Washington Post: Alabama Flooding

 (Washington Post)

THEODORE, Ala.

"John Corideo drove the solitary two-lane highways of southern Alabama, eyeing the roadside ditches. It had been raining off and on for days and Corideo, chief of the Fowl River Fire District, knew that if it continued, his department could be outmatched by floodwaters.

It kept raining. Water filled the ditches and climbed over roads, swallowing parts of a main highway. About 10 residents who needed to be rescued were brought back to the station in firetrucks. More remained stranded in floodwaters, out of the department’s reach. “That week … we just caught hell,” Corideo said.

What the residents and rescuers of the Fowl River region faced on that day was part of a dangerous phenomenon reshaping the southern United States: Rapidly rising seas are combining with storms to generate epic floods, threatening lives, property and livelihoods."

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Master Boat Builders is one of the area’s largest employers and just manufactured the first electric tugboat in the United States, powered by at least 1,100 batteries. The ship, the eWolf, was delivered to the Port of San Diego earlier this year and has just begun operations.

Rice said part of the shipyard now floods during major high tides, something that never used to happen. When it does, the company moves workers out of that location and onto a different project until the seas relent. From his home on Dauphin Island, Rice said he’s seen the arrival of much higher tides.

“I really don’t think people think about it,” Rice said. “They see it on TV and I think it’s some kind of liberal hoax. But it’s not. If you live on the water, you’re on the water, you can see that it’s actually justified.”

 

FULL Story is HERE.