Hurricane flooding and water quality issues: opportunities for increased resilience

Hurricanes that cause damage to lives and property are often accompanied by poor water quality that threatens the health of human communities and aquatic species. North Carolina has experienced 3 devastating 500-yr storms within 2 years; wastewater treatment plants and sanitary sewer overows occurred up to 300 km inland, as well as coal ash spills, breaches of confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) waste lagoons, and numerous fish kills. Many in-situ sensors went offline and hazardous conditions precluded field sampling during and after these events. Publicly available satellite data enables delineation of flooding over broad areas, which can aid in quantifying the extent of flood exposure and potential water quality impacts. We mapped flooding across the North Carolina Piedmont and Coastal Plain due to Hurricane Matthew (2016) and Hurricane Florence (2018) with Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar. We assessed how impacts were distributed across indicators of social vulnerability at the census tract lev...