Yesterday, I pulled up to my house and sighed.
My yard was STILL soggy, and my driveway, which is made of gravel that had been put down 70 years ago and is now mostly just really compacted dirt, made a squishing sound as I pulled in.
A regular thunderstorm had flooded my yard so badly that there was a wrack line in my yard. Again. It meant wet puppy paws, muddy floors and soggy shoes. Again. It meant tearing up my driveway and yard. Again.
It is a common story in the northern Gulf. I regularly have people say things to me like “[This road] used to flood only once a year, now it floods every month at the highest tide.” Or I will see in the news people saying “Every time it rains, we know, here comes the water. It didn’t used to be this way.”
Nuisance floods have chronic effects
These inconvenient or nuisance floods are happening more often, but they are just that – inconveniences. Right? It feels like something we should accept about coastal living.
The problem is the increases in these “nuisance” floods are having a chronic effect that is more subtle and insidious than the larger catastrophic floods. My house is a perfect example of what more frequent nuisance or minor floods can cause. I will end up spending a LOT of money (some estimates are over $80,000) lifting and leveling my house because of nuisance flooding. And there are a lot of complex things related to nuisance floods that are causing this.
My house is sinking on one side due to the ground being saturated more often and for longer than it ever previously has been. This is because of three reasons:
- Due to environmental changes, it is raining more often.
- Because of sea-level rise the rainwater is not draining as effectively.
- The lot next to me, which was a low-lying area, built up their lot, and it now sends their water into my yard, amplifying the problem.
High-tide flooding is on the rise
Unfortunately, we know that intense rainfalls are expected to continue increasing in our region and that seas are going to continue rising and at an even faster pace. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report this year that shows nuisance, or high-tide flooding, has doubled since 2000. This doesn’t even account for more frequent flooding from rainfall, so it is actually even higher! In Bay St. Louis/Waveland, they have seen a jump from three high-tide flooding days in 2000 to 22 in 2020! The report goes on to say that in the next 30 years we can see the days of high-tide flooding jump to 5-15 times more often!
These nuisance floods may not feel like they have a big impact at the time, but they interrupt business, erode away at our infrastructure and disrupt our daily lives to have long-lasting and, at times, very expensive impacts for our communities and individual residents.
Planning can reduce flooding
Fortunately, we know that these changes are coming – and with that information we can make smart decisions about how we invest in our infrastructure, homes, businesses and ecosystems! For example, conserving low-lying areas that can hold and absorb water are critical to reducing the frequency of and the impact of nuisance flooding. Adding rain gardens and rain barrels to your property also helps! Additionally, your community can invest in back flow preventers to keep high tide from spilling on to the street.
Planning at the community level can also account for changes in where nuisance flooding is regularly impacting important thoroughfares for commerce or safety and identify strategies to reduce the flooding or develop alternate routes.
The possibilities of how we can take action and be prepared are endless! To learn more about what you and your community members can do, reach out to the Sea Grant and Mississippi State University Extension led PLACE:SLR.
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