Floods cause road closure, water damage, and the kind of erosion that can destroy a block’s worth of cars in a few seconds. And lucky us, Baltimore is near the top of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report listing cities facing frequent “nuisance floods.”
Though these floods can often amount to more than a mere nuisance, they’re called that to distinguish them from the kinds of major floods caused by hurricanes and other major weather events. Baltimore had an average of 13.1 nuisance flood days per year from 2007-2013. That’s markedly up from 1.3 annual nuisance flood days fifty years earlier. The NOAA report pins the blame on an obvious culprit — rising sea levels caused by climate change. “It no longer takes a strong storm or a hurricane to cause flooding,” lead author William Sweet told WYPR.
The only silver lining to this damp cloud? At least things are not as bad in Baltimore as they are in Annapolis, which had an average of 39.3 flood days. That’s approaching Noah proportions, guys!
