On August 9 a flood delivered by Hurricane Debby clobbered the community of Trout Run, just north of Williamsport. Nine inches of rain flushed muddy water into low-lying homes while torrential currents made Highway 14–as photographed in the Sun-Gazette–look like the San Andreas Fault, gaping and ugly enough to eat a car. Lycoming County was not alone. The storm wreaked damage from South Carolina to Vermont. Governor Shapiro declared a disaster proclamation for one-third of the state. That released $2 million of taxpayer money for relief, which will be a drop in the bucket needed to cover expenses for a single day of drenching.

The losses have been costly and heart-breaking for all who are directly involved, and people’s needs call for immediate generosity in relief and recovery. But our collective reaction to high water must look beyond the tragedy and forward to the floods of the future and to an improved response following climate disasters that are destined to increase. While denial is the easy way out once the horrors of floods wane, it’s not going to work in the future. The age of denial is over.

To me, the news of August 9 is like a re-run from 52 years ago. Back then I lived at ground-zero of the most damaging flood in American history up to that time. Right here in Lycoming County. My wife and I had nestled into the village of Cammal, along the beautiful banks of Pine Creek. We loved it. Then the inland spin of Hurricane Agnes sent the highest waters ever recorded lapping at our doorstep. We barely escaped, but neighbors suffered deeply, as did others across eight entire states. While shoveling mud in the aftermath, and listening to National Guard choppers air-dropping food to our isolated little community–bridges out both ways–I felt a deep resolve to forevermore avoid living in the path of a flood.

At that time I worked as the environmental planner for the county, and as soon as a temporary road opened I hustled back to the court house in Williamsport. After the urgent emergency and recovery work was done, our new mission, under the foresight of Planning Commission Director Jerry Walls, was launched to help all 52 of our local municipalities enact zoning aimed at limiting future damage. This had been a long-standing goal, but Agnes lent new urgency and commitment to it. We also began to craft a buyout program–entirely voluntary–to help victims relocate above hazard levels of the next flood.

Fast forward half a century and those efforts have paid off many times over, with the most vulnerable floodplain acreage generally off-limits to new housing and with 200 of the most frequently flooded homes relocated to higher ground. But now, the hydro-bomb that exploded on Trout Run points to a whole new era of intensified flooding on the horizon. “Get ready,” is the message of this flood, just as it was after Agnes the better part of a lifetime ago.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research has forecast that extreme storms will multiply by up to 400 percent by 2100. Crunching the numbers, the First Street Foundation reported that the warming climate will cause flood damages to swell from $20 billion in 2021 to $32 billion in 2051. When we zoned floodplains in the 1970s we aimed to set aside space for rivers to be rivers up to the level of a 100-year frequency deluge. Fast forward to 2024 and we find that flood levels thought to occur on average once per century are now routinely being blown out of the water, so to speak. Floods of the “100-year” magnitude now occur along some streams every few years. Poor Ellicott City in Maryland endured what was calculated as a 1,000-year frequency flood in 2016 when it looked like an entire Susquehanna River was foaming down Main Street. Ditto in 2018–another “1,000-year” flood. Before Debby got to us, it hammered low-lying Lumberton, North Carolina, which was still soggy from enduring two “1,000-year floods” within two years. The unmistakable drift here is that the floods are getting worse.

Towns, cities, states, and the nation have spent untold billions in efforts to prevent floods from happening by building dams, uncounted billions trying to keep floodwaters at bay by erecting levees, and still more billions every year on disaster relief in efforts to nominally help people get back on their feet. Yet flood damages continue to peak at record levels again and again. Dams fill. Levees fail. Relief money is spent by staging-up for the next flood. Any similar hemorrhage of tax dollars would ignite a volatile taxpayers revolt.

Meanwhile, too many municipalities refuse to effectively stem the tide of new development on the expanding acreage of floodplains, seemingly in denial of what is starkly occurring. Just as bad, we’ve relegated relocation assistance to a pittance of federal funding compared to outlays for disaster recovery and subsidized rebuilding in the wet zone. Consider just one among dozens of illuminating statistics in these regards: The Natural Resources Defense Council plotted thousands of data points and reported that for every $1.70 that the federal government spends helping people to relocate upslope and be done with the flooding problem once and for all, we taxpayers spend $100 helping people stay in the path of danger and get flooded again. This is through relief, rebuilding incentives, and insurance subsidies, not even counting the burgeoning billions needed for maintenance of aging dams and levees, repair of doomed infrastructure, and replacement of public works, many of which were misguided and failing a benefit-cost analysis in the first place. In contrast, and looking at the smart path too-seldom taken, a University of Bristol and Nature Conservancy survey found that for every dollar spent converting damaged properties into public greenways of open space, $5 in benefits are gained.

Surprises such as the flash flood that hammered Trout Run on August 9 should not be a surprise. They will always be popping up and, no doubt, some of the losses recently incurred there were unavoidable. But inexcusable losses occur with properties that are flooded over and over again. These “repetitive loss” homes represent only 3 percent of the policies in the National Flood Insurance Program but they account for 30 percent of the program’s payouts–many of them not for people in need who happen to be in the way of an unexpected storm, but for oceanfront trophy homes rented for recreational use where we know perfectly well that sea level is rising. Famously and chronically insolvent, the Insurance Program would be on far firmer footing it the repeated-loss payouts were not allowed.

Grasping our flood-response policy by the horns, a group called the Association of State Floodplain Managers promotes a package of reforms that could turn this lumbering supertanker of federal involvement in the direction it must go by limiting repeated payouts of the subsidies, closing loopholes that allow for continued development on floodplains, expanding the zones of expected flood damage so that they reflect reality, and requiring disclosure of flood risk in real estate transactions.

Immediate help after the waters recede is important for flood victims. But until our governments at all levels bolster efforts to prevent yet more floodplain open space from being developed and also to increase efforts helping people relocate to higher ground, the national headache of flood damage will continue to grow more splitting with each passing hurricane or snowmelt season. Each and every flood–Debby included–should be a reminder that our government’s course as well as our individual decisions in hazard reduction need to be corrected. This fact has not changed ever since the opaque waters of Hurricane Agnes receded in my backyard a half-century ago. Since then, effective zoning and robust relocation programs have proven to be practical, popular, economic, ecological, and equitable, not only in Lycoming County but cities such as Nashville and Napa, Charlotte and Milwaukee. All we need is the political and personal will to put those real solutions to work.

Tim Palmer is the author of Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution To Our Urgent Flooding Crisis, as well as 30 other books. From 1972 to 1980 he served as the environmental planner for the Lycoming County Planning Commission.