Before Tropical Depression Chantal Swamped Hillsborough, the Town Had Been Counting on FEMA – Inside Climate News

HILLSBOROUGH, N.C.—About nine hours after Tropical Depression Chantal inundated central North Carolina last week, Jeff Mahagan’s phone woke him at 3 in the morning. The person working on call at the Hillsborough wastewater treatment plant was scared.

Mahagan, the town’s deputy utilities director for water treatment, didn’t immediately grasp the severity of the situation. He lives 20 miles away, where just three-tenths of an inch of rain had fallen. 

Hillsborough was another story.

When Mahagan arrived at the plant, he tried to inspect the River Pumping Station perched 10 feet above the Eno River. 

Oh my God, he thought to himself. The river had swallowed the pumping station and was within 2 feet of the roof. 

It was exactly the scenario town officials had worried they might one day face.

And it’s unlikely the damage would have happened—at least to this extent—had the Federal Emergency Management Agency kept its word. 

Three and a half years ago, Hillsborough applied for a FEMA grant as part of the agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, also known as BRIC, to protect its water and sewer systems from future weather disasters.

It took more than a year and a half for FEMA to approve the grant, slower than the agency had predicted. This spring town officials were preparing to request bids for the water project when FEMA abruptly announced in a press release that it had canceled the program, part of the Trump administration’s move to overhaul and substantially cut the agency.

The afternoon before the North Carolina flooding, meteorologists had forecast some areas could get 4 inches of rain and issued a flood watch. Midday on July 6, the U.S. Geological Survey’s in-stream sensor at the Hillsborough station measured the Eno River at 1.8 feet, an average height for the area. The river loped along at an unremarkable 6,060 gallons per minute.

But then, between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., Chantal trudged up from the south through central North Carolina. It was a slow, wet storm that carried an immense amount of water vapor, a phenomenon, scientists say, that’s intensified by climate change. 

Dark clouds, pregnant with moisture, began emptying their contents on Orange County. The Eno’s water level spiked to nearly 5 feet. The river, now angry and roiled, thrashed against outcrops of volcanic rock hundreds of millions of years old.

At 6:30 p.m., the Eno flung debris into the river gage, USGS officials said. Rising flood waters inundated the instrumentation. The gage stopped transmitting data and died. 

Over the next 12 hours, more than 10 inches of rain fell on Hillsborough, hoisting the Eno out of its banks. The river rose to a record 24.79 feet, based on high water marks, USGS later found, and at its peak, surged to 8.8 million gallons every 60 seconds—more than 1,400 times the amount of the day before.

The Eno inundated the River Pumping Station at the wastewater treatment plant above levels reached during Hurricane Fran in 1996. The pumping station normally receives and transports 75 percent of what leaves the town’s toilets, washing machines and kitchen sinks to the wastewater treatment plant. 

Now the plant was inoperable, and raw sewage, diluted with ground, rain and river water, was pouring into the Eno from the manholes upstream. 

At the water treatment plant, which provides drinking water to the town, the river infiltrated a partially buried ground storage tank of finished water. Town officials immediately issued a boil water notice and began buying water from Durham, which conveyed it to Hillsborough through interconnected pipes, key to the area’s resiliency.

“BRIC grants were designed to help shift towns from reactive disaster spending to proactive investment to avoid future costs” of storm events, Hillsborough Mayor Mark Bell said at a press conference four days after the disaster. “The impact of Tropical Storm Chantal on the river pumping station is exactly the type of scenario that BRIC grants were intended to protect the public against.”

Nationwide, the chosen projects weren’t splashy: elevating flood-prone buildings, conducting climate change and flood risk assessments, and removing woody debris to help suppress wildfires. Yet during a crisis, the improvements can mean the difference between communities being inundated or incinerated, or not.

After the announcement, a spokesperson called BRIC “yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.” The program was established by a Republican-controlled Congress during the first Trump administration.

Nationwide, $3.6 billion in BRIC funding has been eliminated, according to recent FEMA figures. In North Carolina, FEMA owes 40 local governments $121 million, state officials said.

“The changes to the BRIC program by FEMA are disappointing, as this program provides critical federal funding for mitigation projects that build resilient communities across North Carolina,” said Justin Graney, chief of external affairs and communications for North Carolina Emergency Management, which administers the BRIC grants as the FEMA pass-through entity. 

Projects that hadn’t started construction—like Hillsborough’s—would receive no money, FEMA officials said at the time, while funding for those being built in phases would end “at an appropriate stopping point.”

Hillsborough had planned to spend $1 million of BRIC funding to build a new pump station to receive drinking water in emergency situations from the Orange Water and Sewer Authority, a utility that serves nearby Chapel Hill and Carrboro, Utilities Director Marie Strandwitz said.

Hillsborough officials consider an emergency water source crucial to future economic development and the UNC Hospital on the south side of town.

Another $6 million in BRIC funding would have paid for the 50-year-old River Pumping Station to be moved and rebuilt out of the floodway, reducing the risk of sewage overflows.

“This is a very substantial amount of money for a small town like Hillsborough,” Bell said. “To lose it suddenly was very impactful.” 

The BRIC cancellation exposes dozens of communities in North Carolina—and hundreds more nationwide—to the full effects of disasters worsened by climate change. Until this year, including during the first Trump administration, FEMA underscored the importance of such projects. 

In 2018, FEMA cited a study by the National Institute of Building Sciences showing that hazard mitigation saves an average of $6 for every $1 spent on federal grants disbursed for that purpose.

As recently as a week ago, Alex Meyer, director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, told the FEMA Review Council, “I believe that we should have a more resilient nation.”

The council’s 12 members are Trump appointees; he tasked them with revamping the agency.

After FEMA announced it was canceling the program, 80 members of Congress, including North Carolina Republicans U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis and U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, urged the Trump administration to “take swift action to reinstate the BRIC program, and to work with Congress to identify and implement reforms to strengthen our nation’s resilience for decades to come.”

FEMA did not respond to a request for comment on the congressional letter.

A Small Town Left Vulnerable to Disaster

Hillsborough is a town of 9,800 people, some homegrown and others expatriates who were priced out of nearby Durham and Chapel Hill. Downtown, the streets are narrow, the parking’s free and no building is more than four stories tall.

Several days after the storm, most of Hillsborough’s Riverwalk, a 3-mile, shaded promenade that runs along the Eno below downtown, was closed. Dirt and silt had turned the river the color of chocolate milk. Mosquitos emerged from the mire. Remnants of raw sewage coated flattened grass.

Debris cluttered the river’s rocky banks: broken pipes, a stray propane tank and an errant tire. Enormous old trees had been toppled, their boughs touching the ground likely for the first time in 100 years. 

Three months earlier, shortly after FEMA canceled the BRIC program, Hillsborough Town Manager Eric Peterson appeared before the Board of Commissioners to deliver the news. 

“This is a crisis,” he said. “It blows a hole in our budget.”

The town had paid for design and engineering—localties must shell out upfront and then ask for reimbursement—and was prepared to bid the drinking water project. 

In retrospect, Peterson’s alarm was prescient. “You want to make sure that you’ve got redundant water systems, ensuring that we can get the volume that we need quickly in an emergency,” he told Inside Climate News in April.

Likewise, Peterson was rightfully concerned about the vulnerability of the wastewater treatment plant. “If that River Pumping Station fails, we can’t treat wastewater for over half of our community, for who knows how long,” he said then. “We might have to spend a large amount of money to put a Band-Aid on a 50-year-old station. It would be really wasteful.”

The problem with the BRIC program wasn’t waste but rather red tape, officials from several towns told Inside Climate News. Many local governments in North Carolina waited more than three years for their funding to be approved, only to encounter further delays in receiving any money, even though they had signed contracts with FEMA.

Only one project—a living shoreline and upgrades to N.C. Highway 12 in the coastal community of Duck—had been finished before the program’s cancellation.

Hillsborough officials applied for the BRIC funding in November 2021, but spent the year prior working with an engineering consultant to perfect the application. They proposed starting the first phase of the drinking water project in January 2023, federal records show, and the sewer pumping station six months later. 

FEMA took 19 months to review the application. During that time, the agency requested and Hillsborough provided technical and environmental information. Strandwitz said it was unclear why the process took that long.

FEMA finally awarded Hillsborough the funds in August 2023. 

Had FEMA moved as quickly as it had originally projected, federal records show the new drinking water booster station would have been finished last month, just before Chantal hit. The relocation of the River Pumping Station would have been completed this coming December.

“This is a historic town,” Peterson said. “We have sewer mains that are over 100 years old. We have a water tank that was built in the 1930s. We have 50-year-old water lines connecting us with Durham that are made out of a fragile material that’s undersized. We’ve just got a long list of very expensive needs, and the BRIC cancellation creates a domino effect in a bad way.”

Hundreds of Thousands in Damages

On a sultry afternoon five days after the storm, Strandwitz, the town’s utilities director, stood before an array of microphones, mud on her shoes, and prepared to address the media. 

Behind her, the wastewater treatment plant hummed, and temporary bypass pumps had been set up to stop the discharge of untreated yet diluted wastewater into the Eno.

Hillsborough officials had lifted the boil water notice after tests showed the drinking water was free of bacteria. Strandwitz asked residents to conserve in part because Durham was still the sole supplier of drinking water, nearly 2 million gallons per day.

The numbers were still coming in, Strandwitz said, but damage estimates are at $450,000.

Most of the damaged infrastructure was not only outside the 100-year flood plain—meaning the location has a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year—but also the 500-year benchmark. Those areas have just a 0.2 percent chance of flooding annually.

To compensate for the loss of BRIC money, local governments like Hillsborough could apply for Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funds. The state administers those grants, but the funding ultimately comes from FEMA. 

“This determination will be made when further clarity is received from FEMA,” North Carolina Emergency Management’s Graney said. “NCEM is committed to assisting communities with finding possible solutions as we believe that these projects have a positive impact on a community’s resilience.” 

If the funding comes through, Hillsborough’s projects will be further delayed by six to eight months, because the state’s review process doesn’t begin until October, Strandwitz said.

The new river pumping station would be built on an acre of land upstream, outside the 500-year flood plain.

Town officials hope that will be good enough.