This hurricane season has made me acutely aware of how communities prepare for and recuperate from natural disasters. In many ways we are pretty terrible at it.

My hometown, New Paltz, N.Y., 75 miles north of New York City, made The Wall Street Journal for its preparedness. In addition to some mandatory evacuations on the Wallkill River flood plains, there was a curfew Aug. 28 from 7 p.m. until 5 a.m. and the sale of alcohol was banned. This was in an effort to deter those gawking at the flood, which broke the record set in 1955. Tropical Storm Lee flooded the river again around Sept. 5, just as the town began to wring itself out.

It is time to get geared up and rethink how the Northeast approaches rural infrastructure. Let’s get creative with designing wetlands to take on flood water, houses on stilts and erosion control like we mean it.

New Paltz serves as a microcosm for what happens on a national level. The village itself sits above the flood plain, pinned between the New York State Thruway and the Wallkill River. The Wallkill River floods every year. Everyone who lives there knows that. Most of the time it comes with the snowmelt in April; sometimes it comes on Valentine’s Day when the ground is still frozen and cannot absorb water; and sometimes it is hurricane season and all of the pumpkins ready to be harvested float away. At least little development sits directly on the west bank of the river — the buildings wouldn’t stand.

The only bridge in town, which serves as bottleneck for traffic anyway, is closed and drivers are forced to drive about fifteen minutes to the next town, where a slightly higher bridge remains open. Every year, someone in his or her SUV attempts and inevitably fails to brave the floodwaters and requires some sort of rescue. The fire department pumps out everyone’s basement, and there is that one kid who canoed to his bus stop in high school. Hurricane Irene was awful for sure, but within the realm of possibility.

The most prevalent danger from hurricanes is inland flooding, exactly what happens in New Paltz yearly and exactly what was most devastating about Hurricane Irene. Vermont and parts of Upstate New York will spend years recovering from this, with bridges washed out, inches of topsoil washed away and homes and businesses swept off their foundations.

New York City and Long Island were largely prepared for the high winds and storm surges, but it was the sheer volume of water that caused devastating flooding. A hurricane like Irene that is hundreds of miles in diameter can still be acquiring more moisture over the ocean while barreling inland. Cooler ground temperatures hundreds of miles from the coast cause the moisture to condense into serious amounts of rainfall. This, paired with mountainous topography and sparse infrastructure in rural areas, creates the potential for destructive flooding.

Hurricanes are getting more intense as sea surface temperatures rise thanks to — you guessed it — climate change. We are also in a cyclical rise in hurricane intensity that started in 1995, which can potentially last 40 years.

Leanna Mulvihill is a senior forest engineering major and environmental writing and rhetoric minor. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at lpmulvih@syr.edu.

Published on September 10, 2011 at 12:00 pm