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A Uniquely French Approach to Environmentalism

The biodiversity police might just work.

On a Wednesday morning last December, Bruno Landier slung his gun and handcuffs around his waist and stepped into the mouth of a cave. Inside the sprawling network of limestone cavities, which sit in a cliffside that towers above the tiny town of Marboué, in north-central France, Landier crouched under hanging vines. He stepped over rusted pipes, remnants from when the caves housed a mushroom farm. He picked his way through gravel and mud as he scanned the shadowy ecru walls with his flashlight, taking care not to miss any signs.Landier was not gathering evidence for a murder case or tailing a criminal on the run. He was searching for bats—and anything that might disturb their winter slumber. “Aha,” Landier whispered as his flashlight illuminated a jumble of amber-colored beer bottles strewn across the floor. Someone had been there, threatening to awaken the hundreds of bats hibernating within.Landier is an inspector in the French Biodiversity Agency (OFB), an entity that was given sweeping powers to enforce environmental laws when it was founded, in 2020. Its nationwide police force, the only one of its kind in Europe, has 3,000 agents charged with protecting French species in order to revive declining biodiversity in the country and its territories. Damaging the habitat of protected animals such as bats—much less killing a protected animal—is a misdemeanor that can carry a penalty of 150,000 euros and three years in prison. It’s a uniquely draconian, uniquely French approach to environmentalism.The environmental police watch over all of France’s protected species, including hedgehogs, squirrels, black salamanders, lynxes, and venomous asp vipers. Bats are a frequent charge: Of the 54 protected mammal species on French soil, 34 are bats. The Marboué caves patrolled by Landier are home to approximately 12 different species.[Read: How long should a species stay on life support?]When Landier visits each morning, he sometimes must crouch to avoid walking face-first into clusters of sleeping notch-eared bats, which he can identify by their coffin-shaped back and “badly combed” off-white belly. They hibernate in groups of five, 10, or even 50, dangling from the ceiling like so many living umbrellas for as long as seven months each year. If roused before spring—by a loud conversation or even prolonged heat from a flashlight—the bats will flee toward almost-certain death in the cold temperatures outside the cave.Bats, of course, aren’t the only nocturnal creatures attracted to caves. Landier has spent more than 20 years patrolling this site, beginning when he was a hunting warden for the French government. In that time, he has encountered ravers, drug traffickers, squatters, geocachers, looters, local teens looking for a place to party. When he comes across evidence such as the beer bottles, he’ll sometimes return on the weekend to stake out the entrance. First offenders might receive a verbal warning, but Landier told me he’s ready to pursue legal action if necessary. (So far, he hasn’t had to.) “I’m very nice. But I won’t be taken for a fool,” he said. In the neighboring department of Cher, several people were convicted of using bats as target practice for paintball, Landier told me. A fine of an undisclosed amount was levied against the culprits. (France prevents details of petty crimes from being released to the public.)[From the June 1958 issue: Is France being Americanized?]Across France, many of the caverns and architecture that bats call home are themselves cherished or protected. Landier told me that relics found in his caves date back to the Gallo-Roman period, nearly 2,000 years ago; on the ceiling, his flashlight caught the glitter of what he said were fossils and sea urchins from the Ice Age. The floor is crisscrossed with long wires trailed by past explorers so they could find their way back out.In nearby Châteaudun castle, built in the 15th century, several dozen bats live in the basement and behind the tapestries. At Chartres Cathedral, to the north, a colony of pipistrelle bats dwells inside the rafters of a medieval wooden gate. Bats flock to the abbey on Mont Saint-Michel, in Normandy, and to historic châteaus such as Chambord, in the Loire Valley, and Kerjean, in Brittany. In Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, they chase insects from the graves of Molière, Édith Piaf, and Colette.France is fiercely protective of its landmarks, and that sense of patrimoine extends to less tangible treasures too. For more than a century, French law has prohibited any sparkling-wine producer worldwide to call its product “champagne” unless it comes from the Champagne region of France. As part of the French naturalization process, I had to learn to match cheeses to their region (Brie to Meaux, Camembert to Normandy). Their craftsmanship, too, is included in the cultural imagination: In 2019, the French government asked UNESCO to recognize the work of Paris’s zinc roofers as part of world heritage (the jury is still out).[Ta-Nehisi Coates: Acting French]In recent years, even animals have begun to be incorporated into this notion of cultural heritage. When two neighbors ended up in court in 2019 over the early-morning cries of a rooster—embraced for centuries as France’s national animal—the judge ruled in favor of Maurice the rooster. Inspired by Maurice, France then passed a law protecting the “sensory heritage of the countryside.” In the immediate aftermath of the Notre-Dame fire, a beekeeper was allowed access to care for the bees that have been living on the rooftop for years. The Ministry of Culture insists on provisions for biodiversity on all work done on cultural monuments.Bats, despite receiving centuries of bad press, are a fitting mascot for biological patrimony. They are such ferocious insectivores—a single bat can eat thousands of bugs a night—that farmers in bat-heavy areas can use fewer pesticides on grapes, grains, and other agricultural products. On Enclos de la Croix, a family-owned vineyard in Southern France that has partnered with the OFB, insectivorous bats are the only form of pesticide used. Agathe Frezouls, a co-owner of the vineyard, told me that biodiversity is both a form of “cultural heritage” and a viable economic model.Not all farmers have the same high regard for biodiversity—or for the OFB. Earlier this year, 100 farmers mounted on tractors dumped manure and hay in front of an OFB office to protest the agency’s power to inspect farms for environmental compliance. The farmers say that it’s an infringement on their private property and that complying with the strict environmental rules is too costly. Compliance is a major concern for OFB, especially when it comes to bats. If someone destroys a beaver dam, for instance, that crime would be easily visible to the OFB. But bats and their habitats tend to be hidden away, so the police must rely on citizens to report bats on their property or near businesses.Agriculture is part of the reason bats need protection at all. The Marboué caves’ walls are dotted with inlays from the 19th century, when candles lit the passageways for the many employees of the mushroom farm. Until the farm closed, in the 1990s, the cave network was home to tractors and treated heavily with pesticides; their sickly sweet smell lingers in the deepest chambers. The pesticides are what drove off or killed most of the bats living here in the 20th century, Landier told me—when he first visited this site, in 1998, only about 10 bats remained. Today, it’s home to more than 450.[Read: Biodiversity is life’s safety net]After several hours inspecting the cave, Landier and I ambled back toward the entrance, passing under the vines into the harsh winter light. In the next few weeks, the bats will follow our path, leaving the relative safety of the cave to mate.With summer coming on, the slate roofs ubiquitous throughout rural France will soon become gentle furnaces, making attics the perfect place for bats to reproduce. Homeowners reshingling roofs sometimes discover a colony of bats, and Landier is the one to inform them that they must leave their roof unfinished until the end of the breeding season. Most people let the bats be, even when it’s a nuisance. Perhaps they’re beginning to see them as part of the “sensory heritage of the countryside” too.Support for this article was provided by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Kari Howard Fund for Narrative Journalism

Why we keep seeing egg prices spike

With a new wave of bird flu affecting hens, egg prices are ticking up again. | Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg via Getty Images How corporate greed plays a role in making bird flu outbreaks — and egg prices — worse. Egg prices are rising again. The culprit, again: bird flu. At least, that’s the surface-level reason. In the current wave, according to the CDC, the H5N1 bird flu has been found in over 90 million poultry birds across almost every state since 2022, and has even spread to dairy cattle, with over 30 herds in nine states dealing with an outbreak at the time of this writing. The last time bird flu struck US farms, in early 2022, egg prices more than doubled during the year, reaching a peak of $4.82 for a dozen in January 2023. During the bird flu outbreak in 2014 to 2015, egg prices also briefly soared. While prices now are still nowhere near the peak they reached in January 2023, they’ve been creeping up again since last August, when a dozen large eggs cost $2.04. As of March, we’re bumping up against the $3 mark, which is a nearly 47 percent increase. It’s also a huge increase from the price we were used to a few years ago: In early 2020, a dozen eggs were just $1.46 on average. The H5N1 strain of bird flu is highly contagious and obviously poses a big risk to hens. But the fact that bird flu outbreaks keep battering our food system points to a deeper problem: an agriculture industry that has become brittle thanks to intense market concentration. The egg market is dominated by some major players The egg industry, like much of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a few heavyweights — the biggest, Cal-Maine Foods, controls 20 percent of the market — that leave little slack in the system to absorb and isolate shocks like disease. Hundreds of thousands of animals are packed tightly together on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has explained, where disease can spread like wildfire. According to the government and corporate accountability group Food & Water Watch, three-quarters of the country’s hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are crammed into just 347 factory farms. The system also uses genetically similar animals that farms believe will maximize egg production — but that lack of genetic diversity means animal populations are less resistant to disease. When a hen gets infected, stopping the spread is an ugly, cruel business; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the consumer, it often means paying a lot more than usual for a carton of eggs. Preventing any outbreaks of disease from ever happening isn’t realistic, but the model of modern industrial farming is making outbreaks more disruptive. And it’s not just these disruptions driving price spikes. Egg producers also appear to be taking advantage of these moments and hiking prices beyond what they’d need to maintain their old profit margins. “It is absolutely a story of corporate profiteering,” says Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch. Cal-Maine’s net profit in 2023 was about $758 million — 471 percent higher than the year prior, according to its annual financial report. Most of this fortune was made through hoisting up prices; the number of eggs sold, measured in dozens, rose only 5.9 percent. Last year, several food conglomerates, including Kraft and General Mills, were awarded almost $18 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had constrained the supply of eggs in the mid- to late 2000s, artificially bumping prices. A farmer advocacy group last year called on the FTC to look into whether top egg producers were price gouging consumers. Are we doomed to semi-regular price surges for eggs? Our food system didn’t become so consolidated — and fragile — by accident. We got here because of three big reasons, Wolf says: by not enforcing environmental laws, by not enforcing antitrust laws, and by giving away “tons of money” to the agriculture industry. During the New Deal era, the federal government put in place policies that would help manage food supply and protect both farmers and consumers from sharp deviations in what the former earned and the latter paid. Under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in the 1970s, though, those policies started getting chipped away; Butz’s famous motto was for farmers to “get big or get out.” The spread of giant factory farms is in part a product of this about-face in managing supply. Because our food system is so concentrated and intermingled, it also means any single supply chain hiccup — whether due to disease, wars, or any other reason — can have ripple effects on others, affecting prices in a vast number of essential consumer goods and services. “When we have things like E. coli outbreaks, it’s hard to know where the problem lies because the way that we process and manufacture is so hyper-industrialized that you then have a problem with millions of pounds of food,” says Wolf. Thankfully, the Biden administration has been making some strides in loosening up food industry consolidation, often by shoring up enforcement of long-existing antitrust laws. But there’s still more we could do. There are bills that have been introduced to Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, that would give the FTC the authority to first define what counts as price gouging and then crack down on companies that raise prices excessively. The cycle of food chain snags and higher prices doesn’t have to keep repeating. “We are maximizing profit truly over everything else — over the welfare of the animals, over the rights and wages of people who work in the food system, for even consumers who are at the grocery store,” Wolf says. “None of this is inevitable — we shouldn’t have to be here.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

We found pesticides in a third of Australian frogs we tested. Did these cause mass deaths?

Among the poisons found in 36% of the frogs tested, rodenticide was detected for the first time. Pesticides are considered a threat to hundreds of amphibian species.

Jodi Rowley, CC BY-NC-NDIn winter 2021, Australia’s frogs started dropping dead. People began posting images of dead frogs on social media. Unable to travel to investigate the deaths ourselves because of COVID lockdowns, we asked the public to report to us any sick or dead frogs. Within 24 hours we received 160 reports of sick and dying frogs, sometimes in their dozens, from across the country. That winter, we received more than 1,600 reports of more than 40 frog species. We needed help to investigate these deaths. We asked people across New South Wales to collect any dead frogs and store them frozen until travel restrictions eased and we could pick them up for testing. Hundreds of people stepped up to assist. What could be causing these deaths? Aside from the obvious suspect, disease, many people wondered about pesticides and other chemicals. One email we received pondered: Maybe a lot of these Green Frogs that are turning up dead have in fact died from chemicals. Another asked: Is there any relationship between chemicals being used to control the current mice plague in Eastern Australia and effects on frogs? In our newly published research, we detected pesticides in more than one in three frogs we tested. We found a rodenticide in one in six frogs. Pesticides have been shown to be a major cause of worldwide declines in amphibians, including frogs and toads. In the case of the mass deaths in Australia, we don’t believe pesticides were the main cause, for reasons we’ll explain. Read more: Dead, shrivelled frogs are unexpectedly turning up across eastern Australia. We need your help to find out why What did the research find? As soon as travel restrictions eased, we drove around the state with a portable freezer collecting these dead frogs. We began investigating the role of disease, pesticides and other potential factors in this awful event. We tested liver samples of 77 frogs of six species from across New South Wales for more than 600 different pesticides. We detected at least one pesticide in 36% of these frogs. Our most significant discovery was the rodenticide Brodifacoum in 17% of the frogs. This is the first report of rodenticides – chemicals meant to poison only rodents – in wild frogs. We found it in four species: the eastern banjo frog (Limnodynastes dumerilii), green tree frog (Litoria caerulea), Peron’s tree frog (Litoria peronii) and the introduced cane toad (Rhinella marina). The eastern banjo frog (Limnodynastes dumerilii) was one of the species in which rodenticide was detected. Jodi Rowley, CC BY-NC-ND How did these poisons get into frogs? How were frogs exposed to a rodenticide? And what harm is it likely to be causing? Unfortunately, we don’t know. Until now, frogs weren’t known to be exposed to rodenticides. They now join the list of non-rodent animals shown to be exposed – invertebrates, birds, small mammals, reptiles and even fish. It’s possible large frogs are eating rodents that have eaten a bait. Or frogs could be eating contaminated invertebrates or coming into contact with bait stations or contaminated water. Whatever the impact, and the route, our findings show we may need to think about how we use rodenticides. Large species like the cane toad (Rhinella marina) could eat rodents that have ingested baits. Jodi Rowley, CC BY-NC-ND Two pesticides detected in frogs were organochlorine compounds dieldrin and heptachlor. A third, DDE, is a breakdown product of the notorious organochlorine, DDT. These pesticides have been banned in Australia for decades, so how did they get into the frogs? Unfortunately, these legacy pesticides are very stable chemicals and take a long time to break down. They usually bind to organic material such as soils and sediments and can wash into waterways after rain. As a result, these pesticides can accumulate in plants and animals. It’s why they have been banned around the world. We also found the herbicide MCPA and fipronil sulfone, a breakdown product of the insecticide fipronil. Fipronil is registered for use in agriculture, home veterinary products (for flea and tick control) and around the house for control of termites, cockroaches and ants. MCPA has both agricultural and household uses, including lawn treatments. Pesticides detected in frogs and the percentages of tested frogs in which each chemical was detected. Jodi Rowley, CC BY-NC-ND What are the impacts on frogs? There’s very little research on the impact of pesticides on frogs in general, particularly adult frogs and particularly in Australia. However, from research overseas, we know pesticides could kill frogs, or cause sub-lethal impacts such as suppressing the immune system or malformations, or changes in growth, development and reproduction. Pesticides are considered a threat to almost 700 amphibian species. Unfortunately for them, frogs do have characteristics that make them highly likely to come into contact with pesticides. Most frog species spend time in both freshwater systems, such as wetlands, ponds and streams (particularly at the egg and tadpole stage), and on the land. This increases their opportunities for exposure. Second, frogs have highly permeable skin, which is likely a major route for pesticides to enter the body. Frogs obtain water through their skin – you’ll never see a frog drinking – and also breathe through their skin. Peron’s tree frog (Litoria peronii) is one of the common species in which pesticides were detected. Jodi Rowley, CC BY-NC-ND Our findings are a reminder that frogs are sensitive indicators of environmental health. Their recognition as bioindicators, or “canaries in the coalmine”, is warranted. Frogs and other amphibians are the most threatened group of vertebrates on the planet. More research is needed to determine just how our use of pesticides is contributing to ongoing population declines in frogs. So, were pesticides the major driver of the mass frog deaths in 2021? We don’t believe so. We didn’t detect pesticides in most frogs and the five pesticides detected were not consistently found across all samples. It’s certainly possible they contributed to this event, along with other factors such as disease and climatic conditions, but it’s not the smoking gun. Our investigation, with the help of the public, is ongoing. Chris Doyle, from the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, contributed to this article. Jodi Rowley has received funding from the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, Perth Zoo, the Australian Museum Foundation and other state, federal and philanthropic agencies.Damian Lettoof does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The new face of flooding

Alabama and the U.S. Gulf Coast region have seen a sudden burst of sea level rise, spurring flooding in low areas exacerbated by rainfall and high tides.

THEODORE, Ala.John Corideo drove the solitary two-lane highways of southern Alabama, eyeing the roadside ditches. It had been raining off and on for days and Corideo, chief of the Fowl River Fire District, knew that if it continued, his department could be outmatched by floodwaters.It kept raining. Water filled the ditches and climbed over roads, swallowing parts of a main highway. About 10 residents who needed to be rescued were brought back to the station in firetrucks. More remained stranded in floodwaters, out of the department’s reach. “That week … we just caught hell,” Corideo said.What the residents and rescuers of the Fowl River region faced on that day was part of a dangerous phenomenon reshaping the southern United States: Rapidly rising seas are combining with storms to generate epic floods, threatening lives, property and livelihoods.In the Fowl River’s case, unusually high tides slowed floodwaters as they went downstream to drain. This increased the water’s depth and flooded a wide expanse — even several miles upstream. The result was deluged roads, washed out cars and damaged houses from a flood that was larger, deeper and longer-lasting due to rising seas.These supercharged floods are one of the most pernicious impacts of an unexpected surge in sea levels across the U.S. Gulf and southeast coasts — with the ocean rising an average of 6 inches since 2010, one of the fastest such changes in the world, according to a Washington Post examination of how sea level rise is affecting the region.The Post’s analysis found that sea levels at a tide gauge near the Fowl River rose four times faster in 2010 to 2023 than over the previous four decades.Chart showing sea level rise at Dauphin Island, Alabama. The chart shows the rate of sea level rise from 1980 to 2009 which was 0.1 inches per year, and the rate from 2010 to 2023 which was 0.5 inches per year. The chart also compares these rates to the overall rates in the Gulf of Mexico, which in the former period were slower than and in the latter period were faster than the Gulf.The rapid burst of sea level rise has struck a region spanning from Brownsville, Tex., to Cape Hatteras, N.C., where coastal counties are home to 28 million people. Outdated infrastructure built to manage water, some of it over a century old, cannot keep up. As a result, the seas are swallowing coastal land, damaging property, submerging septic tanks and making key roads increasingly impassable.“Our canary in the coal mine for sea level rise is storm water flooding,” said Renee Collini, director of the Community Resilience Center at the Water Institute. “Each inch up of sea level rise reduces the effectiveness of our storm water to drain and the only place left for it to go is into our roads, yards, homes and businesses.”To explore sea level rise in the region, The Post analyzed trends at federal tide gauges and drew on satellite data to compare the Gulf of Mexico with the rest of the globe. The Post also worked with Bret Webb, a coastal engineer at the University of South Alabama, to closely study the 2023 flood in the Fowl River region. A sophisticated river simulation Webb produced showed how higher seas would have turbocharged the flood, making it worse — with deeper waters covering a larger area for a longer time — than if the same event had occurred in an era of lower seas.These analyses showed how much the ocean is rising and how it’s affecting flooding across this region, a preview of what other parts of the United States and the world that are affected by sea level rise will face in coming decades.Key findingsThe ocean off the U.S. Gulf and Southern Atlantic coasts has, since 2010, risen at about triple the rate experienced during the previous 30 years. In just the Gulf of Mexico, sea levels rose at twice the global rate over the past 14 years.There are now more dangerous rain-driven and flash floods reported within 10 miles of the coast in the region. Their numbers increased by 42 percent from 2007 to 2022 — a total of 2,800 events, according to a Post analysis of National Weather Service data.The Fowl River flood was caused by intense but not record-breaking thunderstorms that collided with high tides, according to Webb’s analysis. Working together, they caused the river to spill miles inland. The higher seas of today, compared with sea levels in 1967, would have increased the volume of the flood by nearly 10 percent of the river in its normal state, the analysis showed.Human-caused climate change is driving an acceleration of sea level rise globally, largely because of the faster melting of the globe’s giant sheets of ice. Scientists do not know for certain why this region is experiencing a surge in sea levels beyond the global average, but one theory is that naturally occurring ocean currents are moving ever-warmer ocean water deep into the Gulf. This warm water expands and causes seas to rise. This comes on top of sinking land, which has long exacerbated sea level rise in the region.“When I first moved here in 2007, the rule of thumb was a foot per century,” said Webb. “Well, looking back now in the last 20 years, we’ve gotten half of that in a fifth of the time.”Press Enter to skip to end of carouselThe Drowning SouthCarousel - $The Drowning South: use tab or arrows to navigateSeas are rising across the South faster than almost anywhere. The Post explores what that means on the ground.End of carouselThe Fowl River region is a quiet inland expanse of flat spaces and pine forests filled with large riverfront homes, more modest dwellings and a few mobile home parks. The wealthier inhabitants live along the wider stretches of the river and near the coast, and lower income residents generally populate rural areas upstream. The community is largely White, and the population swells in the summer, when people come to boat and fish in the river.The rainfall on June 19 was dramatic, but not necessarily record-breaking. And the tide at the end of the Fowl River barely qualified as a NOAA high tide flooding event. But it was the confluence of these factors, Webb said, that made the flood extreme — and highlights a phenomenon that is growing in frequency but has received little attention.Scientists in the United States have mostly focused on this type of collision of precipitation and tides — known as compound events — with hurricanes, not everyday rain events. But more local deluges are now attracting growing scientific attention. Webb’s analysis shows that the sea level acceleration since 2010 was substantial enough to have an impact in the Fowl River flood — a finding that breaks new ground as scientists grapple with rising oceans.A deeper, wider floodTo simulate the flow of the river, Webb used modeling software designed by the federal government. He then drew on three sources of regional data to show how sea level rise made the flood worse.Mapping the areaWebb mapped the river’s channel and the height of the surrounding land, and told the software how the river flows.Map showing elevation data in the area surrounding the Fowl River studied by Bret Webb, emphasizing the area that is below normal high tide.Measuring the river and oceanTo show the effect of rainfall on the river and the height of the ocean, Webb used two sources of data: a river gauge 10 miles upstream and a tide gauge where the river empties into Mobile Bay.Graphic showing river levels at the Fowl River at Half-Mile Road streamgage and sea levels at the tide gauge at East Fowl River Bridge.How deep the water got during the floodRiver levels swelled, filling the waterway as unusually high tides kept the excess rainfall from draining. As a result, the river leaped far beyond its banks.Map showing water depth from Bret Webb's flood modelIn some places, higher sea levels led to deeper floodsThe sea level — which includes both the rise of the ocean and sinking of land — was the analysis’ sole variable. “It’s the only thing that’s changing in the model from scenario to scenario,” Webb said.Map showing the change in depth between the 1967 and 2023 sea level scenarios in Bret Webb's model.The simulations found that last year’s flood would have more than doubled the total volume of water in the river, versus what it holds in normal high tide conditions.Webb ran the model with ocean heights characteristic of the past, including 1967, the first full year of data available, and higher levels projected in the future.He found that the 2023 flood was larger than the simulated 1967 version of the event due to higher sea levels, with most of the increase in floodwaters occurring between 2010 and 2023.Webb also found that last year’s flood would have lasted longer and flooded an additional 43 acres.The real-life flood was likely worse than what the model produced, Webb said, because the model would not have captured the full extent of rainfall or how a higher sea is pushing up the groundwater level, making flooding worse.The simulation does not fully reproduce the events of June 19. Experts who reviewed Webb’s analysis broadly agreed with its finding that today’s sea levels would have caused worse flooding. The main takeaway from the model, they said, was that it showed the impact of sea level rise across the entire flooded area, rather than in specific locations.Most of the individual stories in this story nonetheless took place in areas near the Fowl River where Webb’s model shows sea level rise impacted flooding. In some spots upstream, the model suggests its influence could emerge in the future.Awash in waterCorideo has worked in emergency response for nearly five decades. He was dispatched to Ground Zero on 9/11 while a firefighter in Mastic, N.Y. In 2005, he came to the Gulf Coast with FEMA as part of the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina, and stayed after meeting his wife.Today, Corideo responds to over 1,000 calls a year and operates his department on a $120,000 budget, which pays his salary, fuel and operating costs. He doesn’t have the money to repair the ceiling of the engine bay where the firetrucks park, from which streams of insulation dangle. Corideo’s department mostly scrapes by for house fires, health calls and brushfires — but an extreme flash flood is another matter.John Corideo, fire chief of the Fowl River Volunteer Fire Department, stands in the department's dilapidated engine bay. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)He remembers being “wet for most of the day” on June 19. When he thought his truck might get submerged he got out and waded. Floodwaters are often filled with hazards such as submerged wood and snakes. In this case, T.John Mayhall of Servpro of Mobile County, a cleaning and restoration company, said the waters were also “highly contaminated” due to runoff from agricultural land, chemicals and other substances.But Corideo had no protective equipment.“We’re a poor little fire department,” he said.Corideo had no boat, either, and needed to call in the Mobile Fire-Rescue Department, located about 20 miles to the north, to do the most harrowing work. The department has a team trained in water rescues and used a drone to locate stranded residents, said district chief J.P. Ballard, who led the response.“[The water] was rushing in certain places. It presents its own kind of challenges, you have got to have the right people and the right kind of gear to get into those places,” Ballard said.Two rescuers arrived at Debra Baber’s house by boat around 6 p.m. They navigated up to Baber’s porch while a drone buzzed overhead, steering the boat carefully between two vehicles with little more than their roofs visible.Debra Baber sits on the porch where she was rescued by boat during last year's flood. Baber owns property along the Fowl River that includes her home, a swimming hole and camping site. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)The boat came “right up here to this ramp,” Baber said, gesturing outward from her deck. “I got on it … I said, man, I’m going to have me a drink, for 6 hours, I mean, I’ve been panicking.”The Mobile Fire-Rescue Department was not the only outside assistance Corideo had to call in — the nearby Theodore Dawes Fire Rescue department, Mobile County’s Road and Bridge division and others had to help conduct rescues and keep people off flooded roads.The Post talked to 15 people who experienced the deluge. They boated across fields, streets and front yards located miles inland, drove across flooded roads and rescued neighbors’ belongings that had floated downstream. Again and again, residents said that the storm was extreme, even in a rainy and flood-prone region.Kim Baxter Knight’s house sits nearly 12 feet off the ground on stilts, several hundred feet from the river. It was “unbelievable” how quickly the rains swelled the river and submerged both her cars, ruining them, she said.Knight, who lives with her ailing 77-year-old father and 10 cats, didn’t try to evacuate, but with how quickly the water moved, she didn’t think she could have.“It’s never flooded like that before,” she said. “We get flooded, but not like that.”While her insurance company covered her losses, Knight’s monthly payment more than doubled from $128 to $267.Mobile County spent about $150,000 responding to the flood, including putting up barricades and removing objects like toys and yard furniture from drainage systems, said Sharee Broussard, the county’s director of public affairs and community services. Road flooding was localized, she said, and the ground was heavily saturated from days of heavy rainfall.“The water rose quickly, and it receded quickly,” Broussard said.Mayhall’s company responded to at least a dozen homes after the waters receded. People had to treat or discard belongings or parts of their homes that got wet. The cost to remediate a damaged house started around $12,000, Mayhall said.“There’s no small, insignificant or mildly impactful situation for this, unless the water just barely made its entry,” he said. “If it actually came into the home, it’s going to create a significant impact.”Vanishing islandsWhen it rains hard enough or there’s a very high tide along the Fowl River, Sam St. John’s neighbor calls to let him know that his wharf has gone under. St. John drives down from his main residence in Mobile to lift his boats and secure his property.And over time, he said, it has become harder to find a dry road on his drive down.St. John drove by Baber’s house late in the afternoon of June 19, and saw a white pickup with water nearly up to the steering wheel. He later drove across a flooded Windsor Road.“All the routes were blocked,” said St. John, who founded a Mobile-area computer company in the 1980s and now sits on the board of Mobile Baykeeper, a local environmental group dedicated to preserving the region’s waterways. “Even places that I had never seen flood before.”St. John used to water ski on the river as a teenager in the 1970s and has owned a home in the region for decades. “You were just skiing around islands and spits and you never saw anybody, or any houses or anything,” he remembers. St. John later watched them lose plants, then soil.“I watched those islands disappear, year after year,” he said.Map showing detail of the Fowl River from a declassified spy satellite photo from 1976.Map showing aerial imagery of Fowl River from 2019. In comparison with the same view in 1976, two islands have disappeared and a long spit has shortened.The 1976 image is a declassified photograph taken from a spy satellite and obtained through the U.S. Geological Survey. The 2019 aerial image is from the National Agriculture Imagery Program.On the opposite bank of the river from St. John, Ted Henken watched the June 19 flood while standing knee-deep in water that submerged his dock.Henken’s family began vacationing along the Fowl River long before he and his wife Margaret retired here 11 years ago. Back then, there was an island a little offshore from the land they owned, which the family called Monkey Island. Trees and azaleas grew on it.“The kids used to, in order to be able to swim by themselves without their life jacket, they had to swim from there out to that island,” Henken said, gesturing from his boat as he motored downriver.Monkey Island has been swallowed by the river. Other submerged islands are marked by white poles, which warn boats not to drive over their remnants.Henken spent nearly 40 years working for Chevron and started a side hustle in retirement: He and two of his brothers raise neighbors’ lower “crabbing” docks — where people would once sit and lure crabs with just a net and a chicken bone. The higher tides have gotten so bad that water covers these docks so often that they become slimy and corroded. It takes the brothers two days’ work to lift each one.Henken also monitors the environment of the Fowl River by taking water samples at a calm tributary north of his home and is the host of “AL-MB-86,” the code for a rain gauge in his yard that reports daily data as part of a volunteer observers’ network.Henken’s station reported 10.94 inches of total precipitation on June 19 — high, but not extraordinary for rainy Mobile County. If the reading is correct, it amounts to about a one in 25 year storm event, according to Webb.A worsening problemWebb’s model suggests that events like the one in June will get worse as sea levels increase. By 2050, rising seas would produce a flood 17 percent larger by volume than what would have occurred in 1967; by 2100, that increase would be 44 percent.It also illustrates how places farther upstream, which were marginally affected by sea levels but still flooded last year due to rainfall, may feel the growing effects of the ocean in the coming decades. Heavy rains in many regions — including coastal Alabama — are also expected to get worse due to climate change, exacerbating the potential for extreme events.Broussard said Mobile County is “engaged in planning and implementation” to address the threat of sea level rise. The county “works within its purview to mitigate current issues and plan for the future,” she said. For instance, it funds the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program and helps implement its strategies — which take climate change into account. Last year the county approved a coastal restoration project that will help protect a vital road, the Dauphin Island Causeway, from flooding.At this point, Mobile County is not seeing more road maintenance because of flooding, or worsening storm water effects that it can quantify, Broussard said.Last year’s storm impacted much of Mobile County.David Rice, executive vice president of Master Boat Builders. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)Just outside of Mobile, waters swamped an on-ramp to Interstate 10 from the Mobile Causeway, lined with seafood restaurants. Along the coast at Bayou La Batre, two casino boats broke from their moorings and crashed into the dockside.Master Boat Builders, a family-run business, has been in the same Coden Bayou spot for more than 40 years. The storm shattered a wooden bulkhead, took out electrical equipment and caused part of the shipyard to go underwater, forcing the company to stop work for the day, said David Rice, the company’s executive vice president for corporate resources.Master Boat Builders is one of the area’s largest employers and just manufactured the first electric tugboat in the United States, powered by at least 1,100 batteries. The ship, the eWolf, was delivered to the Port of San Diego earlier this year and has just begun operations.Rice said part of the shipyard now floods during major high tides, something that never used to happen. When it does, the company moves workers out of that location and onto a different project until the seas relent. From his home on Dauphin Island, Rice said he’s seen the arrival of much higher tides.“I really don’t think people think about it,” Rice said. “They see it on TV and I think it’s some kind of liberal hoax. But it’s not. If you live on the water, you’re on the water, you can see that it’s actually justified.”Shipbuilders construct tug boats at the mouth of Coden Bayou in Bayou La Batre, Ala. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)About this storyBrady Dennis contributed to this report.Design and development by Emily Wright.Photo editing by Sandra M. Stevenson and Amanda Voisard. Video editing by John Farrell. Design editing by Joseph Moore.Editing by Katie Zezima, Monica Ulmanu and Anu Narayanswamy. Additional editing by Juliet Eilperin. Project editing by KC Schaper. Copy editing by Gaby Morera Di Núbila.Additional support from Jordan Melendrez, Erica Snow, Kathleen Floyd, Victoria Rossi and Ana Carano.MethodologyThe Washington Post used monthly tide gauge data from 127 gauges from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for relative mean sea levels in the United States. This is adjusted for seasonal signals for ocean temperature, currents and other marine and atmospheric variables.For its analysis The Post relied on dozens of tide gauges along the coasts of the United States, measurements which are affected both by the rising ocean and slow but persistent movement of land. It also took into account satellite data for global sea level rise, which measures ocean heights independent of land movement.Annual means for two time periods — 1980 to 2009 and 2010 through 2023 — were calculated. Only gauges which had at least eight months of data for a given year and 70 percent of the years were used. Three gauges used in this analysis are not currently in service but had sufficient data for the 1980 to 2023 time period to include in the analysis.A linear regression model was applied to the annual means for each gauge to determine the trends for each time period and calculate an annual rate of relative mean sea level rise. Because readings from tide gauges are also influenced by the rising or sinking of land, these findings are referred to as changes in relative mean sea level.To analyze changes in sea level around the globe, The Post used data based on satellite altimetry readings produced by NOAA. Annual means were calculated for 1993 through 2023 for the global data and for each ocean. The Post applied a linear regression model estimating the annual rates of change in mean sea level for each ocean and the global average. The data from the satellite altimeters are measures of ocean height independent of any land movement, or absolute means.Scientists, including Jianjun Yin and Sönke Dangendorf, have studied regional trends in sea level rise. The Post’s analysis builds on this body of work and compares trends for the 2010-2023 and 1980-2009 time periods to drive home the rate of acceleration in recent years. The Post also presents the trends for each tide gauge included.Flood eventsTo examine trends in reported flood events along the Gulf and Southeast Atlantic Coasts of the United States, The Post relied on the Storm Events Database compiled by the National Weather Service and maintained by the National Centers for Environmental Information. After consulting with data experts from the NWS and NCEI, The Post used the events data from 2007 to 2022 since reporting and data maintenance practices had been standardized by late 2006.The Post examined and geolocated all events classified as “flood” or “flash flood” for eight states: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, removing events related to hurricanes and tropical storms. A shoreline shapefile from NOAA was used to calculate the distance to the coast for each event, focusing on events within 10 miles of the coast for the analysis.The simulation of the Fowl River floodFor the simulation of the Fowl River flood, The Post worked with an outside expert, Bret Webb. He assembled key data elements around elevation and tide levels from the two closest federal tide gauges.Webb fed the elevation data to the Sedimentation and River Hydraulics — Two-Dimensional model (SRH-2D model), a hydraulic model developed at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Webb used the Surface-water Modeling System (SMS) software to deploy the model.Reporters from the Post also provided Webb with locations and details about how high the water was, which was used to tune the model.Webb developed six scenarios to test the impacts of different sea levels on the flood. The first is the baseline flood, using the data from June 18-21. Then, Webb changed the mean sea level variable at the mouth of the river to simulate the extent of the flood based on lower ocean levels from 1967, 1990 and 2010. Webb also projected sea levels forward to 2050 and 2100. For each scenario, the model produced time and spatially varying velocity (speed and direction), water depth and water surface elevation for the duration of the simulation.The Post showed Webb’s work to sea level rise experts who backed the analysis and findings. Reviewers included:Christopher Piecuch, a sea level scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic InstitutionThomas Wahl, an expert on compound events at the University of Central FloridaRenee Collini, director of the Community Resilience Center at the Water Institute.The reviewers generally described Webb’s analysis as a thorough look at a single event, and said that it captured the likely role of sea level rise in making that event worse. They cautioned that while the research shows the broad impact of sea level rise on rain driven flooding in the Fowl River event, it is less reliable for inferring the exact flooding risk, or exact role of sea level rise, in a specific location.Click here for a detailed explanation of Webb’s work.

Finding space for wind farms might be easier than we thought

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Towering wind turbines dot landscapes across the country, stretching hundreds of feet into the sky. But the huge structures topped with massive rotating blades only take up five percent of the land where they’ve been built, new research shows.The rest of the space can be used for other purposes, such as agriculture, according to a study published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology.This means developers could fit turbines in places that are often perceived as unsuitable for a wind farm.To meet the Biden administration’s goal of weaning the electric grid off fossil fuels by 2035, the United States needs to add more wind farms. But finding places to put turbines has emerged as a major hurdle, due in part to the perception that wind farms require large amounts of land.The new study highlights that turbines and existing human development, such as agriculture, cannot only share the same area, but also that building wind farms where there are already roads and other infrastructure could help reduce impacts on the land.“Clever siting, use of existing infrastructure, multiple use of landscapes — all these things … can really contribute to solutions in areas where wind power is acceptable to the local people,” said Sarah Jordaan, the study’s principal investigator.Finding the right site for a wind farmHistorically, planning studies for wind farms have often assumed that turbines would disturb all the land at the site and leave the area unusable for anything else, said Jordaan, an associate professor in the department of civil engineering at McGill University. The study’s findings provide a more accurate accounting of how much land is needed for wind farms, she added.The researchers analyzed roughly 300 wind farms with more than 15,000 turbines in total that feed a grid that provides electricity to 80 million people across 14 U.S. states and parts of Canada and Mexico. They found that a lot of the time wind farms share the landscape with farming.Wind farms that piggybacked on existing infrastructure, such as roads, disrupted less land and were about seven times more efficient than projects constructed from the ground up, according to the study. “Our results should provide stakeholders with a greater evidence base for a more informed understanding of the impacts of energy developments,” she said.Ben Hoen, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab, who was not involved in the research, said the findings emphasize the potential benefits of building turbines on shared land. One major concern about renewable energy projects, he said, has been that they could displace or disrupt farming, hurting the local economy.“This study might allow folks to take a fresh look at the ability to retain some of that economic benefit that agriculture has while still co-developing or developing wind energy at those locations,” Hoen said.Other barriers for wind energyBut experts said it remains a question whether this new data will spur greater acceptance of wind projects, which can face opposition in communities for other reasons the study didn’t take into account, such as noise.“On the ground, the trade-offs related to energy development are complex,” Jordaan said. “For wind, it includes issues like visual impacts, noise, and bird and bat mortality. How people evaluate these trade-offs is complex.”Much of the public though appears to be supportive of renewable energy projects, including wind turbines. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll conducted last year reported that large and bipartisan majorities of Americans said they wouldn’t mind fields of solar panels and wind turbines being built in their communities.The new study comes as the country is undergoing an energy transition toward more renewable sources. In January, the Energy Information Administration forecast that wind and solar energy will lead growth in U.S. power generation for the next two years.“There’s no denying that wind and solar deployment is going to take up land,” Hoen said. “But I do think that understanding the actual impacts and taking into account some of these co-use opportunities — whether it’s roads or agriculture — are extremely important.”