Here & Now

Noon Wednesday: Can We Stay Ahead of Future Floods?

Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to Noon Wednesday. I’m Marisa Wojcik, a multimedia journalist with Here & Now on Wisconsin Public Television. So in 2019 alone, Wisconsin has already racked up nearly $3 million in infrastructure repair costs due to flood damage. Go back just a few years more and that number is much higher. In a collaboration with Here & Now and WisContext, we traveled across Northwest Wisconsin and visited local communities that are grappling with keeping pace with increased storm damage. And Will Cushman from WisContext is here to talk with us about it. Thanks so much for being here.

Will Cushman:

Thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

So for your story, where did you visit and what’s happening?

Will Cushman:

Sure. Visited communities as you mentioned, all over Northwestern Wisconsin. Was based out of Superior, but visited Hayward, Spooner, Ashland, and then a whole bunch of rural areas in Iron County, Sawyer County, Bayfield, and Ashland Counties. Also hit up Washburn as well. And just throughout that whole trip, my goal was to talk to, for the most part, local officials. Like people at the township level and county level, and better understand how they’re grappling with the really high costs from these repeated flood events that have been occurring in pretty quick succession, since 2012.

Marisa Wojcik:

In particular, you visited a woman in Iron County. And in 2016, she couldn’t even leave her home. Was this a reality for a lot of people? What do you do if there’s an emergency? That sounds terrifying.

Will Cushman:

Right. Yeah, that was Joan, who I actually met her after my trip, over the Internet. So that was a really nice connection to make. But, yeah, Joan told a story that I think was pretty common in the Northwoods, especially after you mentioned that July 2016 storm, which really wreaked havoc across the whole region. Yeah, she described waking up the morning after the storm being completely cut off. She lives in a rural area. Being completely cut off in all directions, as were her neighbors, as were people all over the region. One of her neighbors was dealing with lung cancer at the time and really needed oxygen. And so some of her other neighbors took it upon themselves to basically bushwhack a trail out from their property to a place where they could seek assistance, which was a pretty common experience as I understand. She said that they had to get out and get around using ATVs. Which she said luckily a lot of people up there have ATVs, so they were at least kind of equipped to deal with this. But, yeah, pretty crazy scenario.

Marisa Wojcik:

Yeah. I thought it was particularly interesting. So storms like this are commonly, even when I’m speaking with people, you hear them referred to as 100-year storms. But is that just something that people say? Is it actually a 100-year storm? Are we going to continue to see 100-year storms? How does that factor in?

Will Cushman:

Very much. Yeah, so it is confusing terminology. And unfortunately, it actually arises I think from an effort to make probability a little bit more understandable for people. And I think it was a little misguided. So a 100-year storm does not mean that it’s a storm that we expect to recur like once every century, on the dot. The same goes for a 500-year storm. It’s not something that we expect to only occur once every 500 years, and then again, exactly 500 years later. What it actually is is a reflection of a probability. So a 100-year storm is actually a storm that based on historical rainfall and flood records, we’d expect a 1% chance of happening in any given location, in a given year. So every year, there’s a 1% chance of that storm happening, and so, it could happen two years in a row.

Marisa Wojcik:

But that data is wrong based on the fact that, or that is a kind of a misnomer just based on the fact that these are way more common than a 1% chance. And so, there’s kind of a double-edged sword happening there.

Will Cushman:

Yeah, so one of the I think most fascinating parts of the reporting that I did was talking with some professors at Northland College, who talked a lot about how. One major problem in the reason why Joan and a lot of her neighbors were cut off is that there were a lot of washouts on roads all over the place. And those were often due to failed culverts. And the problem was that these culverts had been designed by engineers for a quote-unquote 100-year storm but using historical data from the mid-20th century. And NOAA recently, I think just before this first major storm in the region hit around 2011 or 2012, updated that guidance, and they found particularly in northern Wisconsin and around the Ashland area, that the size of a 100-year storm had increased by over 35% from the mid-20th century to 2011.

Marisa Wojcik:

So just the scale of everything was off because the data was outdated.

Will Cushman:

Exactly.

Marisa Wojcik:

Things are specifically being designed based on old data, and so infrastructure doesn’t have a chance of holding up to these storms. Because not only was the data old, but your reporting does talk about some changes in climate and how we are even since 2012, just seeing a rapid acceleration of these storms increasing in size, severity, damage.

Will Cushman:

Right. That’s what Matt Hudson, a Northland College professor told me that one of the things that kind of makes him anxious about even the work that’s going on now, trying to build out infrastructure to current 100-year flood standards. The ones that I mentioned were published by NOAA in 2011, those don’t even include these giant storms in 2012, 2016, and 2018. So he said that that guidance is likely already pretty out of date.

Marisa Wojcik:

Wow.

Will Cushman:

Yeah.

Marisa Wojcik:

You gave a lot of examples of culverts. A culvert is like that thing that you don’t even really notice when you’re driving over like a rural county road, but it’s that big kind of tube thing under there, right?

Will Cushman:

Yes, yeah. I think it’s good to talk about this a little bit, because, yeah, you’re right. A lot of people are like, culvert, what’s that?

Marisa Wojcik:

I grew up in the country and I still was just like, culvert, oh, that thing under the road, okay.

Will Cushman:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of the people I talked to, like the county highway commissioners, just refer to them as pipes. And they basically are just big giant pipes, usually made out of concrete or steel. And so, their purpose is to route streams, maybe a small river, but like a stream or an area where water would run through after a storm, underneath a road. Basically so the roadway doesn’t act as a dam.

Marisa Wojcik:

Sure, and so it’s pretty important because the road’s going this way, the water’s going this way. And so, if there’s nowhere for the water to go, it’s going to still try and push through. Which is why we see these like really dramatic photos of roads that are just like completely gone, right?

Will Cushman:

Exactly, yep. So basically, in those really dramatic photos, what happened was that a culvert was too small for these really large storms that produce huge volumes of water. And so the water gets backed up because the culvert just can’t handle all that volume. Sometimes there’s debris that gets stuck in as well, and kind of exacerbates the situation. And then what happens is the water just kind of backs up and then eats away at the roadway. And so, often what you’ll see is a roadway that’s like completely blown out. Looks like it was bombed or something. And the culvert is still sitting there down at the bottom having not been able to do its job because it was just too small for these storms.

Marisa Wojcik:

And so, we have outdated information and data, but on the flip side, even if these townships and counties wanted to account for either very current data, or even future data, some of your research and reporting found that that’s just not even possible. There are certain limits as to what they can do. Why is that happening?

Will Cushman:

Right, the major limitation is funding. The damage caused by just one of these major storms over the last few years in several many townships, has been the cost of that damage has been greater than their entire annual budget. So these townships are just not equipped at all to deal with the expense of repairing this infrastructure. And in many cases, neither are counties. And so what happens, especially with these big events, that there’s a federal disaster declaration that comes in after the disaster, that frees up money from agencies like FEMA. And so they depend on FEMA funding to help them rebuild that infrastructure. It’s a cost-share, so they still have to pay into it a little bit. But it makes the prospect of replacing the super expensive infrastructure a little bit more realistic. But a big problem with that, at least in terms of the people I spoke to in Northwestern Wisconsin is that FEMA usually requires, their rules require that the infrastructure has to be built in-kind, which means it has to be built as it was prior to the disaster. And so, that’s a huge problem when the infrastructure was inadequate to begin with, and that inadequacy kind of led to all these problems related to the flooding anyway. In some cases, some townships, you can kind of negotiate with FEMA. And in some places they have been successful in getting FEMA to fund some upgrades, some larger culverts. But it’s a major hassle, and not all townships are kind of up to the task.

Marisa Wojcik:

You have to be pretty tenacious to have the ability to have that negotiation power.

Will Cushman:

Exactly.

Marisa Wojcik:

So you have basically storms that are increasing in severity, and then you have years going by where infrastructure continues to be repaired at the exact same level. And so things are quickly becoming mismatched. People in rural areas sometimes feel like they’re not being listened to in bigger cities. And this just seems like a very much of like a we have to fend for ourselves kind of feeling. Were the people that you talk to pretty frustrated?

Will Cushman:

Yeah, definitely. And frustrated not only with FEMA, but in some cases, with the state. I spoke to officials in Douglas County, the chairman of the board of supervisors up there. Also really cast blame on the state-imposed levy freezes for counties. Basically not allowing them to even consider raising funds through a referendum that would maybe increase the local sales tax a little bit, to go toward infrastructure upgrades, or highway maintenance repairs. Also he mentioned the opioid crisis has really been massively problematic for their budget. Just in the last couple years, Douglas County has had to transfer $300,000 out of their highway budget to cover the cost related to the opioid crisis. As he said, Douglas County isn’t even in a position to keep up with maintenance of roads, let alone think about upgrading infrastructure. Yeah.

Marisa Wojcik:

Is there anything to show that repairing something repeatedly at the same amount over and over, is that more cost-effective than just having a little bit more capital to make it bigger and more robust? Has there been kind of that cost comparison?

Will Cushman:

I didn’t really find that in my reporting. But I think that could be the situation and in some cases. I think Zach’s reporting, Zach Schultz, his report last week on Here & Now that centered on Hayward, mentioned a culvert in the town of Hayward where it was a pretty expensive culvert upgrade that FEMA did help pay for. And the local roads commissioner there said that, sure it could have been less expensive to just keep repairing that washed out road with minor fixes as those washouts happen. But those costs would eventually add up over the very long term. And so, in his view, putting in this pretty expensive large culvert to hopefully make it so that they wouldn’t have to keep repairing these washouts was a good idea.

Marisa Wojcik:

And I believe he even said he hopes this culvert lasts longer than his own lifetime. Which that’s a pretty big statement.

Will Cushman:

Right.

Marisa Wojcik:

Is there like a light at the end of the culvert? (laughs) Are there positive things that some communities are doing that maybe other communities could take note of? Or things that kind of are making this look a little bit brighter?

Will Cushman:

Yeah, I think there are some bright spots. One really interesting program that I learned about in my reporting process was through a local nonprofit up in the Ashland area called the Superior Rivers Watershed Association, excuse me. And they are actually not necessarily, their initial goal was not necessarily focused on flood risk reduction or maintaining infrastructure in a major storm. They’re interested in fish passage, specifically reconnecting brook trout from Lake Superior to upstream habitats in Lake Superior tributaries. Or tributaries of like the Bad River, for instance, that flows into Lake Superior. As part of that, they have been getting a lot of pretty major grants to replace culverts under roads, to build larger culverts that allow fish passage. But a really nice kind of added benefit of that is that these culverts that they are replacing have been demonstrated to be much more resilient to these large storms. So that’s kind of an interesting, positive thing that I found out. Also, there are places like the city of Superior is actually one of, probably the only local government that I spoke to that actually feels well-positioned to deal with flooding issues in the future. And to work on storm water mitigation. Ironically, that’s because they have millions of dollars of funding from an oil pipeline terminal tax from Enbridge. There’s a little bit of irony there. I talked to the Mayor Jim Payne, and flood mitigation is one of his top priorities, and he feels pretty well positioned to tackle it, at least locally in the city there.

Marisa Wojcik:

So there’s some additional follow-up reporting about things that are happening nationally, and also a follow-up story about Zach’s piece on Here & Now. So where can people find that?

Will Cushman:

At WisContext.org. So that’s W-I-S and the word context.org.

Marisa Wojcik:

All right, Will, thank you so much for telling us all about your reporting.

Will Cushman:

Thank you, Marisa.

Marisa Wojcik:

For more from Here & Now and Wisconsin Public Television, you can visit wpt.org, and thank you so much for joining us on Noon Wednesday.