This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.
Just across the road from the waterfront in Brunswick, Semona Holmes lives in a house surrounded by fruit trees, potted flowers, a fish pond, and — when it rains or the tide is extra high — floodwater.
“If you can imagine this entire area here completely flooded,” she explained on her front porch on a recent afternoon. “The flooding would be — we would have like a river on our street.”
The floodwater has reached to her knees at times. Once, after a hurricane, her neighbor canoed down the block.
Improvements to the stormwater system have helped a bit in recent years. But Holmes’s concerns go beyond the inconvenience of an occasionally flooded street. She lives about half a mile from a former pesticide plant, which is now a toxic Superfund site — one of thousands of contaminated former... Read more
