Opinion: Flooding and wreckage in Detroit expose the city’s climate vulnerability
For more than two weeks, convoys of garbage trucks have slowly crept through neighborhoods throughout Detroit, picking up damaged pool tables, soggy mattresses and endless boxes of irreplaceable memorabilia ruined by the June 25 flood caused by heavy rain. In kitchens and dens, distressed residents are gathering what paperwork wasn’t ruined to submit to the city, state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency in hopes of compensation. It was the second devastating flood to sweep the city in the last seven years. Much attention has been given to the potential for climate-change-driven devastation in coastal cities from rising seas, but with storms intensifying, inadequate city infrastructure is being exposed, as seen in New York over the past week. The damage in Detroit last month was particularly upsetting because the city has made considerable progress in rebounding from its dilapidated nadir in 2013 as the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. The flood, and the infuriatingly slow effort to collect the wreckage it left behind, exposed the city’s physical fragility and stirred memories of the bleak, bad old days. Bill Shuster, professor and chair of the department of environmental science at Wayne State University, thinks urban resources to deal with climate change simply aren’t keeping up with the threat. “The burden just keeps getting larger and larger each time,” he said on the public radio program “Detroit Today.” “It’s really about social and political will to make sure resources are available.”