A Bucks County town reels from a flood tragedy and worries about what might happen next

Caroline Gromlich has lived in the Washington Crossing area for 25 years and is well familiar with the hazards of negotiating local flood-prone roads, but what happened this month transcended anything in her experience.

Gromlich, a friend of Yuko Love, 64, one of the six people who died, with a seventh presumed dead, after profoundly heavy rains targeted their ferocity on narrow Hough’s Creek in Upper Makefield Township, said that she will be navigating more warily on those roads, several of which have remained closed.

“We really don’t know what to expect as things reopen,” said Gromlich, who was attending a vigil Thursday night for the flood victims and whose son was among the firefighters who rescued 10 others.

“There’s a lot of fear,” said Denise Burmester, the township’s planning and zoning director, not to mention trauma. “That’s going to be a long time healing.”

» READ MORE: The Bucks tragedy occurred in a hazardous flood zone

The historically flood-plagued township has won praise from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for its efforts to hold back the waters, but they were not to be stopped on July 15.

Residents, understandably, are left to wonder: What’s next?

For one thing, said David R. Easterling, chief of the assessments branch at the National Centers for Environmental Information, in a climate-change world made moister by rising temperatures, the downpours aren’t going way. “We expect to see more,” he said, adding that for a variety of reasons, the Northeast has been especially vulnerable.

The township on the Delaware River has been bedeviled by several creeks, including Hough’s, said Burmester.

It has incurred $13.7 million in National Flood Insurance Program losses dating to the 1970s, and has hosted 71 “severe repetitive-loss properties,” those with four claims or more. “That’s a red flag,” said Paul Osman, a longtime floodplain manager in Illinois. About 7%, or 258 structures, are in the flood zone.

Could a township with such a flood resume have done more to prevent a tragedy such as the one that occurred July 15?

Underscoring the magnitude of the challenges, the township evidently has been trying harder than other communities, according to FEMA. It is one of only five in Philadelphia’s neighboring Pennsylvania counties that participates in a flood-mitigation program known as the Community Rating System, or CRS.

Towns are scored on their mitigation efforts — such as buying out dangerous properties and informing the public of flood hazards. If it accumulates enough points, flood insurance policyholders get discounts.

The rating system is one initiative that has been making a difference, floodplain experts say.

“It has a measurable effect,” said Nicholas Pinter, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis. “It’s not just blowing smoke.”

» READ MORE: What to know about flash flooding

Pinter coauthored a study that estimated CRS saved $11.4 billion in flood losses and yielded $12.1 billion in reduced insurance premiums from 1998 to 2020.

Doug Noonan, professor of public and environmental affairs at Purdue University, said that the program appears to reduce claims, but that the evidence is “suggestive” rather than convincing. In any event, he said, the program is “unlikely to hurt.”

He added that the program has blind spots. It doesn’t explicitly reward protecting public infrastructure by elevating schools or roads, for instance.

FEMA gave Upper Makefield strong marks for storm water management and for keeping the public informed of flood risks. But none of the boxes the township checked could have prevented the tragedy at Washington Crossing.

Noonan said a big part of FEMA’s focus is to keep the insurance program solvent. “So if we wanted to worry about human life, or uninsured assets and resources, we’d need to look somewhere else,” he said.

Congress created the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968 because private companies wanted no part of insuring flooding, a constant in much of the nation.

Anyone buying a home in a flood zone with a federally backed mortgage would be required to have it. Critics of the program have long held that the program has encouraged risky floodplain development, including in such areas as Upper Makefield, and Osman said that may well be the case.

Flood insurance has elements of what the industry calls “adverse risk.” Invoking a metaphor to explain the concept, Osman says to think of a car insurance company that writes policies only to 16- to 20-year-old males with terrible driving records.

The program, which is $20.5 billion in debt, is far from perfect, said Pinter, “but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.”

With global temperatures in the last 10 years about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 20th-century average, the air is holding about 6% more water vapor, according to analysis by the National Centers for Environmental Information. Warmer air can accommodate more water.

Across the contiguous United States, that has been a primary driver of an increase of “extreme rains” — defined as those that rank in the top 10% of 24-hour rainfalls over a given area, said NCEI’s Easterling.

» READ MORE: A deadlier flood occurred in Chester in 1971

“The Northeast has been the poster child of the increased rains,” said Easterling. He said that evidently is related to above-normal temperatures in the two source regions of moisture: the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Since 2001, the percent of the Northeast affected by extreme rains has more than doubled from the 20th-century average, according to NCEI.

The upper-air patterns that have baked the Southwest in record heat and pestered the Northeast with random, flooding thunderstorms have persisted for weeks.

Sooner or later showers will pop up again in Upper Makefield, and chances are the traffic will be light when they do.

“I don’t think our community will be on the road in the rain very much anymore,” said Burmester.

Vivian Levin, who has lived in Washington Crossing for 14 years, says she has little choice but to continue using that stretch of road on Route 532 where she lost her friend Yuko Love.

“You have to use 532 to get back and forth to Newtown, go to the gym, and that’s where I shop,” said Levin. “However, how am I going to like going up there, and always having that memory?”