On Father’s Day, my Greenville city neighborhood, Marshall Forest, was decimated by a microburst storm.
The phone emergency warning came as the punishing winds were already upon us. As the house groaned, and the lights flickered and died, my husband and I saw the dark shadows of trees falling into our garden and sprinted to scoop up our children from their beds.
Later, when we emerged from the basement, the first thing we saw was a huge 130ft tree lying behind our backyard fence.
The night prior, my neighbor and I had sat underneath it, sipping wine and catching up from a safe social distance, as was our new pandemic routine.
The calls started to come from neighbors. No casualties thankfully but multiple homes damaged by falling trees. I was horrified to circle our house and see a tree crushing an 84-year-old neighbor’s car in her front yard.
The limbs had damaged her roof. She was shaken but unhurt.
The porch of the house across the street was gone – taken out by a falling tree.
I shined my flashlight up the street. It was blocked by felled trees and electrical poles. The light beam bounced off the reflective strips of a fireman’s uniform.
“How many trees are down?” I asked.
“Too many to count,” he replied.
In the following days, my neighborhood worked to salvage and repair. Trucks full of lumber trundled past and the sound of heavy equipment and sawing reverberated through the usually quiet streets.
As my husband and I did multiple trips up and down the yard pulling away heavy tree limbs in the sweltering South Carolina heat, I reflected on my volunteer work advocating for climate change action. I got involved initially out of concern for melting ice caps, droughts in far-flung places, and warnings from scientists about the world my children could inherit. Yet in recent years it has felt like climate change is creeping ever closer to me, waiting to strike.
Three years ago, as devastating wildfires spread across Napa Valley, we were 65 miles south in Santa Clara County and felt some of the impacts. Air pollution warnings bleeped on my phone for a number of days and smoke was visible in the air. That December, as we visited a friend in LA, we drove past a bleak, still smoldering hillside that was the remains of a terrifying inferno by the freeway. You will remember the news footage – it literally looked like the highway to hell.
If I expected a natural disaster reprieve in South Carolina it did not last long. I was heavily pregnant when Hurricane Florence rolled in painfully slowly and painfully soggy in 2018. It dropped record amounts of rainfall on the state with devastating consequences.
I know that many are skeptical about the connection between climate change and weather. However, while weather events are born from many factors, science tells us that global warming is one.
Research increasingly indicates that a warmer, wetter atmosphere leads to heavier rain just as a warmer surface ocean powers hurricanes to travel, longer and stronger, inland.
Many folks, whether they grew up in the upstate or not, increasingly talk to me about ‘this crazy weather.’
In April, a Greenville friend, who lives five miles from me, grabbed her young daughters from their beds as their windows blew in and their roof was beaten to disrepair by a tornado near Pleasantburg Drive. Her husband was outside in his car as the winds sped in and remarkably emerged unscathed as vehicles were scooped up from across the street and propelled towards him by the twister.
Just weeks ago, I saw another friend watch on in dismay as the community garden in Nicholtown she’d poured hours of work into was invaded by the Reedy River. This level of flooding is supposed to be infrequent – maybe once every few decades – but the seedlings and vegetables she’d painstakingly nursed were underwater for the second time in six months. Intense rainfall and severe floods blighting our community are becoming our way of life.
In South Carolina, there is no doubt we are at high risk if temperatures continue to warm globally and sea levels rise. Research suggests that climate change creates conditions more favorable to the formation of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes and NASA scientists have made the quantitative estimate that every 1.8F rise in ocean creates temperatures that increase storm frequency at the tropics by 21% – that is something we cannot turn a blind eye to in our warming, subtropical part of the world. There are also secondary effects that we associate with weather like the flooding after a big storm or wildfires, which are made more likely by heat and drought and exacerbated by wind. These are threats to our way of life and our economic stability.
It is a sad realization that climate change is creeping into all aspects of our lives. I’m sure other parents have seen the bites on their children’s ankles and arms from the mosquitoes that plague our region 203 days a year (in 1989 it was 169 days) because our warming climate is more favorable for them.
As I think about repairing my fence, I am also thinking about the actions that need to happen now to curb carbon emissions and slow down climate change.
The bipartisan legislation I would like to see passed – The Energy Innovation Act (HR763) – would put a fee on carbon emissions at the source and return the money to Americans as a monthly dividend. It would reduce emissions in the US by 40% in 12 years and help to slow down the impact of global warming.
Tornadoes and microburst storms damaging dozens of homes in a neighborhood should not be the norm. If we don’t act now, I fear they could be.
