Climate change, flooding and roads

Recent news stories report that fewer and fewer people are concerned about climate change, even considering the extraordinary amount of severe weather this year. The cover story in this issue of The Road-RIPorter highlights one of those unusual weather events — an extremely high snowpack throughout the west. One result was spring flooding throughout the Intermountain region and Pacific Northwest. Montana was often in the news as whole communities were flooded with melting snow. Houses were destroyed, highways were under water, and communities were cutoff. While spring flooding is a ritual in some places, this spring’s floods defied the norm. Some people might say it has nothing to do with climate change. Most scientists would beg to differ.

Wildland roads, especially forest roads, were a significant casualty of the floods. As of June, for example, the Forest Service regional offices in California, Oregon/Washington and Montana/Northern Idaho were projecting more than $50 million in flood related damage to roads alone (many roads were still buried under feet of snow at the time, updated numbers are not yet available). This flood-caused road damage includes simple washouts, full road failures and everything in between. The damage also means that affected areas of the national forests won’t be accessible by motorized vehicle until funding is secured to fix those roads.

When roads fail, they can literally fall down the mountain, and in the process, dump hundreds, thousands, and, cumulatively, millions of tons of sediment straight into fish-bearing streams and municipal water supplies. So while it may cost $50 million to repair the roads themselves, it might cost millions more to mitigate their ecological damage. A municipal water supplier, for example, might have to
upgrade their filtration system to deal with the increased sediment. From a fisheries perspective, the damage can be profound: fine sediments can suffocate fish eggs, severely damaging reproductive success. It can take years for such sediments to wash through the system. Decimated fisheries result in significant costs to commercial and recreational fishing.

The impacts of climate change, therefore, are significant economically. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and other severe weather events wreak havoc on people’s lives, livelihoods, homes and property. And while private insurance and the Federal Emergency Management Agency can help rebuild, who pays to restore the public services that our federal lands provide, such as clean air and clean drinking water, when they are damaged by climate change? Who pays to restore the salmon fishery? Well, it depends. In many instances, the damage goes unrepaired, but that doesn’t mean no one pays. The fishermen pay because there aren’t as many fish. Or consumers pay when their water bills rise. But, technically, there is no fund to mitigate the environmental damage from these events.

One would assume that funding would be available to repair the road damage itself, and this has been the case in the past. But in this era of fiscal ridiculousness, even emergency funds are not reliable. (Emergency road repair is usually funded through the Federal Highways Administration, but the program in question is “oversubscribed.” See Policy Primer this issue for more information.)

It doesn’t have to be this way. First, we can, as a nation, reduce our impacts and the pace at which climate change is occurring. Second, we can prevent and mitigative impacts as they occur. The Legacy Roads and Trails program is one example, as funding can be used to reclaim unneeded roads and to stormproof/floodproof others so that they hold up in severe weather. Some people say that there’s nothing we can do to address or deal with climate change. Most activists would beg to differ.