After the Flood

Yesterday, Chattanooga hit a high water mark you don’t want to brag about—6.37 inches of rain in a single day. The airport logged it. The videos told the rest of the story: I-24 under water. East Brainerd a river. East Ridge and Gunbarrel swallowed up.

And if you’re wondering why the same handful of spots keep ending up on the evening news when it floods, here’s the short version: they used to be wetlands.

In the last few years, developers turned them into Exit 1 off I-75, the Red Wolves stadium, Bass Pro Shops, Chick-fil-A. Before that, they were places built to hold water—nature’s version of a sump pump. Now they’re concrete and asphalt. Wetlands are cheap land, which makes them catnip for investors. But when you pave over a sponge, the water has to go somewhere. Yesterday, “somewhere” meant your commute.

Any old-school engineer could’ve told you this. They did tell you this. You’ve got to have a place where excess water can sink into the ground, because the sewer system can’t handle it all. The old manuals laid it out plain as day. The new engineers might still try to play by those rules, but they’re forever being told to “make it work,” so the plans get watered down, corners get cut, and we all get to see what happens when everything falls apart.

Meanwhile, Tennessee’s legislature is working hard to make sure there are even fewer wetlands to save, with bills rolling back development oversight. See this facebook post by State Rep Greg Vital:

If Hurricane Helene had swung a little west last year, we could have been Asheville. We will be Asheville—or worse—when the next one hits, because climate change means warmer air, and warmer air means it can dump more water.

Yesterday was the second-wettest day in Chattanooga history (so far), which brought some of our most devastating flooding. And unless we wise up about what we build and where we build it, that'll be a headline you read again and again.