It’s been a wet week in North Carolina, one that started with deadly flooding from Chantal.
“It’s a little disturbing, but it’s nature so you have to go along with it and just try to build back," Kathleen Fearrington, owner of The Shoe Repair at Eastgate Crossing in Chapel Hill, told WUNC.
Fearrington’s business sustained heavy damage from Chantal. Then more heavy rain flooded parts of the Triangle a few days later.
While survivors repair their homes and businesses, this week’s flooding raises larger questions about how North Carolina communities get ready for the next major storm.
WUNC's Will Michaels spoke with Chapel Hill Town Council member Theo Nollert about how communities can be resilient in the face of more frequent floods.
This conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
What stood out to you when you looked through town after this particular flooding event?
Will, I've been helping people clear their lives out of their homes, ruined apartments. I've seen ruined businesses. People are looking at enormous costs. I have seen a mutual aid network come together quickly. The towns and the county have a disaster management response team that has done God's work, performing Water Rescues on the night of [Chantal].
Events like this are becoming more frequent and they're becoming more intense. Local communities do not have the resources to protect themselves and to adapt to these new conditions alone. I want the focus on this to be not how do we prepare for the aftermath of disasters, but what do we have to do to avoid disasters like this in the future?
Flood mitigation at Eastgate and the homes nearby has been complicated for decades, in part because Booker Creek runs right underneath it. There was some work done a few years ago to improve storm water drainage, but clearly it's not robust enough for this kind of event. What do you think needs to be done there?
In 2015, there was a report that was started about how to improve storm water mitigation there. And unfortunately, in 2021 after approving a plan to create some storm water basins, there was some public consternation about what the storm water basins would look like, and the plan was halted. I think if we had those basins, things would have been different.
Now we really need to look at what effective mitigation looks like town-wide. One of the things that we have seen is when you build a lot of single-family neighborhoods, the impervious surface per unit area is pretty high, and that means you need robust storm water mitigation in multiple places, because these have a sort of cascading effect across the town.
So we need to revisit those plants. We need to look at finding the money to implement them, and some of that is going to have to come out of the local resources that we have. But we're going to need help. We're going to need to talk to our state partners. We're going to need to talk to federal partners. We can not expect new people to come into this situation and then every few years, get flooded out and leave.
What role do you think bodies like town councils have to play in disaster mitigation in 2025 when catastrophic flooding is happening more often and will likely continue to happen more often due to the accelerating effects of climate change?
Yes, great question. There are several different roles. It is critical that town councils do not relax rules around building and floodplains. State governments also must not relax rules. We have buildings in Chapel Hill that were built decades ago in flood plains, and now those are mostly for low income residents who get flooded out every few years and they're going, 'Where else am I supposed to move?' Town councils have a responsibility to say, 'Look, these are the places where we can project that people are going to be reasonably safe, that their belongings are going to be reasonably secure. We are approving building there, and we are doing it in ways that don't add to storm water.'
The last thing that I would say about this is it's not just about what we build and where we build it. It's about how we get our energy. So we need to work on an energy grid that is more resilient, that is prepared for events like this, and energy sources that are set up to keep us safe and to mitigate these events as much as possible. And I need to see more work on that at the state and federal level, because it's really urgent and people's lives are at stake.
