As the Hudson Valley continues to deal with the lingering effects from Wednesday's storm, WAMC's Sam Dingman has been reporting on the damage and what it could tell us about the bigger picture of how climate change is impacting our region.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
LUCAS WILLARD: Sam Dingman joins us now. Hi, Sam.
SAM DINGMAN: Hey, Lucas.
WILLARD: So you were out running around yesterday, on a very wet Wednesday. What can you tell me? What did you see?
DINGMAN: Water, water everywhere! I spent a lot of time driving around - very carefully! - in Athens in particular yesterday, and what I saw was a lot of spots on the road where, if you can picture this, you would see a house up on a hill with a yard that slopes down towards the road. And the lower part of that yard would be basically transformed into a pond. There would be upwards of, like, a foot of standing water collecting in various places. And that water would then cascade out across the road.
I also stopped by the Athens Volunteer Fire Department around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, and I spoke to the first assistant chief there, Antonio Fuentes. He had been on duty since six in the morning.
FUENTES: They had a possible water rescue at the viaduct in Coxsackie. They had a possible structure fire in Catskill in that time frame. But majority pump outs in the village...
DINGMAN: A pump out, as I suspect some people listening maybe learned about for the first time yesterday, is what you need when your basement floods, and that obviously creates a hazardous situation in terms of electronics and furnaces. Fuentes told me they had had a steady stream of those pump out calls coming in all day. Actually, a couple came in while I was standing there talking to him.
We also saw really serious damage all over the region. In Castleton-on-Hudson, there was a centuries-old grist mill that was overwhelmed by rushing water from Muitzes Kill. This grist mill had been standing for 300 years, and it was totally demolished by the overflow of water.
We also saw some local farms and orchards - the Chatham Berry Farm and Nimble Roots Farm are just two examples - who reported serious flooding that they said had destroyed a lot of crops and inventory. And actually, as we record this, Lucas, a lot of the Hudson Valley remains under a state of emergency. There is a flood warning in effect until this evening for Albany, Columbia, Greene, and Rensselaer counties.
WILLARD: And Sam, I'll just have to note that I experienced a lot of that flooding myself yesterday. So a lot of these rains have subsided, but there are washouts, there are damaged roadways, there are communities that are under boil water advisories. So, what can you tell me about this next day and what people are are feeling across the region?
DINGMAN: Yes, definitely, there's still a lot of lingering effects. Just to give you a couple examples, earlier today in Schodack, Charles Peter, the town supervisor, estimated that the costs of damage to town property there are over $100,000. Schodack got hit really hard by this. There have been collapsed roadways, overturned vehicles, very intense property damage. Schodack got almost a foot of rain.
Greenport residents yesterday were dealing with discolored drinking water, which had to do with a water main break that officials are still working to fix. Although I did speak with them earlier this afternoon, and they told me they have the location of the water main break narrowed down to one street in Greenport. So hopefully they'll have that fixed soon.
And we should also say, Lucas, there is more rain in the forecast on Sunday, and some meteorologists are warning that that could mean more flooding.
WILLARD: So, Sam, speaking about flooding and this extreme weather, I know you've been trying to put this into the broader context for us. What have you learned about how this fits into weather patterns that maybe are typical or less typical for for this time of year?
DINGMAN: Well, you may have heard Lucas, a lot of people have been comparing the storm yesterday to a hurricane or a tropical storm. A lot of people, in particular, have brought up Tropical Storm Irene back in 2011. And earlier today, I spoke to a climatologist at SUNY New Paltz named John Rayburn. He is a professor of environmental science there, and he told me that is a fair comparison.
JOHN RAYBURN: Usually, we associate these kinds of rainfall events with hurricanes, but this week we saw it with just a regular rainstorm that's set up over our region and the atmosphere just didn't push it away fast enough.
DINGMAN: I think it's worth staying on this idea for just a second, Lucas, because this was definitely my big takeaway from the conversation with Professor Rayburn: this idea that what we saw yesterday was a level of rainfall and associated damage that we would normally expect with a hurricane...only it wasn't a hurricane. It was just a regular storm that was way more intense than summer storms generally are. And the reason it was more intense is climate change.
Rayburn told me that as the global climate warms, the ocean absorbs the vast majority of that increased heat. And remember, 70% of the Earth's surface is ocean. Which means, Rayburn says...
RAYBURN: There's more energy stored in the oceans. You expect that energy to transfer to the atmosphere. You expect that atmosphere to transfer that to us as as rain, and yeah, that's what we saw.
DINGMAN: So the atmosphere here on the mainland is being just pummeled with these vast stores of pent-up energy, and that is happening with an intensity that is far greater than what we've seen in the past.
WILLARD: And what did the professor have to say about how scientists are actually studying this increase in intensity in the storms that we're seeing?
DINGMAN: So Rayburn told me that when it comes to flood predictions, climatologists use this metric called the 100-year flood. That means the biggest flood they can reasonably expect to occur every 100 years, based on historical data. And they do this in various increments. They also have the one-year flood and the 10-year flood. And based on these calculations, they can predict the chances of severe flooding in a given period of time. And this is something that cities and towns rely on for things like zoning. But Rayburn says climate change is making these calculations much more complicated.
RAYBURN: One of the big assumptions behind these predictions is that the the climate behind those statistics don't change. But because we have this current climate shifting as we do, there's this dynamic shift behind that regular statistic.
DINGMAN: So that means that as the pace and intensity of climate change continues to increase, assessing the threat levels gets really hard, because the climate is changing. And even if you're able to look back at recent decades where climate change has been more of a clear and present danger, and work that into your prediction model, it still doesn't account for what's happening in the present,and also the near future when the impacts of climate change are going to continue to intensify.
WILLARD: So when we do talk about climate change, I think it is important to note that the federal government and the Trump administration, in particular, has been skeptical of climate change, and the notion from scientists that it is caused by humans, and the extent of human caused climate change. Would it be fair to say that what we're seeing with these intense storms is a result, in some way, due to federal climate policy?
DINGMAN: I asked Rayburn that very question, Lucas, and he said, basically, yes.
RAYBURN: Funding losses to NASA and to NOAA have hurt our predictive models. When they talk about removing things like tide gauges or ocean buoys, that sounds like it shouldn't affect my weather forecast, but it does. We had more robust data, even just five or six years ago, than we do now to make our predictive models.
DINGMAN: So just to give some context on that, NOAA is the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Trump administration has made steep cuts to staffing and funding at NOAA - 40% according to some estimates. And what that means, basically, is that this situation with climate change, that is changing so rapidly, and in unprecedented ways, just is not being looked at as closely as it was prior to 2025.
Now, late last year, the federal government announced the launch of what it called, and I'm going to quote from their copy on this, "a groundbreaking new suite of operational artificial intelligence-driven global weather prediction models." And the idea there, Lucas, is that these tools can increase forecast speed and deliver predictions more efficiently with less overall necessary labor.
But the problem - and this is actually according to a recent study in the journal "Science Advances" - is that these AI climate modeling platforms, and I will just quote from the journal here, "tend to underestimate both the frequency and intensity of record-breaking events." That's partly because of the way AI works. It's generally backward-looking. It's making predictions based on what it knows from the historical record. And so as Rayburn was pointing out, that historical record is increasingly unreliable as the impacts of climate change continue to intensify and evolve.
WILLARD: And that's WAMC's Sam Dingman reporting. Sam, thanks so much.
DINGMAN: Thank you, Lucas.
