Communities in Atlanta are still recovering from the storm that hit Florida’s coast

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

There is still a state of emergency in effect for parts of Georgia from Tropical Storm Debby, which crossed the state roughly two weeks ago. It dumped enormous amounts of rain across the southeast U.S. and caused a lot of inland flooding far from the coast. As Emily Jones of member station WABE reports, with climate change supercharging storms, inland communities are adjusting.

EMILY JONES, BYLINE: A crew is hauling away a makeshift road block outside Statesboro, Ga., a large pile of dirt heaped on the road to keep people from crossing a bridge that flooded in the storm.

DINK BUTLER: We’ve done this because people have been running the barricades.

JONES: Dink Butler is the public works director for Bulloch County, about 50 miles northwest of Savannah, and an hour and a half from the beach. Heavy rainfall from Tropical Storm Debby overflowed stream banks, burst through dams and washed away dirt roads here. Some neighborhoods were stranded by water.

BUTLER: Especially along the rivers, the dead-end roads that go into the river.

JONES: Butler says the county is hauling in rock to fully rebuild some roads.

BUTLER: We’re addressing the limited-access or the no-access locations. We’re prioritizing those so that we’d be able to get emergency services to them if they need it.

JONES: Beyond emergency repairs, the county has a long recovery ahead. Bulloch County has around 700 miles of dirt roads, the most in the state, Butler says. And the storm washed away a lot of them.

BUTLER: We probably lost an average of a foot of dirt across most of these roads.

JONES: Like many of the areas hardest hit by Tropical Storm Debby, Bulloch County is pretty far inland. The path of the storm has a lot to do with that. Debby came from the Gulf of Mexico, across Florida, into south Georgia, rather than traveling up the Atlantic coast. But Debby also caused those heavy inland impacts because it moved slowly while dumping a lot of rain. University of Georgia meteorologist Marshall Shepherd says storms like that are getting more common.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD: We know that climate change is juicing precipitating systems in general.

JONES: Shepherd says the intense rainfall fits the overall trend.

SHEPHERD: The data has been very clear for several years now that when it rains, it rains with greater intensity, even in just sort of heavy afternoon thunderstorms, not just hurricanes.

JONES: It’s not just more rain. The warming ocean is also making hurricanes more powerful. Hurricanes have historically lost steam as they move over land, but Shepherd says that’s not as true anymore.

SHEPHERD: As these storms are more juiced and as they’re stronger, I think impacts further inland will be significant.

JONES: Officials are trying to adjust to this new reality of hurricane impacts outside typical coastal areas. Jill Nagel with the Georgia Department of Transportation says the agency learns from each storm.

JILL NAGEL: With this one being different, we will put this in our plan, our statewide plan, and looking at the future, if we have another event like this, what’s our best course of action?

JONES: Like, what roads and bridges should they monitor for flooding? Local leaders like Butler say they’ve also learned lessons.

BUTLER: I just hope that we don’t have to face using them again no time soon.

JONES: Hurricane season continues through November and usually gets more active in the fall.

For NPR News, I’m Emily Jones in Bulloch County, Ga.

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