GoKawiilOn the morning of June 9th, Laura Lin was working from her home in Lanesville, a rural southern Indiana town about 15 miles from the Kentucky border. She was on a Zoom call, unaware that the heavy rain outside was beginning to flood her yard.
“I look over to where the barn is over there, and I see pieces of my wood floating, and I was like, ‘What?’ And I immediately was like, ‘I have to go.’ Close my laptop, and I get my kids up, and I’m like, ‘Something’s wrong,’” Lin recalls.
Lin and her family got out safely and sheltered at a neighbor’s house, but Lanesville got over 8 inches of rain within just a few hours that day, way over the threshold for what is considered “heavy” rainfall. The water was gone a few hours later.
Floods are the second-deadliest type of weather event in the United States and the deadliest globally. Just 6 inches of fast-flowing water can knock an adult off their feet, 12 inches can lift a car, and 2 feet can move larger vehicles like trucks and SUVs. A warming climate means more instances of extreme rainfall in the US, creating more opportunities for floods to occur. The deadly flash flooding in Nepal in August caused by a glacier collapse shows the power of water to devastate communities worldwide.
Fortunately, new tools are being developed to counter this threat. A new software called the Transient Artifact and Continuous Learning System (TACLS) uses satellites and machine learning to try to spot areas that could flood sooner and help the National Weather Service (NWS) make better decisions when it comes to issuing flash flood alerts.
“We didn’t get the ‘get on your roof’ warnings until I was already at that person’s house,” Lin says. “All the people in town were already flooded when they started sending out alerts, being like, ‘Get on your roof. We’re dispatching boats.’ So it was way too late.”
TACLS has the potential to help change that.
“It will help you save lives,” says Ivory Small, science and operations officer at the NWS San Diego Weather Forecast Office. Without TACLS, Small says, a storm moving into your area “could kill some folks.” With TACLS, “you can put out the warning and save some folks.”
The river near Laura Lin’s house in Lanesville, Indiana, flooded after a recent rain. New technology could provide residents with quicker warnings when the threat arises. Image: Megan Wollerton / The Verge
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