorm Sandy showed U.S. coastal cities the damage water can do -- a threat the Dutch have lived with for centuries.  Their system of dams and dikes, locks and levees is keeping the Netherlands safe in a world with rising seas.  Miles O'Brien reports on what Americans can learn from the Dutch model of flood management.

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Now to the second installment of our look at what has and has not changed one year after superstorm Sandy blew ashore, taking 181 lives and damaging 650,000 homes.

Many of those affected are still trying to rebuild and to answer the question, are we doing enough to protect ourselves from floods?

In conjunction with NOVA, NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien traveled to the Netherlands for one answer.

MILES O’BRIEN (Newshour):  The Netherlands, the name says it all, the lowlands, built on a swampy delta.  Much of the country lies below sea level.  American Tracy Metz is an author and water management expert living in Amsterdam.

TRACY METZ, water management expert:  You really wonder why people settled here at all.  This must have been such an uninhabitable, inhospitable place.  It's a very soggy delta.

MILES O’BRIEN:  That's what these are for.  Windmills are essentially pumps.

AMERICA - Flooding in the Midwest

"Heavy April Showers Inundate Midwest States With Widespread Flooding" PBS Newshour 4/24/2013

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JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Now the floods along the Mississippi and other Midwest rivers, creeks and streams.

This week, communities are coping with rising waters, heavy rain and increasing damage, with no immediate end in sight.  The scope of the problem keeps growing, with flooding along the Mississippi, Illinois and Missouri rivers.  Towns and cities from North Dakota to Arkansas have felt the brunt, with its biggest impact so far in Illinois and Missouri.

Ray Suarez has the story.

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour):  The rain-swollen Mississippi River neared its crest today near Saint Louis, after days of rising waters.

Muddy river waters covered the tops of trees and street signs, and a boat was the best way to get around in some areas.  The unruly river caused more than 100 barges to break free earlier this week.  A handful of them hit a Saint Louis County bridge.  The Coast Guard says at least 10 barges sank.

Meanwhile, floodwaters on the Illinois River crested at 29 feet.  That's the highest it's risen in 70 years.  The waters began falling today.  Volunteers worked steadily to throw up tens of thousands of sandbag barriers to stop flooding.  But, for some houses, the waters couldn't be stopped.  Many stood partially submerged yesterday.  Buildings on the floodplain, like this one, were suddenly in the middle of the river.

Meanwhile, in the north of the state, the water receded enough in some areas to allow residents to start their cleanup.  In Des Plaines, west of Chicago, the streets are lined with the unsalvageable.

AMERICA - Federal Flood Insurance Post-Sandy

"Flood Insurance, Already Fragile, Faces New Stress" by ERIC LIPTON, FELICITY BARRINGER, and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH; New York Times 11/12/2012

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The federal government’s flood insurance program, which fell $18 billion into debt after Hurricane Katrina, is once again at risk of running out of money as the daunting reconstruction from Hurricane Sandy gets under way.

Early estimates suggest that Hurricane Sandy will rank as the nation’s second-worst storm for claims paid out by the National Flood Insurance Program. With 115,000 new claims submitted and thousands more being filed each day, the cost could reach $7 billion at a time when the program is allowed, by law, to add only an additional $3 billion to its onerous debt.

Congress, just this summer, overhauled the flawed program by allowing large increases in premiums paid by vacation home owners and those repeatedly hit by floods. But critics say taxpayer money should not be used to bail it out again — essentially subsidizing the rebuilding of homes in risky areas — without Congress’ mandating even more radical changes.

“We are now just throwing money to support something that is going to end up creating more victims and costing more money in the future,” Representative Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon, said of the program, which insures 5.7 million homes nationwide near coasts or flood-prone rivers.

Even with the new rules, critics argue, it will be many years, if ever, before many homeowners are required to pay premiums that accurately reflect the market cost of the coverage. Some communities have long resisted imposing more appropriate building codes to prevent damage, putting the program at further risk of devastating losses when storms like Hurricane Sandy hit. And despite some efforts in recent years, many of the flood maps the program relies on are out of date — which can have expensive, and even deadly, consequences in this era of rising sea levels if homeowners are not cognizant of the risks they face.

The program’s giant debt makes matters worse because simply covering the interest owed the Treasury consumes from $90 million to $750 million a year, depending on interest rates. This means it is much harder to build reserves for future catastrophes.

RUSSIA - The Floods of 7/7/2012

"After Russian Floods, Grief, Rage and Deep Mistrust" by ELLEN BARRY, New York Times 7/10/2012

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Forty-six new graves were cut on Tuesday in a field outside this city, where catastrophic flooding has left behind a slime of mud and anger.

Everyone here had a story of the pitch-black hours of Saturday morning, of being trapped inside homes as water rose to 6 and then to 8 and 10 feet, listening to the screams of neighbors and fear-maddened animals.

So it came as a shock, and then as the focus of anger, when officials acknowledged that they had been aware of a threat to Krymsk at 10 the previous night, but had not taken measures to rouse its sleeping residents.

The flood in this city of 57,000 in southern Russia is the first disaster to hit the country since Vladimir V. Putin returned to the presidency, amid uncertain public support for his government. Its aftermath has riveted national attention as a measure of the state’s effectiveness, including visits from celebrities and volunteer efforts backed by pro-government and opposition political parties.

Mr. Putin has been damaged in the past by appearing indifferent to disasters — most acutely in 2000, when he failed to immediately return from a vacation to handle the sinking of a nuclear-powered submarine, the Kursk. Russia declined initial rescue offers from other countries, and all 118 sailors trapped onboard died.

The official death count in the floods had risen to 172 by Tuesday. Inside a ruined pastry shop, which had the sickly smell of something rotting, Sergei Viktorovich, 45, described waking in the darkness to the sensation of moisture in his bed, then reaching for his phone on a bedside table to find that it was already lost in the water.

“If they knew at 11, why didn’t they warn us? What are we, hunks of meat? Are we not people?” he said, offering his patronymic, not his surname, because he said he feared retribution from the police. “We are the young people, so we swam, but what about our grandmothers? How many grandmothers drowned?”

He said those emotions were barely restrained when the region’s governor, Aleksandr Tkachev, met with residents on Sunday. “If there weren’t so many police around,” he said, “they would have thrown rocks at him.”

Whatever the ultimate repercussions — firings, compensation, criminal charges — a visit to Krymsk offers a view of the gap that has opened between Russians and their government. Rumors have taken on such force that, on Monday, word of a second wave of water sent many people running.

“Even if Tkachev was saying the same things as the people standing in line for humanitarian aid, they still wouldn’t believe him,” said the journalist Oleg Kashin in a commentary on Kommersant FM radio. “Because this is not about the fact that the official story is different from the victims’ story, but that people don’t trust the authorities, on any subject — on natural disasters, or elections, or soccer.”