Hillsborough, NC Had Been Counting On FEMA For Flood Protection. Then Came Trump, Followed By Chantal [View all]

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Three and a half years ago, Hillsborough applied for a FEMA grant as part of the agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, also known as BRIC, to protect its water and sewer systems from future weather disasters.

It took more than a year and a half for FEMA to approve the grant, slower than the agency had predicted. This spring town officials were preparing to request bids for the water project when FEMA abruptly announced in a press release that it had canceled the program, part of the Trump administration’s move to overhaul and substantially cut the agency.

The afternoon before the North Carolina flooding, meteorologists had forecast some areas could get 4 inches of rain and issued a flood watch. Midday on July 6, the U.S. Geological Survey’s in-stream sensor at the Hillsborough station measured the Eno River at 1.8 feet, an average height for the area. The river loped along at an unremarkable 6,060 gallons per minute. But then, between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., Chantal trudged up from the south through central North Carolina. It was a slow, wet storm that carried an immense amount of water vapor, a phenomenon, scientists say, that’s intensified by climate change.

Over the next 12 hours, more than 10 inches of rain fell on Hillsborough, hoisting the Eno out of its banks. The river rose to a record 24.79 feet, based on high water marks, USGS later found, and at its peak, surged to 8.8 million gallons every 60 seconds—more than 1,400 times the amount of the day before. The Eno inundated the River Pumping Station at the wastewater treatment plant above levels reached during Hurricane Fran in 1996. The pumping station normally receives and transports 75 percent of what leaves the town’s toilets, washing machines and kitchen sinks to the wastewater treatment plant. Now the plant was inoperable, and raw sewage, diluted with ground, rain and river water, was pouring into the Eno from the manholes upstream.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16072025/hillsborough-north-carolina-canceled-fema-program-chantal-damage/