Is Your Town Threatened by Floods or Fires? Consider a ‘Managed Retreat.’
After suffering back-to-back floods in 1993, the town of Valmeyer, Ill., did something unusual. Instead of risking yet another disaster, it used funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state of Illinois to move the entire town a few miles away to higher ground.
As the climate continues to change, more and more communities will contemplate taking actions like Valmeyer’s. Rather than merely build levees or weatherize homes, communities will purposefully move away from places threatened by floods, droughts, fires or high temperatures.
This strategy is known as managed retreat. It is often considered an extreme option to be pursued only when no other alternatives remain. People don’t want to move from their homes, especially when environmental conditions, even if worsening, have not yet made life unlivable.
But managed retreat should be considered more often and in more innovative forms. Most adaptations to climate change involve both upsides and downsides: A home on stilts may reduce flood risks but restrict access for a person with limited mobility; air conditioning may keep some people cool but lead to untenable energy bills for others. While conversations about managed retreat tend to focus on its downsides, it can offer significant benefits if it’s done intelligently and with the necessary resources, as we argue in a recent article in the journal Science.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
NATURAL DISASTERS
Smoke from a fire in Washington State wafted over the Snake River into Idaho earlier this month.Credit...
The Great Outdoors Is Giving Way to the Great Indoors
MISSOULA, Mont. — “I wouldn’t go out without an N95 mask,” an oncology nurse told me the other day. She wasn’t referring to Covid-19 protections. Cases here remain quite low. I’m vaccinated. Besides, I wasn’t planning to be indoors. It was for the smoke.
The nurse was responding to a question I posed on Twitter last week as the air quality in my town degraded before my eyes, from “moderate” to “unhealthy for sensitive groups” to plain “unhealthy.” I had planned to enjoy a midmorning trail run through the valley, usually one of the perks of summer in Montana. But when I opened the door, it smelled like a campfire.
The hills just across the valley were faint through the gauzy haze. After 18 months of worrying about masking and health risks from being indoors, I now wondered the reverse. Was it safe to exercise outside?
I went for my run, but I paid for it. I didn’t breathe the air, I chewed it. For the next day, I had a smoke hangover, marked by a dull headache, light wheeze, and a strange, bone-deep fatigue. But you don’t have to exercise to feel smoke malaise. My partner and I wake up cranky each morning and we seem to argue more lately over silly things. My neighbors have reported red, itchy eyes, greasy hair, and gnawing sinus pain just walking outside. As Covid’s Delta variant sweeps the country, Westerners have a new game to play: Smoke or Covid?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Lovely Weather Defined California. What Happens When It’s Gone?
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hollywood should have been in New Jersey. It was, after all, in that unglitzy state that Thomas Edison invented the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, his cost-effective motion-picture camera and its companion viewer. And it was there that moviemaking took off; until the 1910s, many of the biggest hits of the day — “Jack and the Beanstalk,” for instance, or “The Great Train Robbery” — were produced in New Jersey and New York, many by Edison’s own company.
Yet by the end of that decade, the budding film industry had packed up and moved to California. Why? Scholars cite several reasons, but most accounts include an obvious one. The earliest movie cameras required lots of light, so films were often shot outdoors or on open-air sets. Unlike the gloomy Northeast, Southern California offered filmmakers year-round sun and a diversity of striking landscapes on which to dream up celluloid worlds — oceans, deserts and mountains within easy reach, glory wherever you looked.
In other words, Hollywood is in Hollywood rather than in West Orange, N.J., for many of the same reasons that California’s Central Valley produces about a quarter of the nation’s food, and why the Beach Boys wished for all of America to be like “Californi-a.” It’s why John Muir, looking from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, described a landscape that appeared “wholly composed” of light, “the most beautiful I have ever beheld.”
And it is the same reason that a lot of Californians first came here, and the reason so many of us, despite everything, still can’t help but stay: sunshine and natural splendor. We are hooked not just on California’s weather, pleasantly temperate and accommodating to seemingly any pursuit, but also the way life here feels defined just as much by what’s outdoors as what’s in.
A state that lives by nature, though, risks dying by it, too. In the last few years, as California battled heat waves and drought and fire, intensifying as the planet warms, I have found myself wondering about my home state’s future and, in a deeper sense, its purpose.
Is California still California when our weather becomes an adversary rather than an ally? What is California for when summertime, the season in which the Golden State once found its fullest luster, turns from heaven into hell?
Because that’s how I’ve come to think of late summer and fall here nowadays. Seven of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last three years. This fire season has already put an entry in the books. The Dixie Fire, which has been raging for nearly a month near Lassen National Forest, is already the second largest fire in the state’s history; it has consumed nearly half a million acres and destroyed hundreds of structures, and it’s only 25 percent contained.
Smoke from the Dixie Fire and other blazes this summer has blown more than a thousand miles away, choking the air in Denver and Salt Lake City. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, the air has so far remained short of noxious, but nobody I know is expecting it to remain that way. As they did last year, face masks will soon likely serve a dual purpose for Californians — wear one indoors to evade the virus, and wear one outdoors to filter out smoke and raining ash.
I don’t mean to claim special hardship for my state; the weather is turning vengeful across the planet, not just in California. It is true, too, that wondrous as it often is here, California has never been exempt from bad weather and natural disasters. In an essay about the dry and dangerous Santa Ana winds that periodically blow through Southern California, Joan Didion described its climate as characterized by “infrequent but violent extremes.” Weather in Los Angeles, she wrote, “is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.”
That strikes me as correct. Growing up in Orange County, I often saw headlines about drought and mudslides, fires here and there, El Niño, the Santa Anas. It was a place where the earth could never quite be trusted — you were to never forget that at any moment the ground beneath your feet could erupt in violent tremor, and everything around you might be destroyed in an instant.
What’s different about nature in California now is not the kind of disasters we face, but rather the regularity. The violent extremes are no longer infrequent — they are commonplace, expected. The weather of catastrophe and apocalypse is not freak; it is just the weather.
People who study California sometimes talk about the “weather tax.” Life in this state can be frustrating — it’s expensive, it’s clogged with traffic, taxes are high, inequality levels are among the worst in the nation. But maybe that’s just the price you’ve got to pay for amazing weather.
In 2015, pollsters at the University of Southern California and The Los Angeles Times asked people whether they’re likely to remain in California, and if so, why. Although respondents cited a litany of problems, more than 70 percent said they’d rather live here than anywhere else. The top reason, by far, was the weather. Life here may be tough, but people seemed willing to endure a lot to live in a place where it was so nice outside.
But the importance we place on pleasant weather is exactly why an altered climate could be so devastating to this state’s identity. The Mamas & the Papas sang of California as an escapist dreamland untouched by gloom. You’d be safe and warm if you were in L.A.
Not long from now, Los Angeles and elsewhere here might be more nightmare than dream — way too warm and none too safe, all the leaves burned, the sky ash gray.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hollywood should have been in New Jersey. It was, after all, in that unglitzy state that Thomas Edison invented the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, his cost-effective motion-picture camera and its companion viewer. And it was there that moviemaking took off; until the 1910s, many of the biggest hits of the day — “Jack and the Beanstalk,” for instance, or “The Great Train Robbery” — were produced in New Jersey and New York, many by Edison’s own company.
Yet by the end of that decade, the budding film industry had packed up and moved to California. Why? Scholars cite several reasons, but most accounts include an obvious one. The earliest movie cameras required lots of light, so films were often shot outdoors or on open-air sets. Unlike the gloomy Northeast, Southern California offered filmmakers year-round sun and a diversity of striking landscapes on which to dream up celluloid worlds — oceans, deserts and mountains within easy reach, glory wherever you looked.
In other words, Hollywood is in Hollywood rather than in West Orange, N.J., for many of the same reasons that California’s Central Valley produces about a quarter of the nation’s food, and why the Beach Boys wished for all of America to be like “Californi-a.” It’s why John Muir, looking from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, described a landscape that appeared “wholly composed” of light, “the most beautiful I have ever beheld.”
And it is the same reason that a lot of Californians first came here, and the reason so many of us, despite everything, still can’t help but stay: sunshine and natural splendor. We are hooked not just on California’s weather, pleasantly temperate and accommodating to seemingly any pursuit, but also the way life here feels defined just as much by what’s outdoors as what’s in.
A state that lives by nature, though, risks dying by it, too. In the last few years, as California battled heat waves and drought and fire, intensifying as the planet warms, I have found myself wondering about my home state’s future and, in a deeper sense, its purpose.
Is California still California when our weather becomes an adversary rather than an ally? What is California for when summertime, the season in which the Golden State once found its fullest luster, turns from heaven into hell?
Because that’s how I’ve come to think of late summer and fall here nowadays. Seven of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last three years. This fire season has already put an entry in the books. The Dixie Fire, which has been raging for nearly a month near Lassen National Forest, is already the second largest fire in the state’s history; it has consumed nearly half a million acres and destroyed hundreds of structures, and it’s only 25 percent contained.
Smoke from the Dixie Fire and other blazes this summer has blown more than a thousand miles away, choking the air in Denver and Salt Lake City. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, the air has so far remained short of noxious, but nobody I know is expecting it to remain that way. As they did last year, face masks will soon likely serve a dual purpose for Californians — wear one indoors to evade the virus, and wear one outdoors to filter out smoke and raining ash.
I don’t mean to claim special hardship for my state; the weather is turning vengeful across the planet, not just in California. It is true, too, that wondrous as it often is here, California has never been exempt from bad weather and natural disasters. In an essay about the dry and dangerous Santa Ana winds that periodically blow through Southern California, Joan Didion described its climate as characterized by “infrequent but violent extremes.” Weather in Los Angeles, she wrote, “is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.”
That strikes me as correct. Growing up in Orange County, I often saw headlines about drought and mudslides, fires here and there, El Niño, the Santa Anas. It was a place where the earth could never quite be trusted — you were to never forget that at any moment the ground beneath your feet could erupt in violent tremor, and everything around you might be destroyed in an instant.
What’s different about nature in California now is not the kind of disasters we face, but rather the regularity. The violent extremes are no longer infrequent — they are commonplace, expected. The weather of catastrophe and apocalypse is not freak; it is just the weather.
People who study California sometimes talk about the “weather tax.” Life in this state can be frustrating — it’s expensive, it’s clogged with traffic, taxes are high, inequality levels are among the worst in the nation. But maybe that’s just the price you’ve got to pay for amazing weather.
In 2015, pollsters at the University of Southern California and The Los Angeles Times asked people whether they’re likely to remain in California, and if so, why. Although respondents cited a litany of problems, more than 70 percent said they’d rather live here than anywhere else. The top reason, by far, was the weather. Life here may be tough, but people seemed willing to endure a lot to live in a place where it was so nice outside.
But the importance we place on pleasant weather is exactly why an altered climate could be so devastating to this state’s identity. The Mamas & the Papas sang of California as an escapist dreamland untouched by gloom. You’d be safe and warm if you were in L.A.
Not long from now, Los Angeles and elsewhere here might be more nightmare than dream — way too warm and none too safe, all the leaves burned, the sky ash gray.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Flooding in Nigeria Flattens a Town, Killing at Least 151
Nigerian authorities said they had expected flooding as part of the rainy season but were surprised by the extent of the damage.
By Ismail Auwal and Lynsey Chutel
Ismail Auwal reported from Abuja, Nigeria.
Published May 30, 2025
Updated May 31, 2025, 8:14 a.m. ET
Floodwaters from torrential overnight rainfall inundated a town in Nigeria on Friday, killing at least 151 people, according to officials, who said the severity of the flood had taken them by surprise.
The deluge displaced dozens of families and flattened homes and businesses in the town, Mokwa, about 235 miles west of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Mokwa’s central location at the intersection of three major roads has made it a thriving market town, with customers coming from several surrounding villages. The authorities and residents expect the death toll to rise as the floodwaters subside and rescue efforts continue.
A map locating Mokwa, in Niger province, Nigeria. Abuja and Lagos are also shown.
NIGER
NIGERIA
BENIN
NIGER PROVINCE
Mokwa
Abuja
Lagos
CAMEROON
200 MILES
By The New York Times
After heavy overnight rains, residents in Mokwa said they woke to a shocking scene.
“We had to knock on some doors, but before people could escape, the flood had already caught up,” Umar Jamil, who lost his shop in the disaster, said in a phone interview. “We have seen many bodies floating on the water, but we couldn’t help.”
At a camp for displaced people, Kaka Dazana, 48, said she had lost all four of her children and had barely made it out of the waters alive.
“I don’t know if I myself can survive this,” she said through tears. “The eldest was 20, and the youngest was 7.”
Ibrahim Hussaini, a spokesman for the state’s emergency management department, said on Saturday that more than 3,000 people had lost their homes.
The authorities are still searching for bodies and evaluating the damage, said Habibu Wushishi, a spokesman for the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management in Niger State, which includes Mokwa. They have also set up camps for the hundreds of displaced people expected to seek shelter, he said.
Each year, the rainy season, which runs from roughly April to October, brings downpours and flooding to Nigeria and other parts of West Africa. But scientists have found that climate change has contributed to the increased ferocity of the flooding in recent years. In 2022, more than 600 people were killed in Nigeria and 1.4 million displaced in what the country’s leaders described as the worst floods in a decade.
The authorities in Mokwa said they had expected flooding during this year’s rainy season, but not to this extent. Mr. Wushishi said officials had predicted that flooding would be limited to areas surrounding rivers. Mokwa, the seat of the region’s local government, is not on a river.
Still, residents like Mr. Jamil, the shopkeeper, were angered by what they said was the state’s slow response to flood warnings.
“There have been signs for a long time that a flood might occur here,” Mr. Jamil, 32, said. “You can only imagine the magnitude of the pain inflicted on our people by this flood.”
Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/worl ... e9677ea768
Nigerian authorities said they had expected flooding as part of the rainy season but were surprised by the extent of the damage.
By Ismail Auwal and Lynsey Chutel
Ismail Auwal reported from Abuja, Nigeria.
Published May 30, 2025
Updated May 31, 2025, 8:14 a.m. ET
Floodwaters from torrential overnight rainfall inundated a town in Nigeria on Friday, killing at least 151 people, according to officials, who said the severity of the flood had taken them by surprise.
The deluge displaced dozens of families and flattened homes and businesses in the town, Mokwa, about 235 miles west of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Mokwa’s central location at the intersection of three major roads has made it a thriving market town, with customers coming from several surrounding villages. The authorities and residents expect the death toll to rise as the floodwaters subside and rescue efforts continue.
A map locating Mokwa, in Niger province, Nigeria. Abuja and Lagos are also shown.
NIGER
NIGERIA
BENIN
NIGER PROVINCE
Mokwa
Abuja
Lagos
CAMEROON
200 MILES
By The New York Times
After heavy overnight rains, residents in Mokwa said they woke to a shocking scene.
“We had to knock on some doors, but before people could escape, the flood had already caught up,” Umar Jamil, who lost his shop in the disaster, said in a phone interview. “We have seen many bodies floating on the water, but we couldn’t help.”
At a camp for displaced people, Kaka Dazana, 48, said she had lost all four of her children and had barely made it out of the waters alive.
“I don’t know if I myself can survive this,” she said through tears. “The eldest was 20, and the youngest was 7.”
Ibrahim Hussaini, a spokesman for the state’s emergency management department, said on Saturday that more than 3,000 people had lost their homes.
The authorities are still searching for bodies and evaluating the damage, said Habibu Wushishi, a spokesman for the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management in Niger State, which includes Mokwa. They have also set up camps for the hundreds of displaced people expected to seek shelter, he said.
Each year, the rainy season, which runs from roughly April to October, brings downpours and flooding to Nigeria and other parts of West Africa. But scientists have found that climate change has contributed to the increased ferocity of the flooding in recent years. In 2022, more than 600 people were killed in Nigeria and 1.4 million displaced in what the country’s leaders described as the worst floods in a decade.
The authorities in Mokwa said they had expected flooding during this year’s rainy season, but not to this extent. Mr. Wushishi said officials had predicted that flooding would be limited to areas surrounding rivers. Mokwa, the seat of the region’s local government, is not on a river.
Still, residents like Mr. Jamil, the shopkeeper, were angered by what they said was the state’s slow response to flood warnings.
“There have been signs for a long time that a flood might occur here,” Mr. Jamil, 32, said. “You can only imagine the magnitude of the pain inflicted on our people by this flood.”
Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/worl ... e9677ea768