Storm-lashed South Carolina reassesses global warming’s role
Caccurately predicting nearly to a home which ones would flood during Hurricane Florence in September. That gave residents a week or more to get whatever they could out their homes.
Kevin Tovornik was one of them. Tovornik lost his air conditioner and duct work in the 2016 flood. In 2018, he saved his furniture, but still ended up losing the house. For a while, he paid two mortgages: this one and one on a townhome he had to move into 30 miles (48 kilometers) away. To save money, he now lives in an RV in his yard in Conway. He hasn’t been able to start repairs on the house because too much rain has fallen over the past few months for anything to dry out.
Tovornik and his wife don’t want to rebuild. He said he would now have to elevate the house with no guarantee there isn’t another record flood to come on the Waccamaw River, which crested 3.5 feet (1 meter) above the level it reached during Matthew. But at the moment, he can only get back 75 percent of the appraised value of the house through the federal government’s buyback program.
“Where else in South Carolina right now is your house losing that kind of value?” Tovornik said. “It’s hard to get your feet back on the ground. You have so many strikes against you. You have a mortgage on a house that is uninhabitable.”
As they consider how to plan for and react to future weather events, the governor and fellow politically conservative members of the South Carolina Floodwater Commission aren’t quite ready to accept the general consensus among scientists that pollution and other manmade factors are largely to blame for climate change.
The commission’s leader, attorney and environmental professor Tom Mullikin said solving the problem can’t be derailed by what he described as politically charged debates over the cause.
“We are going to deal with the real-time impacts of a climate that has changed throughout all of time,” Mullikin said. “We — the governor — is not entertaining a political conversation.”
Whatever the causes of the extreme weather, meteorologists say it will strike again as it did last year, when more than 100 reporting stations, mostly east of the Mississippi River, recorded more rainfall than at any other time, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center. Weather experts are also investigating potentially record rainfall in South Carolina and North Carolina last year.
Pickens County Emergency Management Director Denise Kwiatek first got a sign the weather world was changing five years ago.
In the summer of 2013, Kwiatek knew a heavy storm was hitting a section of Pickens County in the northern part of the state, but conditions didn’t seem too bad in the middle of the county where she was. And yet, just 15 miles (24 kilometers) away, thousands of plant species collected over decades at Clemson University’s South Carolina Botanical Gardens were being swept away as 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain fell in a few hours.
“More of those little events are happening. We are learning to be more vigilant,” Kwiatek said.
OLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — When he took the job 15 years ago, Horry County Emergency Manager Randy Webster figured his biggest disasters would be wind and surge rolling over his county’s beaches, South Carolina’s top tourist destination.