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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 Outdated infrastructure built to manage water, some of it over a century old, cannot keep up.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.”

This New Biden Rule Will Save Americans $2 Billion On Utility Bills

The long-awaited move lays the groundwork for a massive overhaul in the way Americans build houses.

The Biden administration has finalized a major rule change that raises the bar for real estate developers who want newly built homes to qualify for U.S. government-backed loans, laying the groundwork for a massive overhaul in the way Americans build houses. Regulators issued a final determination Thursday that the breakthrough energy codes that dramatically increased the efficiency of new homes but caused a firestorm in the construction industry met the federal government’s standards for keeping housing affordable and slashing utility bills. Meeting those codes is now set to become the baseline criteria for qualifying for federal loans from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which also issues loans, is likely to follow suit, but maintains a separate regulatory timeline. Federal regulators expect the codes to affect at least 140,000 new homes each year and save the U.S. $2.1 billion on energy bills compared to the $605 million the stricter standards add to total construction costs. “This long-overdue action will protect homeowners and renters from high energy costs while making a real dent in climate pollution,” Lowell Ungar, federal policy director of the watchdog American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, said in a press release. “It makes no sense for the government to help people move into new homes that waste energy and can be dangerous in extreme temperatures.” An aerial view of existing homes near new homes under construction in the Chatsworth neighborhood on Sept. 8, 2023, in Los Angeles, California.Mario Tama via Getty ImagesThe Biden administration’s adoption of the codes came the same day the Environmental Protection Agency finalized the nation’s first-ever limits on power plants’ carbon emissions. Combined with new rules at the Energy Department to ease permitting on transmission lines, the regulatory package was designed to put the U.S. on track to clean up the grid, meaning the electricity powering cars and stovetops in modernized homes would emit little planet-heating pollution. The announcement also came with a new rule requiring all federally owned buildings to go electric and forgo fossil fuels in new construction. The U.S. does not set building codes on the national level. Instead, states and municipalities adopt codes written by two main third-party nonprofits, with the Washington, D.C.-based International Code Council serving as the primary author of standards for building single-family homes. Formed out of 1990s-era consolidation of disparate code-writing organizations, the ICC convened representatives from elected governments, advocacy groups and industry associations every three years to update its codebook. The nonprofit maintained democratic legitimacy over the process by allowing only government officials to vote on the final codes at the end of the convention. For years, it was a sleepy affair that involved mostly making minor tweaks and rubberstamping new codes with efficiency increases of 1% or less. When the ICC came together in 2019 to write the codes released in 2021, local governments were determined to make a serious dent in planet-heating emissions. Unable to dictate the cars on their roads or the power plants supplying their grid, these municipalities organized themselves to vote in favor of the most ambitious ICC energy codes in years, with efficiency gains of up to 14%. Industry groups balked, and challenged governments’ right to vote. Siding with gas utilities, the ICC’s appeals board ultimately decided to remove key provisions that would have required new buildings to include the circuitry for electric car chargers and appliances, saving homeowners who go electric later thousands of dollars on renovations to rewire walls. Much of the code, however, remained intact. The electoral process did not. Bucking pressure from the newly inaugurated Biden administration, the ICC went forward in early 2021 with a plan to eliminate municipalities’ voting rights altogether. Officials from elected governments could still vote on codes governing plumbing or pools. But the energy codes that dictate insulation levels and window measurements would instead fall under a new “consensus committee” process that gave industry players more power. The new procedure was plagued with problems from the start. But volunteers on the committee writing residential codes — including industry professionals — managed to negotiate a package of rules for the 2024 codebook. Advocates of stronger efficiency rules compromised on key components of the code, weakening the certain aspects in exchange for the industry supporting the inclusion of rules mandating the wiring for going electric. While the 2024 code might have loosened some insulation standards from the 2021 rulebook, the new circuitry provisions promised to hasten the Biden administration’s lagging effort to promote a shift away from internal combustion engine vehicles and gas furnaces to electric cars and heat pumps. The rules seemed more ironclad this time. President Joe Biden speaks on "how the CHIPS and Science Act and his Investing in America agenda are growing the economy and creating jobs," at the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum in Syracuse, New York, on April 25.ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS via Getty ImagesWhen gas companies once again asked to scrap wiring rules at the end of the code-writing process last fall, the ICC’s appeals board this time sided against the fossil fuel industry, rejecting all the challenges. But last month the ICC’s board of directors defied its staff and 90% of the volunteers who helped write the code and granted the gas groups’ request. Instead of including the circuitry provisions in the widely adopted base code, the ICC relegated the rules to a bonus-menu appendix for municipalities that wanted — and had the legal right under state law — to go further. Against the advice of ICC experts, the board of directors slapped a warning note on the appendix, suggesting that using the codes could lead to legal blowback. Only a handful of states currently use codes that comply with the latest standards. President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act included over $1 billion in aid to states to help energy regulators adopt newer codes. But the update to federal loan requirements marks the most forceful step yet the administration has taken to promote stricter codes. Federal law from 2007 requires the U.S. government to consistently analyze and adopt the latest codes from the ICC within a year of the codebook’s latest update. But only one president so far has followed the statute — and only sort of. In 2015, the Obama administration raised federal standards for loans to the ICC’s 2009 codes. For builders in states like Illinois, which updates its code within a year of the ICC’s release, the Biden administration’s latest move won’t do much. But meeting the 2021 codes may soon require builders in laggard states like Idaho who want buyers with access to federal loans to leapfrog more than a decade of codes.Under that state federal statute, the Department of Energy will now be tasked with assessing whether the 2024 ICC codes improve efficiency enough to merit nationwide adoption via the criteria for U.S. housing loans. It’s unclear what outcome the process may bring. But advocates of stricter codes want the federal government to start using the 2021 code as a benchmark for more housing loans. Unlike mortgages backed by HUD or the Agriculture Department, loans issued under the Federal Housing Finance Agency do not set any specific criteria for energy codes. The same is true for mortgages the federally related Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lenders purchase. In November, campaigners began pushing for those agencies to adopt similar standards to those HUD uses. The administration signaled in December it would consider the move. Doing so would “decrease burdensome energy costs for future homeowners and renters, which in turn may help lower default risks and loan delinquency rates, and set forth a path to stabilize our shaky housing financial system,” said Jessica Garcia, senior policy analyst for climate finance at Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund.“Implementing up-to-date energy codes will help ease the financial strain on homeowners and renters across the country as they fight to remain housed,” Garcia said. “We are encouraged by HUD’s decision, and urge the Federal Housing Finance Agency to follow suit and swiftly adopt the latest energy efficiency codes.”Support HuffPostOur 2024 Coverage Needs YouYour Loyalty Means The World To UsAt HuffPost, we believe that everyone needs high-quality journalism, but we understand that not everyone can afford to pay for expensive news subscriptions. That is why we are committed to providing deeply reported, carefully fact-checked news that is freely accessible to everyone.Whether you come to HuffPost for updates on the 2024 presidential race, hard-hitting investigations into critical issues facing our country today, or trending stories that make you laugh, we appreciate you. The truth is, news costs money to produce, and we are proud that we have never put our stories behind an expensive paywall.Would you join us to help keep our stories free for all? Your contribution of as little as $2 will go a long way.Can't afford to donate? Support HuffPost by creating a free account and log in while you read.As Americans head to the polls in 2024, the very future of our country is at stake. At HuffPost, we believe that a free press is critical to creating well-informed voters. That's why our journalism is free for everyone, even though other newsrooms retreat behind expensive paywalls.Our journalists will continue to cover the twists and turns during this historic presidential election. With your help, we'll bring you hard-hitting investigations, well-researched analysis and timely takes you can't find elsewhere. Reporting in this current political climate is a responsibility we do not take lightly, and we thank you for your support.Contribute as little as $2 to keep our news free for all.Can't afford to donate? Support HuffPost by creating a free account and log in while you read.Dear HuffPost ReaderThank you for your past contribution to HuffPost. We are sincerely grateful for readers like you who help us ensure that we can keep our journalism free for everyone.The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support. 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As Bird Flu Spreads through Cows, Is Pasteurized Milk Safe to Drink?

H5N1 influenza virus particles have been detected in commercially sold milk, but it’s not clear how the virus is spreading in cattle or whether their milk could infect humans

Bird Flu Is Spreading in Cows. Here’s What That Means for MilkH5N1 influenza virus particles have been detected in commercially sold milk, but it’s not clear how the virus is spreading in cattle or whether their milk could infect humansBy Julian Nowogrodzki & Nature magazineU.S. dairy cows walk back to the barn after milking. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty ImagesThe outbreak of avian influenza in US dairy cattle shows no signs of slowing. Over the past three weeks, the number of states where cows infected with bird flu have been detected has risen from six to eight. A preprint1 posted on 16 April reported the discovery of the virus in raw milk from infected cows, and US federal authorities said on Wednesday that the virus had been found in lung tissue collected from a seemingly healthy cow.Also on Wednesday, US officials confirmed at a media briefing that genomic material from the H5N1 strain, which is causing the outbreak, had been detected in milk sold in shops.Detection of viral particles in milk sold to consumers suggests that avian flu in cows could “be more widespread than initially thought”, says food scientist Diego Diel at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Increased surveillance and testing in dairies should be an important part of control measures going forward.” Nature looks at the implications for human health and the future of the outbreak.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.What does it mean that H5N1 is in retail milk?It’s still unclear how many milk samples the FDA has tested or where the samples were collected. The agency said that it would release more information in the coming days and weeks.After it leaves the farm and before it hits the shelves, milk is pasteurized to inactivate pathogens. To detect H5N1, the FDA used a test called quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), which picks up viral RNA. Because it detects fragments of the viral genome, the test cannot distinguish between living virus and the remnants of dead virus, says dairy scientist Nicole Martin at Cornell University.“The detection of viral RNA does not itself pose a health risk to consumers, and we expect to find this residual genetic material if the virus was there in the raw milk and was inactivated by pasteurization,” she says.The presence of viral material in commercially available milk does have broader implications, however. There are several possible explanations, says virologist Brian Wasik, also at Cornell University. It could be that the outbreak is more pervasive than farmers realized, and that milk from infected animals is entering the commercial supply. Another possibility, he says, is that “asymptomatic cows that we are not testing are shedding virus into milk”. But it’s also possible that both scenarios are true.US federal rules require milk from infected cows to be discarded, but it’s not yet clear whether cows often start shedding the virus before they look sick or produce abnormal milk. The 16 April preprint, which has not yet been peer reviewed, includes reports that milk from infected cows is thicker and more yellow than typical milk and that infected animals eat less and produce less milk than usual.Is milk with traces of H5N1 in it a threat to humans?There is no definitive evidence that pasteurization kills H5N1, but the method kills viruses that multiply in the gut, which are hardier than flu viruses, says Wasik. “Influenza virus is relatively unstable,” he says, “and is very susceptible to heat.” Pasteurization of eggs, which is done at a lower temperature than pasteurization of milk, does kill H5N1.It’s possible that pasteurization would be less effective at killing relatively high viral concentrations in milk, says Wasik. Finding out whether this is the case requires experimental data. In the absence of a definitive answer, keeping milk from infected cows out of the commercial supply is extremely important.When Nature asked when to expect more evidence on whether pasteurization kills H5N1, Janell Goodwin, public-affairs specialist at the FDA in Silver Spring, Maryland, said that the agency and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) “are working closely to collect and evaluate additional data and information specific to” H5N1.Is milk spreading bird flu among cows?USDA researchers have tested nasal swabs, tissue and milk samples of cows from affected dairy herds and have found that milk contained the highest viral concentrations. This indicates that the virus could be spreading through milk droplets.If so, milking equipment could be involved. “The teat cups of a milking machine could transfer remnants of H5N1-containing milk from one cow to the teats of the next cow being milked,” says virologist Thijs Kuiken at Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. “Even if they are washed and disinfected, the levels of virus in the milk of infected cattle are so high that one could not exclude the possibility of infectious virus being transferred from cow to cow by this route.” In fact, in some equipment set-ups, workers spray down milking machines with high-pressure hoses to clean them, which would aerosolize any infected milk, says Wasik.The USDA website concurs that viral spread is “likely through mechanical means”.Is enough being done to stop the spread?The FDA announced on Wednesday that cows must test negative for bird flu before they can be moved across state lines. That might help to stem the outbreak, scientists say. Animals in the US dairy industry move around a lot, Wasik says. Calves are moved to be raised into milk cows, cows are moved when they stop producing milk and farmers sell the animals. Such movement is probably “a main driver” of the outbreak, Wasik says.Diel would like to see surveillance of bulk milk samples at farms. Wastewater testing and environmental sampling could be useful, too, Wasik says, particularly around farms near outbreaks or farms where cows have been moved. He also advocates for a quarantine or observation period of 24 or 48 hours when cattle are moved to a new farm.Such surveillance measures “could really buy us time, slow down the outbreak”, says Wasik, so researchers and agencies can “get a better handle on it. Because time is what’s of the essence.”This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 25, 2024.

Bird flu in milk is alarming — but not for the reason you think

Dairy cows at an operation in Lodi, California, in 2020. | Jessica Christian/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images The US Department of Agriculture’s failed response to bird flu in cows, explained. Bird flu has had a busy couple of years. Since 2022, it’s ravaged the US poultry industry, as more than 90 million farmed birds — mostly egg-laying hens and turkeys — have either died from the virus or have been brutally killed in an attempt to stop the spread. Last month, confirmation that the virus — a strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza known as H5N1 — had infected US dairy cows alarmed infectious disease experts, who worry that transmission to cows will allow the virus more opportunities to evolve. One dairy worker fell ill, increasing concerns about human risk levels. Now it’s in the milk supply. On Tuesday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) confirmed that genetic evidence of the virus had been found in commercially purchased milk. However, it’s unclear whether the milk contains live virus or mere fragments of the virus that were killed by pasteurization, a process that destroys harmful bacteria, but remain detectable. The FDA said it’ll soon release a nationwide survey of tested milk and that for now, the commercial milk supply remains safe, a claim that numerous independent experts have confirmed. The news that the bird flu has been found in the US milk supply may raise alarm among some consumers, and the FDA has been criticized for prematurely assuring the safety of milk without hard data. But the real problem, which has received little attention, is the tepid and opaque response from the federal agency tasked with stopping the on-farm spread of the disease: the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). What we know — and what we don’t — depends on the USDA Ever since the virus was detected on a Texas dairy farm in late March, infectious disease experts around the world have roundly criticized the USDA on multiple fronts. It took nearly a month for the agency to upload data containing genetic sequences of the virus, which scientists use to better understand its threat level. And once the sequence was uploaded, it was incomplete, lacking specifics that researchers say they needed to properly study the data. “It’s as if the USDA is intentionally trying to hide data from the world,” Rick Bright, a former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority at the US Department of Health and Human Services, told STAT. A Dutch virologist told STAT it should’ve taken the USDA days, not weeks, to share data and updates. Beyond the data obfuscation, there’s insufficient monitoring. The virus may have started circulating on US dairy farms months before it was detected, according to Michael Worobey, a biology professor at the University of Arizona. That suggests the need for better and more proactive pathogen monitoring on the part of the USDA. And once H5N1 was confirmed in dairy cows, the USDA didn’t require dairy farms to conduct routine testing nor report positive H5N1 tests. The USDA has even tolerated uncooperative farmers, despite the high stakes of the disease spread. “There has been a little bit of reluctance for some of the producers to allow us to gather information from their farms,” said Michael Watson, administrator of USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, in a press conference on Wednesday. But, he added, “that has been improving.” This voluntary approach is a recurring theme in USDA policy; there’s even uncertainty as to whether the agency is enforcing orders for farmers to toss milk from infected cows to ensure it doesn’t wind up in the food supply, which could explain how traces of it were found in store-bought milk. Last week, the New York Times reported that North Carolina officials confirmed there were asymptomatic cows in the state, which could also explain why the virus was detected in the commercial milk supply. It also suggests more herds may be infected than previously thought. On Wednesday, a month after the first confirmation, the USDA finally issued a federal order requiring that laboratories and state veterinarians report farms with positive H5N1 tests and that lactating dairy cows must test negative for bird flu before crossing state lines (and cooperate with investigators). At a Wednesday press conference, the agency didn’t specify how the order will be enforced. Why regulation and response go hand-in-hand The USDA’s sluggish response to a rapidly moving virus may leave some foreign observers scratching their heads. But much of it can be explained by an irresolvable conflict baked into its mission. The agency, according to food industry scholars Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz, has “the oxymoronic double mandate of both promoting and regulating all of American agriculture—two disparate tasks that, when combined, effectively put the fox in charge of the henhouse.” More often than not, it’s heavy on the promotion and light on the regulation. The paradox has been at the center of its response to the bird flu’s decimation of the US poultry industry in recent years. While the USDA is developing several bird flu vaccines, it’s long been stubbornly opposed to a broad vaccination campaign due to industry fears that it’ll disrupt trade, a major source of revenue for US poultry companies, despite pleas from experts to give birds a bird flu shot. USDA has also been deferential to industry on matters of pollution, labor, political corruption, false advertising, and animal cruelty across numerous sectors. And it’s not the only agency that too often takes a hands-off approach to problems stemming from food production. The FDA has failed to stringently regulate antibiotics used in animal farming, a pressing public health threat that, in recent years, some European regulators have addressed in earnest. Agriculture is a top source of US water and air pollution, due in large part to congressional loopholes and weak enforcement on the part of the US Environmental Protection Agency. It all adds up to what food industry experts call “agricultural exceptionalism,” in which the food industry operates under a different set of regulations than the rest of the economy. The justification of such exceptionalism is that it’s necessary, given the importance of an abundant food supply. But that’s all the more reason not to give farmers and ranchers carte blanche to let disease circulate on American farms unchecked.