99% Invisible - Not Built For This #1: The Bottom of the Bowl

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Reporter Emmett Fitzgerald was used to hearing people call his home state of Vermont a “climate haven.” But last summer, he got a wake up call in the form of a devastating flood.All throughout the United States, people are watching the places they love change in unpredictable and scary ways. Places that once felt safe are starting to feel risky. Places that already felt risky are starting to feel downright dangerous. And as the climate continues to change, people are being forced to make impossible decisions about how to live, and where to live, in an increasingly unstable and unfamiliar world.This is a series about climate change and how we prepare for the extremely bumpy ride ahead of us. Because right now we’re all living in a world that was just Not Built for This. Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Today I'm really excited to bring you the beginning of a new mini-series that we've been working on for the past year. It's called Not Built For This, and it's about climate change, but in a very 99PI kind of way. It's not really about the science or CO2 projections or electric cars. This series is about how our world was not designed for the tectonic changes that are coming. From top to bottom, our society is full of structures and systems that are being stress tested by increasingly extreme weather.

The series is going to cover infrastructure and insurance, housing and public health. Over the course of six episodes, we're going to take you all over the United States, to Florida, California, Louisiana and Arizona. But today we're going to start with a small story set in an unlikely state. If you had to make a list of the states you thought were relatively safe from the worst impacts of climate change, Vermont might be close to the top. The Green Mountain State is relatively cool, there's plenty of water, it's nowhere near the ocean. It also happens to be the state where Emmett Fitzgerald, the host of our series, grew up. He's from Montpelier, a quaint little town

that's also somehow the capital city. And it's truly the last place that I ever imagined starting this series. But then something happened last year that made everyone in Montpelier understand that they might not be so safe after all. And so to begin, I want to take you to the little town that I know best in all the world, and explain what happened. This is episode one of Not Built For This, the bottom of the bowl. Bear Pond Books is a small town institution in Montpelier, Vermont, and a place where I've spent a lot of time.

It's the kind of store that wants to be lingered in. It feels full, almost overstuffed, like the opposite of an Apple store. It smells like old paper. And when I was growing up, it had these delightfully noisy wood floors. You could hear every step that every customer took inside that store.

Yeah, pretty much everyone was like, oh, you can't sneak around in here. You know, we heard that a lot. And I said, yeah, that's our that's our analog security system. This is Rob Casso. He owns Bear Palm with his wife, Claire. And Rob says that the bookstore is probably best known for two things. Their pet tortoise, Veruca,

has a little unfortunate habit of making serious love to his rocks. And those creaky wooden floors. Like an older person, you know, you get creaky when you get older. It's like you got bad knees if the floor was in that state. But those floors are gone. The store's signature floors were removed in the summer of 2023, after Bear Pond Books, along with nearly every other business in downtown Montpelier, was inundated in a flood.

Record-breaking weather, the catastrophic flooding impacting communities across Vermont. Vermont officials say they've had to rescue a hundred people who are trapped by the worst flooding in a century. Cars floating down streets, windows of businesses looking more like fish tanks, the water nearly as high

as the city's parking meters. Parts of Vermont received two months worth of rain in just two days. All that water trickled off the hillsides and into the rivers that run through Montpelier. And eventually there was just too much of it. The Winooski and the North Branch spilled their banks and poured into the town. If you were in Montpelier that day, you would have heard this eerie orchestra. Every security system on Main Street going off all at once.

I called up my parents on the day of the flood. I am. And it turns out that in the middle of this big disaster, they were dealing with a smaller one. Watson just gets skunked right in the middle of all of this. Watson is the family dog, and he had just been sprayed by a skunk. For what it's worth, I didn't really realize quite how much everyone in my family swears until I started recording these phone calls. Anyway, I can't be here. I'm trying to mix up a mix for Jeff who's outside

in the pouring rain with that fucking asshole dog. As my mom was mixing up the old family skunk solution for the asshole dog, my dad came back in from the rain. I got to get a dog and everything's not fine. It's really not fine. In the grand scheme of things, my parents were, in fact, fine. Their house is way up on a hill, well outside the danger zone. But the last few weeks of weather had been surreal.

First, the town had been blanketed in wildfire smoke that had blown down from Canada. And then came the endless rain. I will just say, it is fucking weird the last three weeks of weather. The smoke, the haze, the humidity, the lack of sun, the amount of rain. It is not like anything I've really ever experienced.

Each one independently would be one thing, but to put them all together in the last month is just enough to make you kind of go, whoa. Before the town had even dried out, experts were already saying that this flood was not going to be a one-off, and that Montpelier should expect more storms just like it as the climate continues to change. The science here is pretty simple.

Warmer air can hold more water. And so as the temperature of the atmosphere increases, so does its capacity for deluge. But even though it was predictable, I think getting hit with a climate disaster came as something of a shock to the people of Montpelier, including me. I distinctly remember reading this ProPublica story back in 2020. It ranked every county in America based on climate risk, and I was relieved to scroll to the bottom and see that six of the ten least risky counties in the entire country were in Vermont. I've been reporting on climate change for long enough to know that it will impact every corner of the world.

But still, I think I internalized this idea of Vermont as a climate safe haven. I always thought of the Little Green Valley where I grew up as a place where I might go when things got really bad out in California where I live now. But then my Little Green Valley filled up like a bathtub. When the floodwaters finally receded, my parents headed down the hill to help with the cleanup, and they were shocked by the damage. The entire downtown was a muddy mess. Homes in low-lying neighborhoods were totally swamped, and an army of volunteers was piling

debris on the streets in a frantic race to prevent the mold from setting in. My dad ended up at Bear Pond, where he found Rob throwing out merchandise. The books, it was painful. And they're heavy when they're really wet, too. So it was really hard, nasty work. But the books were just the beginning. Over time, Rob realized that the shelves were unsalvageable, as were the tables. And sadly, the beloved wood floors had to go too. They ripped out those squeaky old boards, and replaced them with something more waterproof.

This is the actual sound of the old floors getting sawed out. It's from an Instagram video the store posted, along with the caption, Goodbye squeaky creaky floors. And there are a lot of comments on this post, a lot of sad face emojis, a lot of people reminiscing about their squeaky creaky childhoods. I know the floors aren't that important

in the grand scheme of things, but I think ripping them up is the kind of choice that we're all going to need to make a lot more of in the years ahead. Unsentimental choices that are not nostalgic for the world we once lived in and that no longer really exists. And I think I think that kind of change is very hard for people. But I think we're at a moment in our history where things are going to have to change quite a bit. Rob says that keeping everything the same just doesn't really feel like an option at this point.

A lot of the business is downtown rebuilt with more waterproof materials, but new flooring on its own isn't going to be enough. Not even close. Fundamentally, Montpelier has a geography issue, a kind of climate change Achilles heel, which is that the town was built at the bottom of a bowl at the confluence of two rivers. It's flooded before. But if the area is going to keep getting rainstorms like the one in 2023 or rainstorms that are even bigger, its location could become an existential problem. Or as my dad put it on our call, we might be.

Meaning what? Meaning the community is not situated right for climate change. What are we going to do? Move? I think my dad's frustration is something that a lot of people can

relate to. All throughout the country, people are watching the places they love change in unpredictable and scary ways. Places that once felt safe are starting to feel risky. Places that already felt risky are starting to feel downright dangerous. And as the climate continues to change, people are being forced to make impossible decisions

about how to live and where to live in an increasingly unstable and unfamiliar world. We are surrounded by a world that was built for weather and conditions that were more or less, you could take them for granted for centuries or millennia. This is the writer Alex Steffen. He's someone who's helped me make sense of this bizarre moment that we're living through. And he says that the human world as we know it developed during a relatively peaceful blip

in the vastness of geologic time. Every city we built, every building we designed, every floorboard that we laid, it all occurred during a fairly mild chapter in the Earth's otherwise tumultuous biography. We created a whole society designed to fit that nice stable version of our planet. But the thing is, we don't really live

on that planet anymore. We have built a world that is no longer suited to the planet we live on. And the challenge for Montpelier, or for any place really, is how do we make our city or town better suited to the reality of the climate that we're living in now? Alex says that people who haven't grasped the magnitude of what's coming sometimes talk as if that's going to be easy. Like, we're going to become a little more resilient. Oh, we'll adapt. We'll have a

little transition here and then things will be fine. No, they won't be fine and it's not going to be a little transition. Like it or not, it's going to require us to make some really big changes. Where the roads are, how things are built, where they're built, how the infrastructure works, how the financing of the city itself runs, how people are able to get insurance. All of these things may require really profound changes, like a re-imagining, a re-founding of that community itself.

And that kind of change is just really hard, especially when the world is already shifting beneath your feet, and all your instincts are telling you to dig in your heels and cling to what feels solid and firm, which is why I was so surprised by what happened next in Montpelier. Could I ask folks to move to this side if you can?

There's still plenty of seats on this side of the room. Nice to see folks coming in. What a crowd. Just a month or so after the floods, people in Montpelier got together and organized a series of forums on, quote, recovery and resilience. Hundreds of people packed into the old Vermont College building at the top of a hill to try and figure out where the hell do we go from here. So this is a very intense, weighty night.

It's weighty not just because of the numbers, it's also weighty because of what we're carrying in our hearts right now. Post-disaster meetings like this one usually follow a fairly predictable script. A lot of beautiful solidarity and a lot of talk about coming together, rebuilding the town and putting things back exactly as they were. But that was distinctly not the vibe at this meeting in Montpilier. There seemed to be near total acceptance that the town couldn't rebuild the same way and

just hope for the best. They needed a paradigm shift. And the meeting was basically a town-wide brainstorm of almost whimsical proposals for how Montpelier might transform itself to meet the moment. I have heard that Chicago in the 1850s was too close to the water level and they raised the entire downtown up to 15 feet with jack screws. Just saying. Someone suggested abandoning the first floors of all the buildings downtown. One guy got up and wanted to move the entire town to the top of the hill where the meeting was taking place

We ought to come up with a plan which basically says let's over time move downtown Montpelier Maybe up here or if not the whole town at least the high school Our high school is on a floodplain it flooded and it's gonna flood again I suggest that we sell the high school move the high school up here where we are today because it is dry and high, and do something for our kids and our community. I was honestly kind of shocked to hear so many people cheering that suggestion.

I was genuinely expecting boos. I mean, I almost booed myself. That's my high school we're talking about here. I played a lot of soccer games on that floodplain. I wrote a decent five paragraph essay about withering heights in that building. And yet, if I put my own feelings aside for a second, I'm not sure that Montpelier can afford

to just ignore big uncomfortable proposals like that one. After the forums, the town established a commission that meets every other week to try and figure out how Montpelier can adapt to climate change. So far, the more extravagant ideas like moving the high school haven't gotten a lot of traction. There's an understandable desire to move slowly. And I get that. I don't want my favorite little town to change any more than is absolutely necessary.

But I'm also kind of terrified about what happens if it doesn't change fast enough. And as if the universe was trying its damnedest to confirm my fears, just a few months later, the town was hit with another torrential downpour. This time, it was a freakish 58 degrees in December, and so the warm rain washed the early season snowpack off the mountains and into the rivers. I was watching this whole thing play out from California in disbelief.

I knew that the summer storms that flooded Montpelier were just climate change's first shot across the bow. But I didn't expect the second shot to come quite so soon. On the phone, my parents seemed dazed. It's just that I can't believe it's happening again. You know, it's just... Well, we know it's gonna happen. I know. It's gonna happen and happen't believe it's happening again, you know, it's just... We know it's gonna happen.

I know. It's gonna happen and happen and happen and happen and happen. Yeah, too fast. Too soon. In the end, Montpelier dodged a bullet. A lot of basements got wet, but the rain stopped and the rivers started receding right before they flooded the downtown all over again. A few days later, I was home, visiting my family for Christmas. On my first day, we took a walk up the hill with the dog. By this point, it had been nearly six

months since the July floods. Many residents were still living in damaged homes, trying to figure out their next move. And my parents said that downtown was only just getting back to normal. A bunch of businesses had recently reopened, but others had decided to pack it in. And many were still caught somewhere in between. My mom was particularly frustrated that Montpelier, the state capital, still didn't have a post office. Totally wild. And then our bank took forever to open up again, but it only opened up in a trailer. It's still in a trailer.

But to have City Hall, the bank, the post office, the liquor store, it felt like the import, not important, the liquor store. Let's take that one out of it. The fundamental pieces of infrastructure for a town. Exactly, that's exactly how I felt at one point. Before I left home, I stopped in at Bear Pond Books. It was humming with shoppers. Although I will say it was a lot quieter without all the squeaks and creaks.

Has anyone mentioned the floors? Everyone mentions the floors. Everyone. I mean, every single person comes in here and says, oh, I missed the creaks of the old floors. Rob seemed relieved that the storm earlier the week before hadn't flooded them out again. Some water got into the basement, but it didn't cause too many problems because they're no longer storing stuff down there.

This is actually true of a lot of the businesses downtown. After the big flood, many of the landlords hauled their furnaces, boilers, and other utilities up above ground. The town has done a lot of work to prepare spaces to get wet again. But when we talked, Rob was not convinced that Bear Pond could survive another flood. No, we're all one flood away. You know, I mean, I don't know anybody who could come back from a flood next summer. It would be I I jokingly told someone, I said, if it floods again, I'm just gonna get in my car with my dog and my cat and my wife and just keep going.

Montpelier hasn't flooded yet this summer. I'm knocking on wood as I record this, but other towns in Vermont haven't been so lucky. A series of catastrophic July storms devastated nearby towns like Plainfield and Lindenville and left a state full of very tired people to pick up the pieces yet again. I think that what Vermont has gone through this past year is emblematic of how climate change is unfolding for many people in this country. It's gone from a topic to talk about and read about and get anxious about to a very

unfun reality that we are all just living through. Climate change is the very definition of a global problem, but it's causing a series of deeply local crises. It looks a little bit different wherever you go, and while the biggest impacts are very much still to come, it is upending lives right now, even in places that we always thought of as safe. In this series, we're going to explore how climate change is creating a new landscape of risk in this country.

Because every place has its vulnerabilities, its weak spots, and climate change is proving to be exceptionally good at finding them. I think about how we respond to this crisis as a harm reduction story. We're not hurtling towards a cliff. There is no date after which we all die. We are in a race against time to stop climate change. But no matter what we do from here on out, we will be dealing with its impacts for the rest of our lives.

And so we have to try our best to prepare for a turbulent future that we can only vaguely make out. We have to try to figure out how to get by on the terrifying new planet that we're creating for ourselves. Because right now, we're all living in a world that was just not built for this. When we come back, a preview of our next episode, which comes out on Friday.

Okay, I'm back. This is Emmett again. In reporting this story about my hometown, I talked to people who moved to Montpelier in part because of climate change. Now, after the floods, I think it's an open question whether Montpelier is a place that people migrate to or away from in the years to come. A lot will depend on how well the town can adapt. But despite everything the state has been through this past year, Vermont still has a lot going for it from a climate perspective. Because having too much water is usually better than not having enough.

Yeah, I mean, from the beginning of human life on this planet, people have gone to where there is water and left the places where there is not. This is Abram Lusgarden, a climate reporter at ProPublica. He's actually the person who wrote that article I read years ago that ranked all the counties in the country based on climate risk. More recently, Abram published a book called On the Move,

The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. And much like this series, it's all about how climate change is impacting how and where we live in this country. For the book, Abram tried to estimate just how many people in the US might need to move because of climate change. And the results were pretty shocking to me. because of climate change. And the results were pretty shocking to me. He talked to researchers who study what's called the human habitability niche. Essentially, the climatic conditions

that are hospitable to human life. And it's found that people live in a certain range of temperature and precipitation, and they always have for the last 6,000 years or so, and that niche is moving. It's moving away from the equator and towards the poles. In the US, that means north, away from states in the deep south and towards states like Vermont

and Michigan and upstate New York. And as that zone of habitability moves, it's leaving millions of people behind, many millions of people. We estimate it'll affect about 160 million Americans in some way, so about half of us. That doesn't mean all of those people will actually move, but it was the dramatic high end of his estimate.

But at the low end, there's research that estimates that about 13 million Americans would be displaced by sea level rise alone. That's the number of people living in homes that will likely be underwater in this century. Now, 13 million is a lot less than 160. But consider for a second the Great Migration, when somewhere between six and seven million black people left the Jim Crow South, which to date is the largest migration in U.S.

history. Abram is talking about a mass movement of people that's at least double that and potentially many, many times bigger. There's no way to know what that will do to our culture or what our identity will be at the end of that transformation, but it tells me with absolute certainty that we're headed for great change, that we won't recognize the version of the country that we arrive at at the end of this transition. This Friday on Not Built For This, we have a small window into that future,

a preview of climate migration in microcosm and a cautionary tale about what happens when you aren't ready for it. We're going to Chico, California to see what it looks like when the climate crisis and the housing crisis collide. I've never seen a housing market in my career that bad. So that was a situation before the disaster. We were teaching about climate change, and I really have to admit that strange thing was that I was thinking of it as a future problem at that time.

It was kind of very oriented towards, you know, what was going to happen down the line. And when that fire hit, it just kind of came roaring up to my back door. Managing evacuation to my back door. Man- mandatory evacuation to all of Paradise. Get people moving now. And I went, oh my goodness,

somewhere between 35, 45,000 people have been displaced. I burst into tears. To be in a business where housing was that difficult to start and then to have that kind of thing hit your community was just, it was brutal. That's coming this Friday on Not Built For This from 99% Invisible. This episode of Not Built For This was reported and produced by me, Emmett Fitzgerald, along

with producers Jason DeLeon and Sophie Kottner, and managing editor Delaney Hall. Further invaluable editing from Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, and our fearless leader, Roman Mars. Mix and sound design by Martin Gonzalez. Theme and original music by George Langford. With additional music by Swan Rayal. Fact checking by Liz Boyd. Series art by Aaron Nestor. Special thanks this week to my parents for always picking up my calls. And to Rob Casso for making time for me during a very tough period. You can find links to Alex Steffen's newsletter and Abram Lusgarden's book on our website.

I also wanted to thank all of the other people in Montpelier who I talked to for this. That includes Lauren Hurl, Elena Mahali, Paul Costello, Kasha Ranjo, Emma Dale, the Reverend Joan Javier Duval, and Jen and Kip Roberts, owners of the greatest bike shop slash cross country ski store in the world, Onion River Outdoors. Not Built For This is a six part series from 99% Invisible. New episodes will be coming to you in the 99PI feed

on Tuesdays and Fridays, wherever you get your podcasts. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstedt is our digital director. The rest of the 99PI team includes Chris Barube, Vivian Ley, Lasha Madon, Gabriela Gladney, Jacob Maldonado Medina, and Nina Potuck. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are a part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stephen Lawrence.

We are a part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family. You can find 99% invisible on all the usual social media sites as well as our new Discord server. There's a link to that and every episode of 99PI and not built for this at 99pi.org.