Flash floods and infrastructure

I've been saying for years and years - the costs of dealing with the increase in intensity of rainfall under climate change is likely to be one of the largest under-rated costs of AGW for urban areas over the next few decades. 

Here's some vindication for that hunch in the New York Times:   

Intensifying Rains Pose Hidden Flood Risks Across the U.S.

In some of the nation’s most populous areas, hazardous storms can dump significantly more water than previously believed, new calculations show.

That's a gift link, but here is some more "that's exactly what I've been saying" from the body of the article:

The calculations suggest that one in nine residents of the lower 48 states, largely in populous regions including the Mid-Atlantic and the Texas Gulf Coast, is at significant risk of downpours that deliver at least 50 percent more rain per hour than local pipes, channels and culverts might be designed to drain.

“The data is startling, and it should be a wake-up call,” said Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a nonprofit organization focused on flood risk....

The nation is set to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into new and improved roads, bridges and ports in the coming years under the bipartisan infrastructure plan that President Biden signed into law in 2021. First Street’s calculations suggest that many of these projects are being built to standards that are already out of date.

Matthew Eby, First Street’s executive director, said he hoped the new data could be used to make these investments more future-proof, “so that we don’t spend $1.2 trillion knowing that it’s wrong.”....

NOAA began publishing Atlas 14 in 2004, which means that any drains, culverts and storm-water basins built since then might potentially have been sized according to standards that no longer reflect Earth’s present climate. But plenty of America’s infrastructure was laid down even earlier, meaning it was designed to specifications that are probably even more obsolete, said Daniel B. Wright, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Certainly, updating Atlas 14 is something that needs to be done,” Dr. Wright said. “But the problem is huge, in the sense that there are trillions upon trillions of dollars of things that are based on horribly out-of-date information at this point.”