This is the 11th installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Stormwater that pours onto our roads and drowns our yards has become the most visible and alarming harbinger of what coastal communities are facing with climate change.

As flooding has rapidly worsened in scale and frequency, people are demanding action from their governments. But stormwater management is a costly problem that is not easily solved, even if political will, funding and community sentiment are miraculously aligned.

According to a draft report in March from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Financial Advisory Board, “Evaluating Stormwater Infrastructure and Financing Task Force,” there is no comprehensive, nationally representative numbers on what is required for stormwater capital and operation and maintenance.

“The needs are great,” the working paper said, “and the funding gap is very wide — estimated to approach $10 billion annually.”

Needs, however, are also urgent.

Of the seven highest rainfall events since 1898 in coastal North Carolina, six have happened within the last 20 years, according to recent research from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City.

The study, published July 2019 in the journal Scientific Reports, pointed to catastrophic rain in hurricanes Floyd in 1999, Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018 as a consequence of the warming climate creating more moisture. Florence alone dumped an average of 17.5 inches of rain on 14,000 square-miles of the Carolinas, the report said.

To make matters worse, nontropical storms are also now dumping record amounts of rainfall. Existing drainage has been overwhelmed, exposing the inadequacy of often haphazard and poorly maintained systems. But even some well-designed, modern municipal stormwater systems can no longer keep up.

According to a 2019 study published in Geophysical Research Letters, extreme rainfall events happened 85% more often in the eastern U.S. in 2017 than they did in 1950.

“The take-home message is that infrastructure in most parts of the country is no longer performing at the level that it’s supposed to because of the big changes that we’ve seen in extreme rainfall,” Daniel Wright, the study’s lead author and a hydrologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in press release.

Depending on whether it’s an urban or rural location, stormwater runoff can be loaded with nonpoint source pollutants such as nitrogen-rich fertilizers, heavy metals, toxic pesticides and fecal bacteria from waterfowl, dogs and septic tanks. It also can be laced with oil, gas and noxious chemicals washed off streets, buildings, lawns and farmland.

In numerous North Carolina coastal communities, including on the Outer Banks, it runs, often unfiltered, directly through outfalls and pipes into the ocean and sounds, or the bays, creeks and rivers that feed into them.

As a result, big storms with lots of runoff overload estuaries and coastal waters with nutrients, sediment and contaminants. Wetlands and recreational waters can be compromised, resulting in fish and shellfish kills, algal blooms and temporarily closed beaches.

The National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, created by the EPA in 1996 and implemented in parts of North Carolina in 2001, requires larger urban areas to manage stormwater with certain best management practices, or BMPs, to reduce flooding, runoff and pollution impacts on watersheds.

North Carolina’s patchwork stormwater regulations require stricter containment and discharge rules mostly to protect water quality in the 20 coastal counties from stormwater runoff impacts from new development.

But beyond those rules, local governments with smaller populations can decide how to manage its nonpoint source stormwater, that is, discharges that don’t come from a specific source such as a sewer pipe.

The volume of stormwater has become increasingly overwhelming and persistent. In many communities, the largely unseen network of pipes, culverts and ditches that is supposed to take stormwater away from streets and property has been maintained infrequently, if at all. Certainly in North Carolina’s low-lying northeast coast, numerous drainage systems are deteriorating and outmoded. Often, the infrastructure, which could be a century-old ditch attached to half-century-old culvert that’s attached to a series of various sized pipes, crisscrosses and zig-zags over different properties, public and private.

Sometimes, no one knows who is responsible when the system is clogged and numerous properties are flooded. In some areas, drainage is so antiquated, it’s not clear what exists, where it is, what condition it’s in, or who owns it. Regulations to maintain the drainage ditches and structures are spotty or nonexistent.

To complicate matters more, the North Carolina Department of Transportation is responsible for maintenance of all the roadside drainage infrastructure within its right of way. Once water leaves the right of way, however, it becomes the responsibility of the downstream property owner. And severe budget shortfalls have limited the department to mostly piecemeal improvements to its drainage or crisis responses when roads flood.

On the Outer Banks, residents in recent years have been shocked by the amount of water inundating their property even when there is no tropical low. Intense rainstorms have, in a matter of hours, transformed entire neighborhoods into lakes and rushing rivers. Water has flooded buildings that have been dry for decades.

In July 2018, for example, more than 15 inches of rain fell for 10 days straight on Roanoke Island, leaving much of the north end flooded for weeks, even months. An engineer later estimated that 50 million cubic feet of water had fallen.

“The amount of rain we got is crazy,” Brent Johnson, Dare County project manager for grants and waterways, said in a recent interview, referring to the event as a 500-year storm. “We don’t design for that level of water.”

An engineering study of the most affected areas later estimated that drainage improvements would cost about $2.6 million, not including engineering and easement acquisitions.

Dare County has so far dealt with flooding and stormwater on a case-by-case basis. But with more of the unincorporated areas of the county having frequent flooding issues, Johnson said, the county is seeking grant funds to start development of a comprehensive long-term stormwater management plan.

Johnson said that such a plan could manage the watersheds within larger areas to address natural flow and drainage challenges. Realistically, he added, funding for stormwater management would have to be shared between local government, public agencies and private property owners, likely through a combination of bonds, special district taxes and grants.

Roanoke Island illustrates the complexity of draining flooded communities on the coast, where land is flat, water bodies of some form are plentiful and sea level rise is making the water table higher. There is not enough slope or grade in spots, causing water to pool and stagnate. Numerous ditches are routinely clogged with debris, roots and overgrown weeds. Regulations forbid flow to be impeded in ditches, but enforcement is lax. Underground pipes and culverts are often different diameters, broken or improperly connected. What one property owner does or doesn’t do on their land affects whether their neighbor’s property will drain or flood, but even when the issue is addressed in stormwater ordinances, it’s difficult to resolve.

“A lot of the issues we have in our area … you can’t stop the water from coming up from the ocean and the sound,” Johnson said. “That’s what we really have to focus on: How do we get the water back to where it’s supposed to go?”

Each town on the Outer Banks is responsible for its own stormwater management. The town of Nags Head, which is upgrading its stormwater infrastructure in phases, funded through a stormwater fee, got an early start on serious comprehensive improvements.

Farther south, the city of Jacksonville in coastal Onslow County charges a stormwater utility fee, which totals about $5 a month for an average home, to pay for its stormwater management.

Two crews “do nothing but clean drainage,” said Pat Donovan-Brandenburg, the city’s stormwater manager, and other staff are charged with monitoring water quality. Stormwater controls include the slow release of water to prevent flooding and allow it to filter.

Donovan-Brandenburg, who took over the program from the state in 2005, said the city has been steadily making improvements in its infiltration, repairing broken pipes and replacing small pipes with larger ones.

“We’ve been taking care of it little by little,” she said. “No municipality has the money to take care of it all at once.”

The city is in the middle of the New River watershed and is surrounded by wetlands, which is a lot friendlier to flood control than acres of impermeable asphalt and concrete.

“We have probably a lot of storage area,” Donavan-Brandenburg said. Other advantages are that the area downstream of the city is lightly developed, and the city has no heavy industry.

Jacksonville also requires stormwater permittees to renew every January to make sure that everything is as it should be, whereas the state only requires renewal every 10 years.

“Imagine not cleaning their houses for 10 years,”  she said.

Donovan-Brandenburg, who had served for four years as director and is also currently serving as secretary with the Storm Water Association of North Carolina, which supports best practices for stormwater management, said that coastal communities hardest hit by the big storms benefit even more with resiliency measures such as green space that drains and filters stormwater and deep setbacks for waterfront properties. And whether it’s urban or rural, she said, all communities gain by planting and protecting wetlands in the watershed to control stormwater while promoting cleaner water and healthier fisheries.

“Wetlands do much better with flooding and wave energy than a man-made seawall,” Donovan-Brandenburg said.

Also, simple measures as grass alongside roads — such as grassy swales and grass ditches — slows down water to “a nonerosive rate,” she said, adding: “Curb and gutter allows water to pick up speed and velocity.”

The stormwater panel has been urging NCDOT to use some of those kinds of BMPs on Interstate 95 and I-40.

Clearly, the best answer for stormwater management, she said, “even in the mountains, is not taking away the floodplain. One thing that everybody can do is start planting more trees.”

The North Carolina Coastal Federation and The Pew Charitable Trusts in March launched a yearlong initiative, “Advancing Nature-based Stormwater Strategies in North Carolina,” to encourage natural solutions to flood risk.

By merging the expertise of academics, developers, investors, landscape architects, conservationists and others, the effort is working to promote cooperative strategies that allow stormwater to filter into the ground, rather than runoff into the waterways. Permeable pavement, rain gardens, cisterns, living shorelines and preserved green spaces are some ways to engineer roads and landscapes that help reduce runoff and erosion.

The working group is expected to issue recommendations this winter, according to Pew.

Some environmentally sensible stormwater control tactics studied by academic partners include bioretention devices, wet ponds, green roofs, stormwater wetlands, grass swales, sand filters and dry ponds. UNC campuses and North Carolina State University have programs that study stormwater issues.

In 2019, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Environmental Finance Center released a report on stormwater funding. Compared with water and wastewater infrastructure needs, the report said, it has been difficult to quantify costs of stormwater infrastructure needs.

“Recently, however, there has been a change in this trend, and more state and federal entities are starting to focus on identifying stormwater needs,” according to the report. “Communities are going to have to identify dedicated sources of revenue for stormwater and to be more intentional about matching revenue generation with capital needs as the future of the North Carolina stormwater landscape develops.”

Even in extraordinary times of overlapping public emergencies, flooding will continue. Without adequate stormwater infrastructure, communities will be condemned to a future of polluted water and flooded neighborhoods and downtowns.

“Stormwater infrastructure requires funding and it has been neglected, or inadequately funded, for far too long,” the EPA said in the draft stormwater working paper, comparing the investment to the federal highway system.

“Municipalities and local utilities need federal and state help in defining long-term reliable funding sources,” the draft report said. “Funding must be available in all states and be sufficient to support both capital expenditures and long-term operation and maintenance costs.”

This is the 10th installment in a continuing series on climate change and the North Carolina coast that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

A state assessment of sea level rise compiled a decade ago met fierce political pushback, but in the years since, North Carolina has boosted its efforts to study and prepare for climate change, and some say work to address issues now commonly associated with rising seas had begun years earlier.

In 2009, the state Coastal Resources Commission directed its panel of scientists to put together state-level data and projections regarding sea level rise, rather than relying on international and national reports.

The next year in March, the CRC Science Panel, with contributions from other state experts, released its North Carolina Sea Level Rise Assessment Report. It included high, medium and status quo projections through 2100, along with a recommended planning benchmark of 1 meter, or around 39 inches, of sea level rise by 2100.

Spencer Rogers, a member of the science panel, said that the science had “a rough start” 10 years ago, “when the Science Panel on Coastal Hazards Sea Level Rise report for the Coastal Resources Commission was prohibited by law from application by the General Assembly.” Rogers is on the faculty of University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science and is the coastal construction and erosion specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant.

Jessica Whitehead, who was named last year as the state’s first chief resilience officer said in a recent interview that the science itself was sound, and the expectation was that sound policy would follow.

Ten years ago, Whitehead, who heads the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, or NCORR, was working a split position with South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium and North Carolina Sea Grant, based out of Charleston and serving both states. In her role at the time, she attended and provided input at workshops that led into both the first state sea level rise report and another guide intended for public and private planners, the 2012 Climate Ready North Carolina: Building a Resilient Future report.

“The approaches we took 10 years ago to climate planning were state of the art for the field at the time,” Whitehead explained. “2010 was still the ‘information deficit’ model of climate planning: everyone thought that if you did a climate assessment and provided information on what the ranges of average temperature and rainfall would be under climate change, that would be all decision makers needed to come up with and implement policy to reduce those risks.”

But in response to the release of the 2010 report, two bills were introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly, one that didn’t pass followed by a successful measure that put constraints on what the state could do regarding sea level rise.

The 2012 law forbid adoption of any rule or policy that defined a rate of sea level rise for regulatory purposes. And while it made the CRC the sole state agency authorized to define rates of sea level rise, it was directed to refrain from setting rates for regulatory purposes prior to July 1, 2016.

Rogers said that the report was intended as a planning rather than regulatory document, so restricting any implementation “had little impact.”

Rogers said that to the General Assembly’s credit, the 2012 legislation also required five-year updates to the sea level analysis, “making North Carolina one of the few, if not the only state, with legislation requiring peer-reviewed, sea level rise reporting.”

The final draft of the report was complete March 31, 2015, and the report was finalized March 1, 2016.

Rogers also noted that the 2015 updated report was delivered without apparent controversy in the General Assembly or the Coastal Resources Commission.

East Carolina University geologist Stan Riggs, who was a founding member of the science panel, resigned from the post in July 2016, for reasons including lingering frustration with the General Assembly’s response to the 2010 report. He’s more encouraged with the way the latest required five-year update to the report is being handled.

“The CRC has backed off to allow the science panel to do their (2020) report based on the science, not dictated by the way the 2015 report was. We were told exactly what we could do, what we couldn’t do, who we could talk to, who would review. And that was outrageous. That was just unacceptable,” Riggs told Coastal Review Online in mid-May.

Tancred Miller is the coastal and ocean policy manager with the Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management. Miller said that the updated report in 2015 included regional rates of sea level rise for different parts of the coast, based upon tide gauge data and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, scenarios. Although the prohibition against adopting sea level rise rates for regulatory purposes has since expired, the CRC has not yet considered adopting any sea level rise policies or regulations.

In 2019, the CRC directed its science panel to begin work on the 2020 update, and while the science panel has started, its ability to meet and work has been hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The panel has been requested to update the report for 2020 and work is underway,” Rogers said. Although COVID-19-related restrictions will delay its completion, “the primary observations and recommendations are expected to be improved and more detailed, but are not likely to be much different than in the previous reports.”

Miller said that the sea level rise report shows the state’s continued commitment to study and present the best available understanding of data, trends and projections.

“DEQ and DCM’s perspective and approach have remained consistent, and we continue to provide technical and financial support to local governments to help build resilience to climate hazards,” Miller said. “The state continues to invest time, resources, and importantly, the invaluable efforts of the CRC Science Panel, into updating the SLR Assessment Report on a regular basis. The report is available to state and local governments and all other interested parties as a resource to support planning and decision making.”

DEQ led the development of the state’s first Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan, which was released earlier this month, and worked closely with NCORR, and other cabinet agencies.

“Academic partners, led by the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, stepped up in a huge way, producing, pro bono, the state’s first ever climate science report,” Miller said, adding that the plan is relevant to virtually every part of the state and would be updated on a regular basis.

Miller explained that the Division of Coastal Management has been able to direct federal funds to local government resilience planning and is contracting with North Carolina Emergency Management to increase the number of tide gauges on the coast.

“DCM is also beginning to work with NCORR and other partners with funding from the N.C. Disaster Recovery Act of 2019 and a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to create a grant program to support local government resilience planning and project development to be launched later this year,” Miller said.

Rogers said that a likely surprising observation for most, including the General Assembly and the Coastal Resources Commission, “is that sea level rise adaptation in coastal North Carolina was well underway before the first report and is still actively being enhanced today.”

Most sea level rise adaptation has been implemented at the community level. “It has been more common in coastal North Carolina than in most of the rest of the nation,” he added.

Local implementation has been typically proposed and justified as a response to other coastal hazards, such as increased coastal storm effects during the last 25 years, continuing long-term shoreline erosion threats and higher levels of interest in nuisance flooding, Rogers said.

Common coastal community responses include new requirements for construction, participation in the National Flood Insurance Program’s Community Rating System and an increasing number of coastal water level gages to measure sea level changes, he added.

“Sea level rise is an important component of climate change in coastal North Carolina,” Rogers said. “Although not typically implemented for climate or sea level rise adaptation, actions to address more immediate coastal hazards are often the same actions appropriate for longer-term adaptation. In 50 to 100 years, the communities will not care why they adapted to climate or sea level rise, only if they did.”