By Ruby Mellen and
August 6, 2024 at 7:59 p.m. EDT
CHARLESTON, S.C. — When Tropical Storm Debby’s floodwaters surrounded Damon Black’s home in the heart of this flood-prone city, he and his family were ready. They pulled up rugs and moved furniture upstairs, because in little over a year of living there, they had endured five floods.
“It’s virtually just a constant existential fear we have throughout the year,” Black said of the specter of floods in the historic Harleston Village neighborhood, near the tip of the city’s picturesque peninsula. In a December storm, water got inside the house; it didn’t breach the floorboards this time.
Debby is just the latest in a series of slow-moving, drenching storms that are threatening communities like this one, already vulnerable to hurricanes and even sunny-day floods and now facing the storms of a changing climate.
Warmer global temperatures mean heavier downpours such as this one, which had dumped more than a foot of rain on parts of coastal South Carolina by Tuesday afternoon, with more rain expected. Flood risks are rising as sea levels surge, too. Here and across the American South, water is rising faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Though Charleston hasn’t had a direct hit from a hurricane since Hugo in 1989, it is weary from a parade of floods that go back a decade. Before Debby and that freak December nor’easter, there were so many other tropical rains: Florence in 2018; Irma in 2017; Matthew in 2016; and the remnants of Joaquin in 2015.
The city is taking action to confront the risk, working to build tunnels and pump stations; raise the Battery, its sea wall whose history goes back to the 18th century; and one day perhaps construct some kind of barrier to protect its harbor from storms’ surging waters. As it endured the first part of its latest test mostly unscathed, with more rain ahead, Debby offered more proof of how tall a task it faces to protect people, homes and businesses from the next flood.
“It’s no longer a question of if these storms can happen; we’ve seen them happen now again and again and again,” said Jessica Whitehead, a Charleston native and executive director of the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience at Old Dominion University. “There’s only so much you can do to plan for 20 inches of rain in a single storm, and beyond that, it’s emergency management.”
Debby remained a tropical storm Tuesday more than a day after it made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region early Monday as a low-end Category 1 hurricane. The storm killed at least five people in Florida and Georgia, and nearly 80,000 utility customers remained without power in Florida by early Tuesday evening. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said the worst hit is rural Jefferson County, east of Tallahassee, where 99 percent of customers still had no electricity Tuesday morning.
Though the storm was less intense than others that have taken similar paths, including Hurricane Idalia less than a year ago, its main threat was drenching rain as it stalled over South Carolina. It was moving at just 3 mph late Tuesday, having already poured on the Palmetto State for nearly a day.
Debby was raising flooding threats up and down the East Coast. In northern Florida, though the storm had passed, flooding risks are expected to linger for five days or longer as Debby’s rainfall filters southward, adding to the already rising Suwannee and Santa Fe rivers, said Troy Roberts, a spokesman for the Suwannee River Water Management District.
Meteorologists expect Debby’s core to move northward into the Mid-Atlantic later Thursday into Friday, and then through the Northeast and New England on Friday into Saturday. That could mean 3 to 7 inches of rain along a swath of coast from Virginia to Massachusetts, though it was not certain where the heaviest rain will fall. That includes some potentially heavy rain late Tuesday into Wednesday across the Philadelphia, New York City and Boston regions, indirectly connected to Debby.
But South Carolina was bearing the brunt of Debby’s deluge Tuesday, with rain expected to continue into Friday.
As of midafternoon, the National Weather Service reported more than a foot of rain in Beaufort and Edisto Beach, coastal communities to the south of Charleston, and more than 14 inches in Green Pond, about 40 miles west of Charleston. Meteorologists were forecasting another 4 to 8 inches of rain would fall into Wednesday morning around Charleston and to its north.
Charleston is in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, a region of rivers, estuaries and marshes that extends southward to the Savannah River and the Georgia state line. It has always been a city vulnerable to storms.
But sea level rise has made it even more so — Charleston’s average sea level has risen by seven inches since 2010, four times as fast as during the previous 30 years, according to The Post’s analysis of accelerating sea level rise across the South.
Seas worldwide are rising faster than ever because of human-caused global warming, the result of fossil fuel emissions and the greenhouse effect. Not only is that warming melting ice sheets, but it also causes water to expand.
Minor floods that occurred in Charleston only a handful of times a year from the 1920s through the 1970s have over the past decade hit dozens of times every year, according to Weather Service data. That includes flooding that hit a record 89 times — nearly one out of every four days — in 2019.
Eight months ago, the city endured its fourth-deepest flood on record when a storm churned up the East Coast. Waters rose more than 4 feet above an average high-tide benchmark, behind the floods caused by three historic hurricanes: The South Carolina hurricane of 1940, Hugo and Irma.
Paul Gayes, a professor of marine science at Coastal Carolina University, remembers the ferocity of Hugo, which killed 13 people in South Carolina.
“But these slow-moving events are different,” he said.
After a night of pelting rain, thunder and tornado warnings, the streets of downtown Charleston were empty Tuesday as the city braced for more historic rainfall. Storefronts were shuttered and sandbagged, and few cars were on the road. The mayor’s office issued a curfew for the city’s peninsula from 11 p.m. Monday to Wednesday morning, closing most roads into the city center.
Residents took the threat seriously, filling up city parking garages to avoid floodwaters and staying at home. With so many storms coming before this one, “they become not easy to dismiss,” said Dale Morris, who served as Charleston’s chief resilience officer until stepping down this summer.