RAIN CHECK

The economic case for preserving America’s wetlands

- JACKIE FLYNN MOGENSEN

NEARLY 30 YEARS ago, in September 1996, Hurricane Fran swept through North Carolina. It was the most expensive natural disaster in state history—causing an estimated $10 billion in damage in today’s dollars and killing 37 people across the region. Raleigh took a direct hit, with the storm toppling thousands of trees and dumping nearly 9 inches of rain. In Rochester Heights, a historically Black neighborhood southeast of downtown, most homes were flooded.

This, as it turns out, wasn’t a freak accident. The neighborhood, built beginning in 1957, was among the first suburban enclaves marketed to Black families, who were excluded from other areas of then-segregated Raleigh. It was full of attractive, one-story brick homes with wide, grassy lawns. But because the low-lying neighborhood flanked a swamp that received untreated sewage discharge and stormwater runoff from downtown Raleigh, it was prone to flooding during storms. (Construction of Interstate 40 through the neighborhood more than a decade later made the problem worse.) Eventually, the 1972 Clean Water Act banned unpermitted disposal of raw sewage in wetlands, but by then the marshy land had become an illegal dump-ing ground for other waste, including tires, glass, and old appliances. One resident, 69-year-old Steve Blalock, who's lived in the neighborhood for much of his life, recalls surfing the sewage discharge in a metal tub as a child.