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A RAPID Response to Hurricane Matthew

Flooding from Hurricane Matthew caused $1.5 billion in damage to 100,000 North Carolina houses, businesses, and government buildings.

On Oct. 8, 2016, Diego Riveros-Iregui couldn’t believe what he was seeing. News stations from all over North Carolina — and the nation — streamed endless aerial footage of submerged homes, collapsed roads, and residents escaping their hometowns in kayaks and motorboats.

Flooding from Hurricane Matthew caused $1.5 billion in damage to 100,000 North Carolina houses, businesses, and government buildings. The Category 5 storm took the lives of 28 North Carolinians, forced more than 4,000 people to evacuate, and impacted 50 counties across the state, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.

“Hurricane Matthew delivered 350 millimeters in rain over 24 hours — that’s about the same amount of rainfall that Chapel Hill receives in three months,” Riveros-Iregui, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill geographer, says.

As the storm continued to wreak havoc on the state, Riveros-Iregui called his longtime colleague Ryan Emanuel, an environmental scientist at NC State, to learn how his family in Lumberton was faring. Their phone conversation quickly transformed into an idea for a research project as the two discussed the potential effects of Lumberton’s multiple bodies of surface water, stream water, and groundwater connecting due to the flooding.

“These coastal environments are relatively flat, so water ponds quicker there than in areas with more slope,” Riveros-Iregui explains.

Lumberton is also home to multiple concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) with waste lagoons that overflowed during the flood. Robeson County, alone, is home to more than 285,000 hogs and pigs and about 7.25 million chickens and turkeys in more than 450 barns.

Sample collection to test water quality, they decided, needed to begin immediately, before water levels subsided. They applied for a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID), given to researchers with proposals that have “severe urgency.” Within two weeks of their submission, they received about $60,000 to conduct their study, set to begin in December 2016.

Although NSF RAPID grants are awarded quickly, they usually don’t accommodate large expenses such as hiring staff. Like emergency responders during a hurricane, Riveros-Iregui and Emanuel had to be resourceful. They solicited volunteers from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology to help. Today, their team’s collective expertise spans a variety of disciplines, from watershed hydrology and ecology to environmental microbiology to geospatial analysis and anthropology. “I think a unique aspect of RAPID is that it’s very interdisciplinary,” Riveros-Iregui says.

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