By Laura Bliss
With an estimated 40,000 homes damaged, 30,000 people rescued, and 11 known dead, the Louisiana floods are a natural disaster of astonishing scale—the worst since Hurricane Sandy, according to the Red Cross. More than 25 inches of rain fell in some parts of the greater Baton Rouge area over three days this past weekend, delivered by an unusual slow-moving low-pressure storm system that “carried enough precipitation to rival a hurricane,” according to the New York Times. The National Weather Service officially declared it a “1,000-year rain”—meaning that the chance of such dramatic precipitation occurring in a given year was less than .1 percent. Yet as many scientists point out, freak storms like these are increasingly the norm as the atmosphere warms up.
Which raises the question: What could Louisiana’s hard-hit communities have done better to survive such an extraordinary event?