For Franco Montalto, a flooding expert and engineer, decades of research were suddenly amplified by a real-life emergency in the Adirondacks, where he and his family were on vacation this week.
In the middle of the night, they were awakened by forest rangers knocking on the door of their lakeside cabin.
The house was surrounded by a foot of water, and they needed to evacuate.
“It was profound to experience these conditions firsthand,” he said.
Dr. Montalto, a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia who is writing about flooding as a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, knows better than most that climate change is producing hard-to-predict and shifting weather patterns that can trigger “cascading events.”Flooding can occur “for different reasons at different times in different places,” he said in a recent interview.
Persons:
Franco Montalto, ”, Montalto
Organizations:
Drexel University, New York
Locations:
“, Philadelphia