Attack of the Chicago climate change maggots

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/07/23/attack-of-the-chicago-climate-change-maggots/

By Danielle Paquette July 23, 2014

CHICAGO — Sewage gushed up Lori Burns’s toilet. It swept the floor. It wrecked the water heater, the deep freezer, her mother’s wedding veil.

This basement invasion was the third in five years. Burns, 40, could no longer afford to pay a cleanup crew. So she slipped on polka dotted rain boots, waded into the muck, wrenched out the stand-pipe and watched the brown water drain.

The South Side native, a marketing specialist, estimated damages at $17,000. And that did not include what she could not replace: the family heirlooms, the oriental rugs, her cashmere sweaters. The bungalow had flooded four times from 1985 to 2006, when her parents owned it. Lately, it flooded every other year. Burns felt nature was working against her. In a way, it was.

As Washington still fights over whether or not climate change is real, people across the country are already paying costs scientists ascribe to it — sometimes in unexpected places. You might think about climate change in terms of rising sea levels threatening coastal cities. But all over the Midwest, from Chicago to Indianapolis and Milwaukee, residents face just as many difficult issues as changing weather patterns collide with aging infrastructure. The costs — for governments, insurance companies and homeowners — are measured not only in dollars, but in quality of life.

In Chicago over the past century, downpours that force human waste up pipes and into homes — storms that dump at least 1.5 inches of rain in a single day — have struck the city more often. Annual precipitation in the Midwest grew about 20 percent during the past century. Rains of more than 2.5 inches a day are expected to increase another 50 percent in the next 20 years. That means more flooding — and more clean-up costs for people like Burns.

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In May, a year after sewage swamped Burns’s basement, an insurance giant took to an Illinois courtroom for what might have been a publicity stunt, or what might be a preview of a nationwide battle over who foots the bill for extreme weather events linked to climate change. Farmer’s Insurance Co. sued the city of Chicago for failing to prepare for the effects of global warming.

The city “should have known,” the lawsuit alleged, “that climate change in Cook County has resulted in greater rainfall volume … than pre-1970 rainfall history evidenced.” The storms are not an act of God, the suit claimed, but a carbon-driven reality outlined in Chicago’s own Climate Action Plan, published in 2010.

Last April, sewage water flooded roughly 600 Chicago buildings, according to the lawsuit: “Geysers of sewer water shot out from the floor drains, toilets, showers. … Elderly men and women and young children were forced to evacuate.” That could have been prevented, the company claimed, if Chicago would have remedied an underground storm-water storage that has become, over time, “obsolete.”

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“The debate we have entered now is: Why does it seem more and more disasters are happening?” said Erwann Michel-Kerjan, executive director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “And, as a nation, who’s supposed to pay for them?”

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The American Association for the Advancement of Science, which calls itself the world’s largest non-government group science advocacy group, released a report this year called “What We Know,” which offers a nuanced look at climate change and its effects. The report concludes that natural disasters, like floods, are striking harder and more often. But, beyond anecdotes and weather projections, it adds, it’s hard to link one specific flood to carbon emissions.

“Greenhouse gases have supercharged the climate, just as steroids supercharged hitting in Major League Baseball,” the report says. “Over the course of a baseball season in the steroid era, we witnessed more — and longer — home runs, even though we cannot attribute any specific homer to steroids. Similarly, even though we cannot attribute any particular weather event to climate change, some types of extreme events … are now more frequent.”

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