Detroit blaming global warming instead of poor infrastructure maintenance.
Story submitted by Eric Worrall
The US City of Detroit is currently in the midst of a crisis – a massive rainstorm has overwhelmed the city’s sewer system, causing extensive flooding.
However, Craig Covey, spokesman for Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner Jim Nash, has blamed global warming for the floods.
According to Covey;
“The system worked exactly like it was supposed to, but we’re seeing these rain events that used to be unusual but just aren’t anymore,” Covey said. “This is going to become more normal and we need to understand that ‘100-year storm’ is an outdated term.”
Covey blamed climate change, and said federal and local governments need to make major investments in infrastructure because “this is exactly what Southeast Michigan’s weather is going to be like in the future.”
If the people of Detroit accept the explanation that global warming is to blame for the disaster, then nobody will be looking to blame the politicians who are responsible for maintaining the city’s waste water system.
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The actual rainfall data from the USHCN doesn’t support the claim:
Graph by Tony Heller from original NOAA data.
I wonder how well Detroit is keeping up with keeping the storm sewer system clear of debris? With so much of the city in urban decay, extra debris in the sewers is almost a given.
Even the EPA says regular cleaning is needed for storm water sewer systems to overflow:
Clogged drains and storm drain inlets can cause the drains to overflow…
One thing in the news recently about Detroit is the inability of many residents to pay their water bill. News media seems to have missed the connection in their own headlines.
Source: CBS Detroit
And as any homeowner reading this knows, the water bill also includes the sewage fee. When people aren’t paying the water bill, they also aren’t paying to keep the sewer system running. Here is the latest financial report for Detroit’s sewer system:
Source: http://www.dwsd.org/downloads_n/about_dwsd/financials/2013_sewage_fund.pdf
Note the yellow highlight, almost half of their budget is in “doubtful” aka unpaid accounts. Surely maintenance suffers when such a situation occurs.
No, it couldn’t be that. Why blame your own management of the sewer system when global warming is an easy out? – Anthony
Brian says:
August 13, 2014 at 8:11 am
Looking back at the data and writing down the numbers this time, the Detroit airport recorded 4.06 inches in 6 hours. I did not look to see if this was the peak 6 hours during the storm it was the largest 6 hours added up by NOAA’s report. That seems of small consequence. The time of concentration for cities I work with, a drainage area of a couple square miles, is typically around 6 hours, so 6 hours would be a critical design time for the storm systems. Higher in the system, the time of concentration would be shorter, and the more intense intervals in the storm would be more important.
Tech paper 29, that you cite, was published in 1960 and considered precipitation data through approximately 1950. It has been superseded at least twice, most recently by NOAA Rainfall Atlas 14, which considers data through 2012. Atlas 14 reports a 100 year, 6 hour rainfall of 4.14 inches, so this was around a 100 year event. As a 100 year event, this would exceed the design capacity of the system. It would of course be a remarkable coincidence if the Detroit Airport was located at the area of peak rainfall: it is likely that elsewhere in the City there was more rain.
My conclusion remains that the flooding is because of the magnitude of the event, not faulty design, maintenance, or construction.
There isn’t a metropolitan area in the US which can handle that much rain in that short period of time without at least some flooding. It’s the land-use, stupid. Definitely anthropogenic – if there is no money for maintenance, i.e. most people don’t pay their water and sewer bill, it will be worse. Land-use, not climate is to blame.
“Detroit Historic Flooding: Major Interstates May Be Closed For Days After Historic Rainfall Event”
http://www.weather.com/news/commuter-conditions/detroit-flooding-historic-freeways-closed-20140812
Some comments:
“I’ve lived in this area 40 years, and can’t ever recall all the major expressways closing for flooding like happened in today’s storms,” said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for The Weather Channel’s sister company, Weather Underground”
Very true because Jeff was not around when the record daily rainfall was set:
“Some of the heaviest rain came in the 6 p.m. hour, when 1.24 inches of rain fell at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in just 24 minutes, part of a record-breaking 4.57 inches of total rainfall for the day. It is the second-heaviest calendar-day rainfall on record in the Motor City, behind only a 4.74-inch deluge on July 31, 1925”
Though most extreme weather has not increased in recent decades(some types have decreased) extremely heavy rain and flooding has gone up.
Was this weather event linked to warmer global temperatures or climate change?
The actual weather pattern at the time did not feature anything that was unusual and in fact, was related more to a pattern in the area(and the entire Midwest) that was connected to that area’s cooler than normal Summer, especially July into early August.
It would make more meteorological sense if one were trying to tie this to global cooling(I am not doing that or intending to imply it).
What are the facts regarding Detroit’s historical weather and extremely wet months?
As seen from the link below, out of the top 20 wettest months for Detroit since 1876, only 1 month in the last 25 years, May-2004 made it. Flint had several wettest months ever in recent years, but a big reason for that is that records at Flint, like Jeff Masters life in the Detroit area, don’t go back far enough to capture equal or greater events.
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dtx/display_climate.php?file=wetall.htm
A huge factor(from the first link/story above) that does point to humans as the cause of the severity of the freeway flooding:
“Cross told Crain’s Business Detroit that valuable copper pipes had been stolen from several pumping stations, compromising their ability to remove water from the freeway system. MDOT did not discover the theft until now, Cross said”
mkelly says:
August 13, 2014 at 8:14 am
Do you want to pay to build a storm sewer system to drain any eventuality? It could be done, but it may double or triple the cost of construction, which would have to be paid for either by your taxes or in the cost of the lot you purchase.
The amount of impervious area is a factor that is explicitly considered in determining the design flow.
Capital Gang make it the second wettest.
Trends at nearby USHCN stations show no increase in frequency/intensity of extreme rainfall, and at nearby Mt Clemens, the wettest day was in 1968.
We also need to recognise that temperatures in Detroit have been 2 to 3F below normal for the last month or so. Maybe that has something to do with it!
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/detroit-floods-not-caused-by-global-warming/
+1 Chris4692
Faulty design and construction would have shown before, at least every decade, and would have been common knowledge.
Faulty maintenance could have make it worse, of course, but you don’t need it to explain what happened.
Lack of funding ? may be. But maintenance folks usually are technies that try their best at critical points, especially if they have to give up maintenance of remote installations. I
Mike Maguire says:
August 13, 2014 at 8:56 am
The climate literature on rainfall generally indicates an increase in frequency of intense rainfall events. A typical study finds 1 of every 6 stations having a statistically significant increase in intense events, and on that basis concludes that more intense rainfall is generally increasing in frequency. That seems to me to be concluding too much, with too much certainty. The studies also do not report the magnitude of change.
I took the rainfall data from all Iowa reporting stations (110 stations) and tested the daily rainfall separately for trend in frequency and trend in size of event since 1970. There was no trend in size of event: as many stations show a decreasing size of event as show an increase. Few stations have a significant trend either direction. In frequency of event, few stations show a statistically significant change, however most stations show an increasing frequency of intense events, though not statistically significant. The change in frequency is such, however, that typically there would be one additional 3 inch (and over) event in 30 years, one additional 2 inch event in 15 years, and one additional event over 1.25 inches every 2 or 3 years. These are not changes of any practical significance.
I conclude that for Iowa, despite the literature findings, the trends are of neither practical or statistical significance.
Chris4692 –
Maybe when they update the database again it will look more like the ’61 model.
Any idea when the last major storm drainage project was done in Detroit?
“My conclusion remains that the flooding is because of the magnitude of the event, not faulty design, maintenance, or construction”
Chris,
You are partly correct but the fact that 24 hours after the event, flooded freeways were still not pumped out is clear evidence that you are partly wrong.
BTW, you are also partly correct on Detroit not being at the exact center of maximum rainfall, apparently there were reports of 6 inches at some places, however my wife flies back and forth in between here and Detroit 2 times a month and has a car parked at the airport that she was concerned about. They had to move it to higher ground. They did get hit with the most intense of the rain making storms and the reading from their instrument was a pretty good gauge of a narrow southwest to northeast corridor of similar amounts that nailed the center of Detroit and some suburbs.
Not to trivialize this 1 in a 100 year type rain event for Detroit but here in Evansville IN, in the past 25 years, I’ve recorded close to a dozen similar events in the last 25 years, including 8 inches in less than 6 hours back in the mid 90’s.
This is partly because we are closer to the Gulf of Mexico.
We have extreme flooding, especially on the Southeast side from every heavy rain event, some that produce less than the rain that fell in Detroit.
Why is that?
We are all paying an additional 35% on each monthly water bill(listed on the bill as “mandate”) to fund a replacement of the aged, inadequate, broken down sewage system here. Every time we get a heavy rain on the southeast side, it overloads the system and results in sewage getting dumped into the Ohio River because the system can’t handle the heavy rain and sewage at the same time.
Fortunately, I live north of the city and on high ground but still have to pay the 35% mandate.
http://www.14news.com/story/24388430/evansville-water-sewer-customers-to-see-new-charges-on-bills
The date on the CBS article is March 21, 2014. Think you’re forcing the issue on that one.
Now Detroit’s woes are being blamed on global warming; didn’t they used to be Bush’s fault?
Brian says:
August 13, 2014 at 9:28 am
I was surprised that the rainfall for a given frequency event in Detroit went down, especially since Tech paper 29 included the drought of the 1930’s, and the more recent calculations do not. In Iowa, where I work, it went up. Perhaps the lakes have something to do with it. The study previous to Atlas 14 was around 1990, so it may be another 20 years, though with better data handling, maybe the re-evaluation will be more frequent.
I have not worked in Detroit, so I don’t know anything specifically about Detroit.
The electric power industry is catching on to the scam.
The Politicization of Science
http://tdworld.com/insights/politicization-science
It is Detroit, after all. Where else in the world does a governing body exist that believes climate is an unchanging everlasting guaranteed known?
As reported on the local news channel WDIV, another contributing factor is that scrappers removed coppper wiring that provided power to the pumping stations located at underpasses along some of the major freeways.
The Detroit area had a similar rain event about 4.75 inches back in July of 1925 when weather data recording was likely done at Detroit City airport. But the1925 rain event was not also global warming?
Windsor, Ontario also experienced severe flooding from the Aug., 2014 rain event.
The new Herb Grey Parkway in Windsor and now under construction there was also flooded by this same storm as were areas around Windsor. See Windsor Star newspaper for photos of the flooding.
Three points:
Covey blamed climate change, and said federal and local governments need to make major investments in infrastructure because “this is exactly what Southeast Michigan’s weather is going to be like in the future.”
Aw, man I wish he had not said that. If the results of these predictions stay true to for, Detroit is now about to have a multi-year drought.
For many, weather has only existed since the 1950s. That’s the only way to make sense of their comments.
Finally, perhaps a higher power believed Detroit could use a good cleaning. I would agree.
Many of Detroit’s main streets have railroad viaducts that flood as the result of heavy rains. Nearly impossible to keep these viaduct drains cleaned out.
Result is that main traffic routes these streets provide are closed making it, at times, difficult to get around the city during and after heavy rains.
PMHinSC says:
August 13, 2014 at 6:38 am
“Don’t know about “100-year storm”, but I do believe 100-year FLOOD is an outdated term. Although localized these problems are anthropogenic in nature and caused by land use changes resulting in more run off, new bridge footings which restrict river flow, levies, and lack of adequate dredging result in backup of rivers. In another century I lived in the New Orleans area for 10 years and experienced several 100-year floods.”
You are right. I’m a licensed land survey and provide FEMA Elevation Certificates and Flood Map Changes (Amendments/Revisions) for property owners. The maps are constantly being updated due to local development. The “100 year flood” means there’s a 1 in a 100 or 1% chance flood waters will reach and certain level within a year. There’s also a “500 year flood” 1 in 500 or 0.2%.
http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqz100yearflood.htm?utm_term=500%20year%20floodplain&utm_content=p1-main-1-title&utm_medium=sem&utm_source=msn&utm_campaign=adid-1e3ff8cb-5800-452f-be8e-bda921af8dcf-0-ab_msb_ocode-12615&ad=semD&an=msn_s&am=broad&q
surveyor
DCA says:
August 13, 2014 at 11:17 am
When I developed house lots in Oregon the 1990s, the official flood plain maps bore no resemblance to physical reality on the ground. They were apparently drawn with a crayon Back East based upon Lewis & Clark maps.
milodonharlani says:
August 13, 2014 at 11:23 am
That isn’t far from the truth. The old flood maps were developed from USGS contour maps with a 20 ft vertical interval between contours, with some supplemental cross section surveys along major drainage ways. 20 ft contours do not show much detail in flat flood plains.
Maybe the new LIDAR based maps will be somewhat better, but I haven’t worked with them.
Chris4692 says:
August 13, 2014 at 11:32 am
A good use for LIDAR. New maps are sorely needed.
IIRC, a contractor in Houston made the maps for the USGS for the whole country, without any new local surveys, often based upon large scale, antique cartography of dubious quality, so that even a fine pencil mark could cover large swaths, which were often off by even more distance from the features they intended to represent.
From the Michigan Department of Transportation:
“Michigan Department of Transportation officials said copper theft in the past has compromised pump stations which drain freeways during storms,”
Does climate change cause copper theft? if yes, then definitely climate change caused Detroit’s major highways to flood. Another man made climate change disaster to add to the list of all man made causes of climate change: copper theft.
June 22, 1947….Holt Mo….12 in of rain…..in 42 MINUTES.