Texas Blackouts Point to Coast-to-Coast Crises
Waiting to Happen
Continent-spanning storms triggered blackouts in
Oklahoma and Mississippi, halted one-third of U.S. oil production and disrupted
vaccinations in 20 states.
Christopher
Flavellen Brad Plumer Hiroko Tabuchi
By
Christopher Flavelle, Brad Plumer and Hiroko Tabuchi
Feb. 20,
2021
Even as
Texas struggled to restore electricity and water over the past week, signs of
the risks posed by increasingly extreme weather to America’s aging
infrastructure were cropping up across the country.
The week’s
continent-spanning winter storms triggered blackouts in Texas, Oklahoma,
Mississippi and several other states. One-third of oil production in the nation
was halted. Drinking-water systems in Ohio were knocked offline. Road networks
nationwide were paralyzed and vaccination efforts in 20 states were disrupted.
The crisis
carries a profound warning. As climate change brings more frequent and intense
storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme events, it is placing
growing stress on the foundations of the country’s economy: Its network of
roads and railways, drinking-water systems, power plants, electrical grids,
industrial waste sites and even homes. Failures in just one sector can set off
a domino effect of breakdowns in hard-to-predict ways.
Much of
this infrastructure was built decades ago, under the expectation that the
environment around it would remain stable, or at least fluctuate within
predictable bounds. Now climate change is upending that assumption.
“We are
colliding with a future of extremes,” said Alice Hill, who oversaw planning for
climate risks on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
“We base all our choices about risk management on what’s occurred in the past,
and that is no longer a safe guide.”
While it’s
not always possible to say precisely how global warming influenced any one
particular storm, scientists said, an overall rise in extreme weather creates
sweeping new risks.
Sewer
systems are overflowing more often as powerful rainstorms exceed their design
capacity. Coastal homes and highways are collapsing as intensified runoff
erodes cliffs. Coal ash, the toxic residue produced by coal-burning plants, is
spilling into rivers as floods overwhelm barriers meant to hold it back. Homes
once beyond the reach of wildfires are burning in blazes they were never
designed to withstand.
Problems
like these often reflect an inclination of governments to spend as little money
as possible, said Shalini Vajjhala, a former Obama administration official who
now advises cities on meeting climate threats. She said it’s hard to persuade
taxpayers to spend extra money to guard against disasters that seem unlikely.
But climate
change flips that logic, making inaction far costlier. “The argument I would
make is, we can’t afford not to, because we’re absorbing the costs” later, Ms.
Vajjhala said, after disasters strike. “We’re spending poorly.”
The Biden
administration has talked extensively about climate change, particularly the
need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create jobs in renewable energy.
But it has spent less time discussing how to manage the growing effects of
climate change, facing criticism from experts for not appointing more people
who focus on climate resilience.
“I am
extremely concerned by the lack of emergency-management expertise reflected in
Biden’s climate team,” said Samantha Montano, an assistant professor at the
Massachusetts Maritime Academy who focuses on disaster policy. “There’s an
urgency here that still is not being reflected.”
A White
House spokesman, Vedant Patel, said in a statement, “Building resilient and
sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather and a changing
climate will play an integral role in creating millions of good paying, union
jobs” while cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
And while
President Biden has called for a major push to refurbish and upgrade the
nation’s infrastructure, getting a closely divided Congress to spend hundreds
of billions, if not trillions of dollars, will be a major challenge.
Heightening
the cost to society, disruptions can disproportionately affect lower-income
households and other vulnerable groups, including older people or those with
limited English.
“All these
issues are converging,” said Robert D. Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern
University who studies wealth and racial disparities related to the
environment. “And there’s simply no place in this country that’s not going to
have to deal with climate change.”
In
September, when a sudden storm dumped a record of more than two inches of water
on Washington in less than 75 minutes, the result wasn’t just widespread
flooding, but also raw sewage rushing into hundreds of homes.
Washington,
like many other cities in the Northeast and Midwest, relies on what’s called a
combined sewer overflow system: If a downpour overwhelms storm drains along the
street, they are built to overflow into the pipes that carry raw sewage. But if
there’s too much pressure, sewage can be pushed backward, into people’s homes —
where the forces can send it erupting from toilets and shower drains.
This is
what happened in Washington. The city’s system was built in the late 1800s.
Now, climate change is straining an already outdated design.
DC Water,
the local utility, is spending billions of dollars so that the system can hold
more sewage. “We’re sort of in uncharted territory,” said Vincent Morris, a
utility spokesman.
The
challenge of managing and taming the nation’s water supplies — whether in
streets and homes, or in vast rivers and watersheds — is growing increasingly
complex as storms intensify. Last May, rain-swollen flooding breached two dams
in Central Michigan, forcing thousands of residents to flee their homes and
threatening a chemical complex and toxic waste cleanup site. Experts warned it
was unlikely to be the last such failure.
Many of the
country’s 90,000 dams were built decades ago and were already in dire need of
repairs. Now climate change poses an additional threat, bringing heavier
downpours to parts of the country and raising the odds that some dams could be
overwhelmed by more water than they were designed to handle. One recent study
found that most of California’s biggest dams were at increased risk of failure
as global warming advances.
In recent
years, dam-safety officials have begun grappling with the dangers. Colorado,
for instance, now requires dam builders to take into account the risk of
increased atmospheric moisture driven by climate change as they plan for
worst-case flooding scenarios.
But
nationwide, there remains a backlog of thousands of older dams that still need
to be rehabilitated or upgraded. The price tag could ultimately stretch to more
than $70 billion.
“Whenever
we study dam failures, we often find there was a lot of complacency
beforehand,” said Bill McCormick, president of the Association of State Dam
Safety Officials. But given that failures can have catastrophic consequences,
“we really can’t afford to be complacent.”
Built for a
different future
If the
Texas blackouts exposed one state’s poor planning, they also provide a warning
for the nation: Climate change threatens virtually every aspect of electricity
grids that aren’t always designed to handle increasingly severe weather. The
vulnerabilities show up in power lines, natural-gas plants, nuclear reactors
and myriad other systems.
Higher
storm surges can knock out coastal power infrastructure. Deeper droughts can
reduce water supplies for hydroelectric dams. Severe heat waves can reduce the
efficiency of fossil-fuel generators, transmission lines and even solar panels
at precisely the moment that demand soars because everyone cranks up their
air-conditioners.
Climate
hazards can also combine in new and unforeseen ways.
In
California recently, Pacific Gas & Electric has had to shut off electricity
to thousands of people during exceptionally dangerous fire seasons. The reason:
Downed power lines can spark huge wildfires in dry vegetation. Then, during a
record-hot August last year, several of the state’s natural gas plants
malfunctioned in the heat, just as demand was spiking, contributing to
blackouts.
“We have to
get better at understanding these compound impacts,” said Michael Craig, an
expert in energy systems at the University of Michigan who recently led a study
looking at how rising summer temperatures in Texas could strain the grid in
unexpected ways. “It’s an incredibly complex problem to plan for.”
Some
utilities are taking notice. After Superstorm Sandy in 2012 knocked out power
for 8.7 million customers, utilities in New York and New Jersey invested
billions in flood walls, submersible equipment and other technology to reduce
the risk of failures. Last month, New York’s Con Edison said it would
incorporate climate projections into its planning.
As freezing
temperatures struck Texas, a glitch at one of two reactors at a South Texas
nuclear plant, which serves 2 million homes, triggered a shutdown. The cause:
Sensing lines connected to the plant’s water pumps had frozen, said Victor
Dricks, a spokesman for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Agency.
It’s also
common for extreme heat to disrupt nuclear power. The issue is that the water
used to cool reactors can become too warm to use, forcing shutdowns.
Flooding is
another risk.
After a
tsunami led to several meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant in
2011, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission told the 60 or so working nuclear
plants in the United States, many decades old, to evaluate their flood risk to
account for climate change. Ninety percent showed at least one type of flood
risk that exceeded what the plant was designed to handle.
The
greatest risk came from heavy rain and snowfall exceeding the design parameters
at 53 plants.
Scott
Burnell, an Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman, said in a statement, “The
NRC continues to conclude, based on the staff’s review of detailed analyses,
that all U.S. nuclear power plants can appropriately deal with potential
flooding events, including the effects of climate change, and remain safe.”
A nation’s
arteries at risk
The
collapse of a portion of California’s Highway 1 into the Pacific Ocean after
heavy rains last month was a reminder of the fragility of the nation’s roads.
Several
climate-related risks appeared to have converged to heighten the danger. Rising
seas and higher storm surges have intensified coastal erosion, while more
extreme bouts of precipitation have increased the landslide risk.
Add to that
the effects of devastating wildfires, which can damage the vegetation holding
hillside soil in place, and “things that wouldn’t have slid without the
wildfires, start sliding,” said Jennifer M. Jacobs, a professor of civil and
environmental engineering at the University of New Hampshire. “I think we’re
going to see more of that.”
The United
States depends on highways, railroads and bridges as economic arteries for
commerce, travel and simply getting to work. But many of the country’s most
important links face mounting climate threats. More than 60,000 miles of roads
and bridges in coastal floodplains are already vulnerable to extreme storms and
hurricanes, government estimates show. And inland flooding could also threaten
at least 2,500 bridges across the country by 2050, a federal climate report
warned in 2018.
Sometimes
even small changes can trigger catastrophic failures. Engineers modeling the
collapse of bridges over Escambia Bay in Florida during Hurricane Ivan in 2004
found that the extra three inches of sea-level rise since the bridge was built
in 1968 very likely contributed to the collapse, because of the added height of
the storm surge and force of the waves.
“A lot of
our infrastructure systems have a tipping point. And when you hit the tipping
point, that’s when a failure occurs,” Dr. Jacobs said. “And the tipping point
could be an inch.”
Crucial
rail networks are at risk, too. In 2017, Amtrak consultants found that along
parts of the Northeast corridor, which runs from Boston to Washington and
carries 12 million people a year, flooding and storm surge could erode the
track bed, disable the signals and eventually put the tracks underwater.
And there
is no easy fix. Elevating the tracks would require also raising bridges,
electrical wires and lots of other infrastructure, and moving them would mean
buying new land in a densely packed part of the country. So the report
recommended flood barriers, costing $24 million per mile, that must be moved
into place whenever floods threaten.
Toxic
sites, deepening peril
A series of
explosions at a flood-damaged chemical plant outside Houston after Hurricane
Harvey in 2017 highlighted a danger lurking in a world beset by increasingly
extreme weather.
The blasts
at the plant came after flooding knocked out the site’s electrical supply,
shutting down refrigeration systems that kept volatile chemicals stable. Almost
two dozen people, many of them emergency workers, were treated for exposure to
the toxic fumes, and some 200 nearby residents were evacuated from their homes.
More than
2,500 facilities that handle toxic chemicals lie in federal flood-prone areas
across the country, about 1,400 of them in areas at the highest risk of
flooding, a New York Times analysis showed in 2018.
Leaks from
toxic cleanup sites, left behind by past industry, pose another threat.
Almost
two-thirds of some 1,500 superfund cleanup sites across the country are in
areas with an elevated risk of flooding, storm surge, wildfires or sea level
rise, a government audit warned in 2019. Coal ash, a toxic substance produced
by coal power plants that is often stored as sludge in special ponds, have been
particularly exposed. After Hurricane Florence in 2018, for example, a dam
breach at the site of a power plant in Wilmington, N.C., released the hazardous
ash into a nearby river.
“We should
be evaluating whether these facilities or sites actually have to be moved or
re-secured,” said Lisa Evans, senior counsel at Earthjustice, an environmental
law organization. Places that “may have been OK in 1990,” she said, “may be a
disaster waiting to happen in 2021.”
Christopher
Flavelle focuses on how people, governments and industries try to cope with the
effects of global warming. He received a 2018 National Press Foundation award
for coverage of the federal government's struggles to deal with flooding.
@cflav
Brad Plumer
is a climate reporter specializing in policy and technology efforts to cut
carbon dioxide emissions. At The Times, he has also covered international
climate talks and the changing energy landscape in the United States.
@bradplumer
Hiroko
Tabuchi is an investigative reporter on the climate desk. She was part of the
Times team that received the 2013 Pulitzer for explanatory reporting. @HirokoTabuchi
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