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In the summer of 2017, Donald Trump stood in the lobby of Trump Tower and declared he would heal a “massive self-inflicted wound on our country” by eliminating red tape that he said was making construction in America an arduous, expensive process.
One policy he eradicated that day was a set of standards aimed at ensuring that anything built with taxpayer money — including hospitals, sewage treatment plants, bridges and libraries — could withstand flooding and rising seas caused by climate change.
Seven years later and in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton, federal officials and flood experts say Trump’s decision to roll back those federal infrastructure standards has had financial ramifications. Those are just starting to come into view as officials continue to tally the damage from the storms.
According to state and federal data, at least five water treatment plants in Florida that were in the path of Helene and Milton were exempt from tougher national building standards and sustained damage from the hurricane ranging from water line breaks to power losses. In total, they were funded with about $200 million in federal spending.
Another seven water plants across the Southeast that together received more than $100 million in federal funding were built to lower flood standards and didn’t receive damage during Helene or Milton. But the plants are considered at high risk for damage in the future, and what worries experts is how many crucial infrastructure plants are similarly exposed.
“We can definitively say that risk increased,” said Alice C. Hill, a senior fellow in energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The federal government continues to invest in infrastructure destined to fail in the light of worsening climate impacts.”
“Hurricanes Helene and Milton are a stark reminder that catastrophic flooding, and the climate crisis more broadly, present ongoing and worsening challenges for America’s critical water infrastructure,” said Zealan Hoover, a senior adviser to the E.P.A. administrator, Michael Regan.
Hoover said policies like the flood standard “have real consequences for Americans,” including ensuring that communities can maintain access to drinking water in the wake of disasters.
The impact of the flood rules
The standards in question were created under President Obama in 2015, who made the case that climate change would make floods more common and much more destructive.
The rules called for building structures two or three feet above the 100-year flood level, or built at the 500-year level. Alternately, federal agencies could analyze future climate change scenarios like sea-level rise or expected heavier floods, and build according to those projections. But the policy ran into opposition, particularly from homebuilders who argued that new restrictions would lead to higher construction costs even outside federally funded projects.
When Trump was elected, he took aim at every policy linked to the phrase “climate change” and repealed it. President Biden reinstated the standard, which went into effect at most agencies this year.
Quantifying the effects of the standard’s seven-year absence is no easy feat. But Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said “hundreds of millions if not billions” had been spent on buildings that are unprepared for intense floods.
Can the standard’s elimination be blamed for damage caused by Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Milton? At this stage, officials said, it’s hard to say.
In part that is because there are no national data sets showing infrastructure spending in flood plains. Helene was a one-in-1,000-year hurricane that might have damaged structures even with stricter codes. And finally, federal data might not capture state or local decisions to impose stricter rules even in the absence of federal requirements.
Preparing for a 500-year flood
That’s what happened in Hendersonville, N.C., which was deluged during three days of unrelenting precipitation from Hurricane Helene. Adam Steurer, the city’s utilities director, said that when the town built a new drinking water pumping station a few years ago on the banks of the French Broad River, engineers opted to build to 500-year flood levels.
“It was a very early discussion we had because this area goes underwater all the time,” Steurer said. He said that the cost difference was negligible and that putting electrical equipment at higher elevation gave the pumping station extra resiliency. The station is still being assessed, but officials do not believe it was badly damaged by Helene, he said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
If he wins the White House in November, Trump is widely expected to again eliminate climate policies, including the flood standards.
Carlos Curbelo, a Republican and former congressman from Miami, said doing so would be “reckless,” adding, “This is a great example of how ideology and trying to win the culture wars can get in the way of protecting property and saving taxpayers resources.”
Berginnis said average annual national losses from flooding had doubled each decade since the 1980s, and would quite likely reach $40 billion this decade. Eliminating the standards again, he said, would be fiscally irresponsible, and lead to taxpayer funds “wasted on projects that may not be built to endure the flooding we are already seeing, and know is only going to get worse.”
How climate disasters are making mobile homes a huge risk
Back-to-back catastrophic hurricanes this fall, first Helene and then Milton, have exposed the risks climate change poses to the 16 million Americans who live in mobile or manufactured homes. Built in factories and lighter than conventional houses, manufactured homes are transported to a property and secured to the ground.
The people who live in mobile homes are often poorly served by federal disaster programs, experts say. The result is compounded loss as they are uprooted from their communities with nowhere to go.
Mobile homes are among the least expensive forms of housing; those who live in mobile home parks are three times as likely to live in poverty as those who live in traditional housing and are more likely to be older or disabled. Manufactured homes are also more likely to be located in flood zones, according to data compiled by CoreLogic, a property information and analytics company.
Manufactured homes make up 6 percent of the nation’s housing stock. But the proportions were much higher in several areas hard-hit by Milton and Helene. — Hilary Howard and Christopher Flavelle
More climate news:
Reuters reports that officials say that a deal at the U.N. climate summit next month could come up with “hundreds of billions” to help developing nations address climate change.
Starting this fall, the Guardian reports, the University of California San Diego will have a new graduation requirement: taking a course that addresses climate change.
The Washington Post “analyzed millions of real estate transactions along the Florida coast to see how climate change may be transforming home values.”
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