eDD’s Franco Montalto Featured in Times Article on New York’s Flooding Fight
From the article:
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 [summer].
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.
Catastrophic rainfall caused overwhelming floods in parts of the Hudson Valley and elsewhere in the country [in July of 2023], leading New York officials like Gov. Kathy Hochul to warn of extreme weather that would be “our new normal.”
