It doesn’t take 40 days and 40 nights of rain to flood your basement in Germantown, or — if you live in Manayunk on Venice Island — the first floor of your apartment building. In parts of Camden you might not need any rain at all, just a high tide on a full moon.
Global warming is global ice melting, of course, and our seas are rising, pushing more water up our tidal waterways. Warmer air holds more water to dump on the land. Heavy rains can come with or without a tropical storm.
In this issue we take a look at the wet side of global warming. We look at where the waters have risen and what has happened there since. We consider resilience as well as retreat.
There are plenty of steps we can take as individuals. We can buy flood insurance. We can research the flood risk and history of properties before we move in. But floods are big, community-wide events; there is only so much we can do as individuals. It takes the government — from City Hall to Capitol Hill — to get moving too.
