Midwesterners facing flood caused by climate change
Colin Moulder-McComb might seem an unlikely climate change refugee. The middle-aged video game developer is a middle-class Midwesterner, not an impoverished resident of a small island nation threatened by sea-level rise. But the resident of Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., an affluent, inner-ring suburb of Detroit where he lives with his wife and two kids, says global warming is destroying his family's quality of life. In 2016, heavy rains caused their basement to fill with 36 inches of water.
"We thought it was a one-and-done, so we refurnished the basement," he recalled. After all, they had been living in southeast Michigan for years, and the massive rainfall that caused the flood wasn't a regular occurrence - or, at least, not yet.
The basement in Colin McComb's home in Grosse
Pointe Park, Mich., as he first looked down the stairs after it flooded on June 26. He was wrong. This June, MoulderMcComb got 42 inches of water in his basement after the sewer backed up again, under pressure from more than 6 inches of rain. And then it flooded again, around 8 inches, in July. "My wife had her old band memorabilia down there; we had financial records down there," Moulder-McComb recalled. "Basically everything got trashed. We are estimating around $40,000 of damage." When New York City basements flooded, to deadly effect, from Hurricane Ida earlier this month, the news made national headlines. But the underlying causes in the Big Apple - increasingly heavy rains, aging public and private infrastructure and a combined sewer and stormwater system - are just as prevalent, if not more so, in many poorer parts of the Northeast and Midwest.
It's not just the financial or sentimental value of what's lost, but the unpleasant hassle of dealing with the damage that has McComb's family considering giving up on their home. Pulling out soaked couches, books, electronics and children's toys, drilling holes to prevent mold and bleaching and sanitizing what was left has forced McComb to take two weeks off work.
Worst of all is the reason the basement flooded in the first place: The local sewer system backed up. "The second flood was actually the worst, because I actually found human feces in my basement," said Moulder-McComb. This problem is not unique to Moulder-McComb's house. His entire neighborhood has been deluged. "Everybody got it. The streets were just lined with [belongings from] people's basements," said Moulder-McComb. "Everybody's got PTSD now." The engines of many of his neighbors' cars were flooded, rendering them inoperable. "This summer alone, we've had three major flooding events," said Christy McGillivray, a neighbor of Moulder-McComb's who works for the Michigan chapter of the Sierra Club. "I was driving my daughter, and we were actually caught on a freeway in a flash flood. It's a climate issue that's hitting very close to home personally."
While the climate in the Midwest has always been relatively wet, the frequency and severity of downpours has gotten notably worse in recent decades, due to climate change. Warmer temperatures have led to more evaporation and precipitation. Between 1951 and 2017, the Great Lakes region's average temperature increased 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, its annual rainfall has risen 17% and it has 35% more heavy rain events, according to a study by Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments, a collaboration between the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.