A few weeks ago, heavy rains came down quickly in Atlanta, turning the city’s Downtown Connector into a lake during rush-hour traffic. As the rain fell, some drivers were seen sitting on the hood of their vehicles as their cars became submerged, while others waded through waist-high water and abandoned their cars.
On May 20, state troopers shut down the highway, and emergency crews and the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department assisted stranded vehicles. While no injuries were reported and the highway was eventually reopened, advocates, residents, and weather experts are raising an alarm. They say local officials need to act quickly to update the city’s infrastructure to handle extreme flooding events as the effects of climate change continue.
Alfred Tucker is a longtime Atlanta resident and organizer of the Stop Flooding Us Coalition, a group of residents pushing the city to address flooding in Black, northwest neighborhoods. He said he sees the flash flood last month as a warning of what’s to come if local officials don’t act aggressively to solve the city’s flooding problems.
“There are a lot of issues with the city and inadequate storm water management. There were many areas, and city streets, especially Northside Drive, Express I-75 and 85, where the traffic was at a complete standstill because the water was so deep,” Tucker said.
“They are not prepared for these types of events that are occurring and they will continue to occur because of climate change. We’re going to continue to have these heavy downpours, which is all the more reason that the city needs to address storm water management,” he said. “That’s what the Stop Flooding Us coalition is trying to do — get petition signatures, and let the city know that this is not only affecting vehicular traffic, but neighborhoods, homes, jobs and the health of the citizens in these communities that are being impacted by these floods.”
While the city has implemented a patchwork of green infrastructure projects to help address flooding, residents and advocates say major roadblocks like funding are preventing the city from improving its stormwater infrastructure and management.
Advocates say solving flooding isn’t a quick or easy fix, but Black neighborhoods bear the brunt as they face a higher flooding risk over time as climate change persists.
How does climate change impact flooding?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls flash flood events the most dangerous type of flooding situations because they can occur within a few minutes, making it difficult to warn and protect residents.
Flash floods occur when heavy rainfall can’t be fully absorbed by the ground. In urban settings like Atlanta, where impervious surfaces like concrete and asphalt are everywhere, absorption is that much more difficult.
Marshall Shepherd, a professor of geography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia, said that May’s flash flood is a byproduct of climate change.
Shepherd wrote that as the earth’s atmosphere grows warmer, its ability to hold more water increases and studies show rainstorm intensity has increased overtime, making events like flash floods a more likely occurrence.
“The greater story is that storms like this, though normal, are quite juiced due to climate change. Couple that with clogged drains and increased paved surfaces, and this will happen,” Shepherd said in an email to Capital B Atlanta.
Chris Manganiello, the water policy director for the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, said the city’s water infrastructure is struggling to keep up with these events because it’s based on older rain patterns that do not look like the rain patterns of today.
“It was an extreme storm. It was a tremendous amount of rainfall in a very short period of time,” Manganiello said. “And historically, our stormwater, our wastewater systems, they have all been designed based on a particular model of water flow, and what climate change is showing us is that that water is coming into the system in ways that doesn’t quite meet that old engineering”
Why Black neighborhoods are at greater risk
According to one study, Black neighborhoods across the South will become more vulnerable to flooding events as they could see at least a 20% increase in flood risk by 2050.
Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, director of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, previously told Capital B Atlanta that due to discriminatory policy practices within city and urban planning, many Black homes ended up being located in flood-prone areas.
“The city, after Reconstruction and during that era, they were putting Black communities in those areas that were low-lying and prone to flooding,” Jelks said. “Many cities sort of have a history of filling in land that you know is likely in a floodplain, and building housing there where it shouldn’t be.”
(Courtesy of the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper)
Consequences of climate change and these flood events don’t just impact the people of Atlanta, but also its animals and surrounding environment. Manganiello said that his organization suspects that the runoff water from the flash flood event may be a cause of the recent fish kill that occurred in the Chattahoochee River.
He said that at the time of the flash flood, the river’s water level was low because of the ongoing severe drought. He speculates that large amounts of runoff water came from the city and went into the river, and that runoff water likely contained pollutants and was at a higher temperature than the river water.
When the river water and the runoff water mixed together, he believes it caused the oxygen levels in the river to decrease, which could have caused the fish to die.
The Department of Watershed Management told Capital B Atlanta that an investigation into the cause of the fish kill is still ongoing.
How is the city preparing for flash floods?
In an email to Capital B Atlanta, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Watershed Management said that the agency is continuing to “invest in infrastructure improvements, maintenance, and drainage upgrades to reduce flooding risks across the city.” The spokesperson said that the department takes preventative measures ahead of storms, such as “cleaning storm drains and catch basins, maintaining streams and channels, monitoring pump stations and tunnels, tracking weather conditions, staging response teams, and coordinating with emergency partners.”
At a utilities committee meeting on May 26, the department’s commissioner, Greg Eyerly, admitted that while usually the department plans ahead of time for incoming storms, it was not prepared for the flash flood event as it came on suddenly. He blamed some of the lack of preparation on the weather forecast.
“Rain was not forecast and certainly not forecasted in the type of event that we saw,” Eyerly said. “That’s critical for our operations.”
Marshall, with UGA, said that the flash flood event was “a randomized scattered shower amplified by clogged drains” and there was “advanced messaging that these scattered showers were possible that day.”
While the city has made efforts to mitigate flooding over the years with green infrastructure projects, like stormwater parks across the city, advocates are calling for more to be done.
One of the major barriers to updating water infrastructure is the large cost involved. City officials said last year that the endeavor could cost billions of dollars.
The Department of Watershed Management told Capital B Atlanta that there are plans to establish a stormwater utility program, and it is working to introduce legislation to the Atlanta City Council by the end of 2027.
Ben Emanuel, Southeast conservation director for American Rivers, a national environmental nonprofit, said that he and other water advocates have been pushing the city to adopt the utility program, which would help raise dedicated funds for updating stormwater management and infrastructure.
“A stormwater utility fee is a very common funding mechanism for managing stormwater in cities,” Emanuel said. “There are more than 40 stormwater utility fee programs just in metro Atlanta. So it’s a very common local government funding mechanism.
“I think that if a stormwater utility fee program is structured appropriately, it’s something that can be done effectively without overly burdening low-income residents, and can raise the funds that we need to manage these systems and improve conditions all across the city for everybody.”
Emaunel said that over the past 20 years there had been two previous efforts to get the city to establish a stormwater utility program, but both failed. He said he feels more confident that this time it can pass, thanks to support from the Department of Watershed Management and because people can see how severe the flooding has gotten.
“We all know that driving around town on a rainy day, we might suddenly come to a flooded street, and if you’ve lived in Atlanta a long time, it seems to be happening more,” Emanuel said. “It seems to be happening more quickly when it rains hard with these intense downpours that we have. So, I think that through everyone’s personal experience, we can see that we have a need.”
For residents like Tucker who have been pushing the city to address flooding, the time to act is long overdue and change must happen now — before it’s too late.
“The word that I would use to describe how I feel is afraid because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. We see these events occurring, and we see it over and over again, and we see a lack of response by the city in terms of what are we going to do about it,” Tucker said. “I’m hopeful that they will do something, but we won’t really know until we confront them.”
