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High winds down power lines. But high waters flood substations — and those are much harder to fix.
There’s a familiar script when it comes to hurricanes: The high winds snap tree branches and even tree trunks and whip around anything else that’s light enough or not bolted down — including power lines and distribution poles. While this type of damage can lead to large-scale outages, it’s also relatively straightforward to fix. In many cases the power comes back on relatively quickly, more like days rather than weeks or months.
But when it comes to flooding, especially in areas that do not regularly deal with big storms, the damage can be more severe, long-lasting, and difficult to repair. This is largely because what’s at risk in these scenarios is not power lines but substations. These messes of transmission and distribution lines that channel high voltage power to homes and businesses are vulnerable to rising water, and repairs can’t begin until the floodwaters recede. Often they have to be replaced entirely, which is expensive and can lead to further delays as there’s a nationwide shortage of transformers. Just one substation can support thousands of homes — a single point of failure that, when it floods, takes all its customers down with it.
Duke Energy, whose grid in the Carolinas was pummeled by Hurricane Helene, has said the damage to its system encompasses “submerged substations, thousands of downed utility poles, and downed transmission towers,” and noted that much of the affected area is “inaccessible due to mudslides, flooding and blocked roads, limiting the ability to assess and begin repairing damages.” In an update published Saturday, it stated that while more than 2 million customers had seen their power restored, about 250,000 customers across North and South Carolina remained without electricity more than a week after the storm.
Workers are “encountering more severe damage on a larger scale than we’ve ever experienced,” Duke Energy storm director Jason Hollifield said in a statement. (Duke didn’t respond to my request for comment.) One Duke employee told the local television station in Asheville, North Carolina, which saw more than three months’ worth of rain fall over three days, that a local substation would have to be completely rebuilt, a process that could take months. In Western North Carolina, the area’s Representative Chuck Edwards has estimated that 117,000 customers still lack electricity, and that while some of them will likely get it back by Sunday, others “whose properties are inaccessible or not able to receive power may be without electricity for an extended period of time as Duke Energy works to rebuild critical infrastructure.”
To prepare for the onrushing Hurricane Milton, Duke is staging thousands of “line technicians, vegetation workers, damage assessors and support personnel” in Florida, the company said. The same problem remains, however: Line technicians will not prevent substations from flooding.
While the exact effect of climate change on hurricanes and other storm categories is an area of intense debate among climate scientists and meteorologists, there’s a rough consensus that warming will cause the storms to be wetter. That means utilities will have to update their old disaster response playbooks, or else prolonged outages when an especially wet storm arrives over a flood plain.
In most hurricanes, utilities are able to pre-position workers to restore power quickly, working on knocked down poles and wires, explained Jordan Kern, an assistant professor engineering at North Carolina State University. “When trees fall on distribution lines, those are, in normal situations, easy to repair,” he told me. But, Kern said, “If the substations are flooded, you can’t do anything until the flood waters go down. They can be without power for a long time.”
Wetter hurricanes will likely mean more severe and less predictable flooding happening far away from the coasts, bringing with it risks that utilities and local governments may be less prepared to face, with costs that will ultimately be born by anyone who pays for electricity, as expensive repairs and hardening of electrical infrastructure will likely be born by ratepayers.
“Rates will necessarily rise” to deal with the higher costs of adaptation and repairing infrastructure more complex than a wooden pole, Tyler Norris, a PhD student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, told me while driving towards Asheville to help out family impacted by the storm.
While Helene has been an especially damaging storm, the risks of wetter storms and inland flooding away from the coastal areas that are prepared for frequent hurricanes have become more apparent in recent years. While Hurricane Irene in 2011 made landfall on Long Island, its most devastating effects were felt inland due to heavy rains, especially in Vermont.
North Carolina in particular has seen a rash of nasty hurricanes in the past 10 years or so, giving Duke ample recent experience with big storms — and some indication of what a warming world could bring.
During 2018’s Hurricane Florence, which knocked out power for around a million Duke customers, “at least 10 substations required de-energization due to flooding or flood risk where heavy rainfall and resulting inland flooding,” according to a 2022 Duke climate resiliency report. The report was meant to look at the effects of climate change to the Duke system by 2050 under two emissions scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one assuming emissions start falling by 2040, the other assuming continued (some might say unrealistically) high emissions.
Under the extreme scenario, the “overall vulnerability priority of Duke Energy substations to climate-driven changes in precipitation and inland flooding is high,” the report said, while under the “middle of the road” projection, “transmission infrastructure faces a medium priority vulnerability.” In both cases, however, “without adaptation planning … substations are at the highest potential risk, with extreme heat and flooding being the greatest concerns for existing assets.”
Duke said at the time that it had “implemented permanent flood protection measures at new substations located in flood plains and substations with a prior history of flooding.” For its existing fleet, priority was being given to those substations considered particularly “at-risk,” however the flood protection plan had “not yet been universally implemented at all existing substations in the flood plain.”
“What they characterized there falls significantly short of what we just saw,” Norris said. While he noted that Duke had listed risk to substations from inland flooding as high (albeit only under the extreme scenario), it had listed the risk to the distribution of power, i.e. poles and wires, as “low” under both scenarios. “There’s been a dramatic misestimate of risk here,” Norris said.
For Duke customers, especially in the more isolated parts of Western North Carolina, they may simply have to wait for workers and parts to arrive. Repairs that could normally happen quickly will likely happen slowly as workers struggle to reach areas whose roads have been washed away. Duke said that it’s now focusing on restoring the “backbone” of the transmission and distribution system, and then is moving on to restoring fallen poles in less densely populated areas.
And it will likely happen again. Kern noted that inland flooding especially is notoriously hard to predict compared to coastal flooding from hurricanes. “Flooding is so idiosyncratic,” he said. “It’s hard for anyone to predict how flooding will affect a region. Let alone electric utilities.”
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It’s known as the 50% rule, and Southwest Florida hates it.
After the storm, we rebuild. That’s the mantra repeated by residents, businesses and elected officials after any big storm. Hurricane Milton may have avoided the worst case scenario of a direct hit on the Tampa Bay area, but communities south of Tampa experienced heavy flooding just a couple weeks after being hit by Hurricane Helene.
While the damage is still being assessed in Sarasota County’s barrier islands, homes that require extensive renovations will almost certainly run up against what is known as the 50% rule — or, in Southwest Florida, the “dreaded 50% rule.”
In flood zone-situated communities eligible to receive insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program, any renovations to repair “substantial damage” — defined as repairs whose cost exceeds 50% of the value of the structure (not the land, which can often be quite valuable due to its proximity to the water) — must bring the entire structure “into compliance with current local floodplain management standards.” In practice, this typically means elevating the home above what FEMA defines as the area’s “base flood elevation,” which is the level that a “100-year-flood” would reach, plus some amount determined by the building code.
The rule almost invites conflict. Because just as much as local communities and homeowners want to restore things to the way they were, the federal government doesn’t want to insure structures that are simply going to get destroyed. On Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall, the base flood elevation ranges from 7 feet to 9 feet, meaning that elevating a home to comply with flood codes could be beyond the means — or at least the insurance payouts — of some homeowners.
“You got a 1952 house that’s 1,400 square feet, and you get 4 feet of water,” Jeff Brandes, a former state legislator and president of the Florida Policy Project, told me on Wednesday, explaining how the rule could have played out in Tampa. “That means new kitchens and new bathrooms, all new flooring and baseboards and drywall to 4 or 5 feet.” That kind of claim could easily run to $150,000, which might well surpass the FEMA threshold. “Now all of the sudden you get into the 50% rule that you have the entire house up to current code levels. But then you have to do another half-a-million above what [insurance] paid you.”
Simple probability calculations show that a 100-year flood (which is really a flood elevation that has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring every year) has a more than 25% chance of occurring during the lifetime of a mortgage. If you browse Siesta Key real estate on Zillow, much of it is given a 100% chance of flooding sometime over the course of a 30-year mortgage, according to data analysis by First Street.
Sarasota County as a whole has around 62,000 NFIP policies with some $16.6 billion in total coverage (although more than 80% percent of households have no flood insurance at all). Considering that flood insurance is required in high-risk areas for federally-backed mortgages and for new homeowners insurance policies written by Florida’s state backed property insurer of last resort, Citizens, FEMA is likely to take a close interest in whether communities affected by Milton and Helene are complying with its rules.
If 2022’s Hurricane Ian is any indication, squabbles over the 50% rule are almost certain to emerge — and soon.
Earlier this year, FEMA told Lee County, which includes Fort Myers and Cape Coral, that it was rescinding the discount its residents and a handful of towns within it receive on flood insurance because, the agency claimed, more than 600 homeowners had violated the 50% rule after Hurricane Ian. Following an outcry from local officials and congressional representatives, FEMA restored the discount.
In their efforts to avoid triggering the rule, homeowners are hardly rogue actors. Local governments often actively assist them.
FEMA had initiated a similar procedure in Lee County the year before, threatening to drop homeowners from the flood insurance program for using possibly inaccurate appraisals to avoid the 50% rule before eventually relenting. The Fort Myers News Press reported that the appraisals were provided by the county, which was deliberately “lowering the amount that residents could use to calculate their repairs or rebuilds” to avoid triggering the rule.
Less than a month after Ian swept through Southwest Florida, Cape Coral advised residents to delay and slow down repairs for the same reason, as the rule there applied to money spent on repairs over the course of a year. Some highly exposed coastal communities in Pinellas County have been adjusting their “lookback rules” — the period over which repairs are totaled to see if they hit the 50% rule — to make them shorter so homeowners are less likely to have to make the substantive repairs required.
This followed similar actions by local governments in Charlotte County. As the Punta Gordon Sun put it, “City Council members learned the federal regulation impacts its homeowners — and they decided to do something about it.” In the Sarasota County community of North Port, local officials scrapped a rule that added up repair costs over a five-year period to make it possible for homeowners to rebuild without triggering elevation requirements.
When the 50% rule “works,” it can lead to the communities most affected by big storms being fundamentally changed, both in terms of the structures that are built and who occupies them.The end result of the rebuilding following Helene and Milton — or the next big storm to hit Florida’s Gulf Coast — or the one after that, and so on — may be wealthier homeowners in more resilient homes essentially serving as a flood barrier for everyone else, and picking up more of the bill if the waters rise too high again.
Florida’s Gulf Coast has long been seen as a place where the middle class can afford beachfront property. Elected officials’ resistance to the FEMA rule only goes to show just how important keeping a lid on the cost of living — quite literally, the cost of legally inhabiting a structure — is to the voters and residents they represent.
Still, said Brandes, “There’s the right way to come out of this thing. The wrong way is to build exactly back what you built before.”
The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.
In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?
No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”
But just because a landfill won’t turn into a mass of airborne dirt and half-decomposed projectiles doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. Because landfills — especially large ones — often contain more advanced infrastructure such as gas collection systems, which prevent methane from being vented into the atmosphere, and drainage systems, which collect contaminated liquid that’s pooled at the bottom of the waste pile and send it off for treatment. Meyers told me that getting these systems back online after a storm if they’ve been damaged is “the most critical part, from our standpoint.”
A flood-inundated gas collection system can mean more methane escaping into the air, and storm-damaged drainage pipes can lead to waste liquids leaking into the ground and potentially polluting water sources. The latter was a major concern in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed a landfill’s waste liquid collection system in the Municipality of Juncos in 2017.
As for methane, calculating exactly how much could be released as a result of a dysfunctional landfill gas collection system requires accounting for myriad factors such as the composition of the waste and the climate that it’s in, but the back of the envelope calculations don’t look promising. The Southeast County Landfill near Tampa, for instance, emitted about 100,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2022, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (although a Harvard engineering study from earlier this year suggests that this may be a significant underestimate). The EPA estimates that gas collection systems are about 75% effective, which means that the landfill generates a total of about 400,000 metric tons of CO2-worth of methane. If Southeast County Landfill’s gas collection system were to go down completely for even a day, that would mean extra methane emissions of roughly 822 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. That difference amounts to the daily emissions of more than 65,000 cars.
That’s a lot of math. But the takeaway is: Big landfills in the pathway of a destructive storm could end up spewing a lot of methane into the atmosphere. And keep in mind that these numbers are just for one hypothetical landfill with a gas collection system that goes down for one day. The emissions numbers, you can imagine, start to look much worse if you consider the possibility that floodwaters could impede access to infrastructure for even longer.
So stay strong out there, landfills of Florida. You may not be the star of this show, but you’ve got our attention.
On the storm’s destruction, wildlife populations, and shipping emissions
Current conditions: Large parts of Pennsylvania are under a frost advisory today and tomorrow • The remnants of Hurricane Kirk killed at least one person in France • A severe solar storm is expected to hit Earth today.
Hurricane Milton is headed out to the Atlantic after raking across Florida overnight, and as the sun comes up, residents are assessing the damage left in its wake. Milton made landfall near Sarasota as a Category 3 storm, bringing heavy rainfall, dangerous winds, and flooding. St. Petersburg reported 16 inches of rain, which meteorologists say is a 1-in-1,000-year event. The storm also triggered more than 130 tornado warnings, possibly a new record. The Tropicana Field Stadium in Tampa sustained significant damage. While deaths have been reported, it’s not yet clear how many. More than 3 million people are without power.
Before the storm hit, the Florida Department of Financial Services issued a rule that requires insurance claims adjusters to provide an explanation for any changes they make to a claimant’s loss estimate, The Washington Postreported, calling the move “a groundbreaking win for policyholders.”
The World Wide Fund for Nature published its 2024 Living Planet Report yesterday, which tracks nearly 5,500 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles all over the world. It found that wildlife populations plummeted by about 73% between 1970 and 2020, as illustrated in this rather bleak but very effective chart:
WWF
Latin America, which is home to some of the most biodiverse regions in the world, saw the worst losses, at 95%. Freshwater species experienced the greatest decline at 85%. There are some success stories, such as a 3% increase in the mountain gorilla population, and the incredible comeback of the European Bison, but generally the report is pretty heartbreaking. It underscores the interconnected nature of the climate crisis and nature destruction. “It really does indicate to us that the fabric of nature is unraveling,” said Rebecca Shaw, WWF’s chief scientist. The report comes days ahead of the start of the UN COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, where delegates will discuss concrete ways to stop biodiversity loss.
More than 100 CEOs from some of the world’s biggest corporations have published a letter urging governments and the private sector to boost efforts to keep Paris Agreement goals alive. The letter, signed by the heads of companies including Ikea, AstraZeneca, A.P. Moller-Maersk, Bain & Company, Iberdrola, Orsted, and Volvo Cars, calls for governments to:
The head of the International Maritime Organization this week called on the shipping industry to do more to cut emissions from the sector. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The IMO recently set a new industry-wide target of a 20% emissions reduction by 2030, and net-zero by 2050. But the IMO’s Arsenio Dominguez said there is more to be done to hit these goals. That includes “low hanging fruit” like reducing ship speed, charting routes according to the weather, and cleaning the hulls of ships to reduce friction, The Associated Pressreported. But in the long-term, he said, the industry will need to switch to cleaner fuels, which have yet to scale.
Long-duration energy storage startup Form Energy, closed a $405 million Series F funding round this week, bringing its total funding to more than $1.2 billion. Form uses a novel method for storing energy, combining iron and oxygen to make rust, a process that the company claims can be used to store and discharge up to 100 hours of battery power. As renewable energy production ramps up, new ways of storing variable energy from wind and solar is essential, and Form’s latest fundraising underscores this need. Canary Mediareported that Form’s technology isn’t proven at utility scale yet but the company is working on commercial deployments and broke ground on a project in August to provide energy to a utility in Minnesota.
Some dragonfly species have evolved to have darker wing spots as a breeding advantage. A new study finds these dragonflies have also evolved to be able to withstand higher temperatures.
Noah Leith