More and more Americans face the threat of flooding. And as a country, we are woefully unprepared. Cities like Charleston and Miami already see routine coastal flooding. Hurricane Helene recently hammered many inland communities with flooding. And the risk is only rising.
FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) sells about 90% of the nation's flood insurance policies, but only a small percentage of Americans are covered. In an effort to account for climate change, expand coverage, and make the NFIP more "fair," FEMA recently overhauled its flood insurance program. It's called Risk Rating 2.0, and the sweeping changes are proving to be highly controversial.
In this episode, we talk to Rebecca Elliott, author of Underwater, about how the story of American flood insurance is really a story about people and our values as a nation.
For more resources about flood insurance and Risk Rating 2.0, check out the Coalition for Sustainable Flood Insurance.
This episode was hosted by Carlyle Calhoun and Eva Tesfaye. Carlyle Calhoun is the managing producer. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski and our theme music is by Jon Batiste. Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and The Water Collaborative. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
INTRO
EVA: It makes a lot of sense to tell the story of flood insurance from the Gulf Coast.
CARLYLE: In fact, so much of the story of flood insurance hinges on events that happened here. Almost a hundred years ago in the worst flood in US history, the Mississippi River overflowed. The Great Flood of 1927 caused devastation across the valley.
EVA: A quarter of the state of Louisiana was under water.
Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes.
If you need a good cry, listen to Randy Newman’s song about the flood.
“Louisiana” The river rose all day, the river rose all night. Some got lost in the flood, some got out all right.
CARLYLE: And whatever insurers were in the flood insurance game at that time lost their shirts and went running for the hills realizing flood insurance was no way to make money.
In the wake of the Great Flood, there was almost no flood insurance available.
EVA: But then… about 4 decades later… the Gulf Coast bore the brunt of another flood disaster.
HURRICANE BETSY ARCHIVAL: Her winds are pushing a 16 foot wall of water. The greatest tidal surge in Louisiana history. Sweeping over the Delta, Plaquemines Parish, St. Bernard, topping the highest levees, roaring across the industrial canal into the southeast section of New Orleans. No one knows the full size of the disaster yet. In Betsy's wake, there's only darkness, confusion, and fear. And death
CARLYLE: In 1965, Hurricane Betsy brought utter destruction to the Gulf Coast. Betsy was the first hurricane to cause over a billion dollars in damage. And all those thousands and thousands of flood victims? Most of course didn’t have flood insurance because there were hardly any companies offering it.
EVA: Where was the money going to come from to help all them rebuild? The time had come for the federal government to do something.
CARLYLE: The idea of a federal flood program had been kicked around since the Great Flood of 1927, but it wasn’t until Hurricane Betsy that the problem could no longer be ignored.
EVA: So with the bipartisan support from both President Kennedy and then President Nixon, in 1968 the National Flood Insurance Program was born. The NFIP.
CARLYLE: An ambitious public program. But there were problems from the start. Critics say because the NFIP has offered affordable insurance, it’s indirectly encouraged people to move to risky areas.
EVA: And now with inflation, climate change intensifying flooding and more and more people living in risky places…the cost of flood damages is skyrocketing.
CARLYLE: And so is Public discontent with the federal program.
Bill Cassidy: “The National Flood Insurance Program is broken.”
EVA: That’s Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy in one of his regular speeches about flood insurance on the Senate Floor.
CARLYLE: and so with mounting pressure, FEMA, who runs the program, had to do something.
News Archival: ”FEMA has been rolling out its new method of evaluating your flood insurance rates, calling it Risk Rating 2. 0.”
EVA: FEMA overhauled its insurance program. They said their goal was to make the program more fair: Where people pay according to their real flood risk. And, at the same time, still fulfill their other goal: help keep people safe from floods.
CARLYLE: makes sense and those are very important goals. But it’s proving suuuper tricky to pull off. The change caused a lot of people’s rates to spike, especially in places like the Gulf Coast. And those people aren’t thrilled.
EVA: While home insurance may be getting the most attention these days, flood insurance is also a gigantic challenge that will have implications for where we can live in the future and who can afford to live there.
I’m Eva Tesfaye
CARLYLE: And I’m Carlyle Calhoun and you’re listening to Sea Change.
EVA: Today on Sea Change, Carlyle talks to Rebecca Elliott, author of Underwater, about how the story of American flood insurance is really a story about people, and our values as a nation.
INTERVIEW
CARLYLE: Rebecca, thanks for being with us.
REBECCA: Thanks for having me.
CARLYLE: So you are a sociologist and you wrote an entire book about flood insurance. It's called Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the U. S. What was so fascinating about flood insurance that it captured your interest?
REBECCA: Sure. So, as a researcher, I've always been really interested in the socioeconomic impacts of climate change. And as I was preparing to think about a kind of big project for myself. Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, and, one of the things that started to happen a few months down the line was that articles started to appear,, about these homeowners in the outer boroughs of New York City who had survived the storm.
Obviously, this had been devastating. In some cases, they'd suffered a total loss. But in the intervening months, they'd been able to muck out, clear out debris, even rebuild, and much in the same way that they had been before the storm. But then they heard that because of some changes to the way that flood insurance is rated through the National Flood Insurance Program, combined with the delivery of these updated flood insurance rate maps. All of this meant that the price of flood insurance was going up and they might not be able to afford to insure those rebuilt homes.
And so I thought this was so fascinating where you have a natural disaster, quote unquote natural disaster. And that passes, and people survive that. But then there's this kind of follow on economic disaster that comes from the way that insurance kind of readjusts in the wake of one of those disasters. And that was actually creating the real pressure points for people in New York City.
CARLYLE: Right, it's not just the disasters themselves that can displace people.
REBECCA: Mmm hmmm. And the logic of flood insurance and the way it's been organized historically makes a lot of sense. The idea that one of the ways that we get people to account for something like flood risk is by attaching a price to it. You know, this is a rationale that is in a lot of our public policy.
And so it's not particularly surprising to see it applied to something like flood, but anytime you attach. a price to something, you're then in the realm of a situation where some people can bear that price pretty easily. It's, you know, no one wants to see costs go up, but it might just be a bit of a nuisance, but then other people really struggle. And in the United States where so much of individual and collective well being is tied up in homeownership, this is really destabilizing. There's such a significant amount at stake.
CARLYLE: So let's go back to the beginning of the story because the federal government has not always been in the business of flood insurance. But that all changed after Hurricane Besty hit in 1965, right?
REBECCA: So indeed, President Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time, says, you know, we have this huge problem of flood loss. Hurricane Betsy is only the most recent example of how devastating floods can be. We need for insurance to be a bigger part of the solution. And this is what leads to the authorization of the National Flood Insurance Program. There are a couple of studies that are focused on, you know, how do we best design this? What’s the role of private insurers. That takes a couple of years and then ultimately, the National Flood Insurance Program is authorized as part of a huge housing bill. So it's really important to recognize that even from the very start of the program, flood insurance has always been tied to this kind of larger project of expanding Americans; access to homeownership because making sure that the assets are insurable is a really huge part of making sure that people can access mortgages.
CARLYLE: It was a largely bipartisan effort but there were some kind of like big issues with how this program would be run.
REBECCA: Yeah. The tension between affordability on the one hand. And actuarialism, which is the word that insurance experts use to basically describe rating insurance according to risk, is in some ways the, the story of the NFIP from the very beginning up to the present day.
This tension has been sort of built into the program and it's never gone away.
And I think in some ways, you know, what we're seeing with fire in California right now, the, speaks to the way that this is an animating tension in all of insurance. This isn't just an NFIP story, and especially as the climate continues to change, we're gonna see these issues crop up again and again. But in the story of flood insurance, what you had was this idea to start a flood program that would make flood insurance available to homeowners. But many of those homeowners already lived in the floodplain. And they didn't have a flood map when they bought their house or they built their house. They didn't know necessarily, uh, that they were at risk.
And so, federal policy makers had to kind of craft these very careful compromises, because they also didn't want to just say, well, here's cheap flood insurance for everyone. Because the intellectual thinking behind a flood insurance program was in part about the idea that the price of insurance could act as a kind of, you know, signal to people about the risk.
And so if you say flood insurance is cheap, then people think, okay, it must not be very, very risky. And this is where I can build and make the rest of my life. And so there was this concern that we preserve that signal as much as possible, but we don't penalize the homeowners that are already in the flood plain.
And so at the start of the program, the way policymakers. Finessed this was, they said, okay, everyone who's already in the floodplain, they're gonna pay a reasonable amount of flood insurance. Now the challenge, of course, was they never defined what reasonable meant. Um, and everyone who's kind of admitted to the program going forward will be rated according to risk, and we're also going to make it a condition of accessing this program of flood insurance that local communities put in place all kinds of land use rules and regulations so that they don't continue to build in the riskiest areas.
So it's very hard for the federal government to make sure that every single local community is actually putting in place those land use ordinances and complying with them. And so that kind of runs away from the federal government. It also turns out that mapping the entire country's floodplains is. a hugely ambitious, a hugely expensive, a hugely time consuming task, and it never ends because flood risk is always changing. So as soon as you make a flood map, almost, it's out of date, and you have to go back a couple years later and update it. And the resources for that were never guaranteed. You know, they're always kind of subject to the whims of congressional appropriation.
And also, the policymakers at the start of the program kind of assumed that The homes that were most at risk of flooding in the late 1960s would eventually be destroyed because they were at risk of flooding and they wouldn't be rebuilt.
But in fact, as we've seen time and time again, when people experience loss from a natural disaster, they tend to try to get back to normal as quickly as possible. And that includes rebuilding their houses. even at the water's edge. And so those properties did not disappear from the program. which meant that you had a significant chunk of policyholders who had these kind of below risk, subsidized, pre mapped rates for a very long time.
And there have been subsequent battles over the years about whether or how or how quickly to get rid of those subsidies, how to get everyone on to a kind of risk based rate. But it's The kind of recurring drama of the NFIP is that this amounts to changing the costs that people are facing. And that means that it's always going to be contentious.
CARLYLE: Yeah. I mean there's, there's so much there and just the fact that this is a public program to begin with I mean, we're pretty rare in that we have a federal flood insurance program, right?
REBECCA: Yes. People are always really surprised, um, when I talk about flood insurance to audiences in other countries that, you know, Americans who seem to prefer private markets for everything would have a public flood insurance program.
And indeed, I think until relatively recently, a lot of people, even people who had flood policies, didn't really understand that it was the federal government that was underwriting those policies because the way the program is, is administered is through private companies who kind of,sell the policy on behalf of the federal government.
So you wouldn't necessarily, unless you were closely reading your paperwork, understand that ultimately the buck stops with the federal government.
CARLYLE: So, let's get to some of the basics of, of how this works. You mentioned flood maps, we'll get to that, but who actually has to buy flood insurance?
and how many Americans are covered and are all the Americans that should be covered covered
REBECCA: Yeah, so this is all kind of been changing in the last couple years. Some of it's changing and some of it's not. So what's not changing is that FEMA, in order to run the flood insurance program on an actuarial basis, has always needed to produce what are called FIRMS, flood insurance rate maps.
Now these are essentially maps that carve up a particular area into zones of high risk and low risk. And the high risk zones are also carved up so that it distinguishes zones that are subject to wave action. So coastal zones have a slightly different designation. And historically, since 1974, there's been this mandatory purchase requirement, which says that if you live in a high risk zone on one of FEMA's maps, and you have a federally backed mortgage, then you must have a flood insurance policy in place.
Now, what that understanding of insurance requirements suggests erroneously, right, is that once you get just outside the boundary of the flood zone, You're not at sufficient risk to be required to have a flood policy. You can get one if you want.
But of course, we know that floods never helpfully stop at the end of a boundary on a map, right?
The flood goes where the flood goes. And FEMA, um, has known that, you know, for years, a significant percentage of claims actually come from outside of the high risk flood zones. and also, you know, we talked about how the maps are often, um, out of date, right? So you might not be in a high risk flood zone according to the effective map.
But if that effective map is from 2005, then maybe you actually are facing significant flood risk and you just aren't zoned into it. So that's kind of how it's historically been. And this has been a huge target of criticism for the program. You know, the community. The status of the maps and the connection between the maps and the insurance requirements and the price of insurance, all of that's kind of come under scrutiny for a long time.
CARLYLE: so, um, FEMA says they sell about 5 million flood insurance policies. So that's 5 million households. I think the U. S., we have around 130 million households. So that doesn't actually seem like That many people are covered. can you talk about just kind of the, the lack of coverage and, and you already kind of talked about people often don't know that they don't have flood insurance cause they assume it's part of their home insurance policy, but it's not usually covered.
REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, the problem of low take up rates has been a problem for the NFIP from the start. And you know, I think there, there are many different reasons that, um, people don't have or don't retain flood insurance in part because they may not know that they need it or, um, or they're, they're not kind of expressly required to have it, but also because it can be expensive and the people that need it most, it's the most expensive for them.
You know, as a sociologist, I'm always interested in what are the kind of, collective and structural influences that shape the decision to do something.
But my colleagues in economics and cognitive psychology would also point to the way that human beings think about risk. Um, so, you know, they, they will talk about kind of forgetting, right? That even if you've experienced a flood, it's, it's only a couple of years.
before your kind of risk aversion and and the steps that you might take to mitigate that risk seem kind of less and less compelling. Um, and that if you've never experienced a flood, but you do, according to a kind of a, you know, Scientific analysis are facing flood risk. We tend not to think that bad things are going to happen. If they do happen, we tend to think they're not going to happen to us. If they do happen to us, we tend to think that they're not going to be that bad. You know, we just don't estimate and act on information about risk in the way that we would like to. Risk assessors do, um, and so all of that could be kind of bound up as well with some of these more kind of collective and structural and political reasons that people might not be able to have or maintain coverage.
CARLYLE: Well, I guess that's a, that's a bright spot as humans are more optimistic than maybe, maybe we think. I guess to get to kind of a big change that FEMA has made recently, So, if I understand correctly, in the very beginning of NFIP, Congress didn't say, hey, FEMA, you've got to make money at the National Flood Insurance Program, right? But in recent years, the NFIP's debt has ballooned. a lot of that grew after Hurricane Katrina, which was just such a devastating storm and also a really expensive storm. So they've got this huge amount of debt and now Congress is saying, hey, way too much debt. You got to change some things. We also have climate change going on here? So they introduced sweeping changes in 2002. They roll out risk rating 2. 0. can you name kind of the biggest driver for this huge,what FEMA says will transform the NFIP, what were the biggest reasons for that? And then what are kind of the sweeping changes
REBECCA: Yeah, so it really depends on who you ask about Risk Rating 2. 0, but indeed you're right. I mean, the expectation for a public program was not at the start that it would, you know, certainly that it would make money, but that it would even necessarily break even.
Um, it wasn't really until the Reagan administration where this sort of logic was imposed on the NFIP that it should run like a business, that it should run like a private insurer,. Um, and so it's only under that logic that this massive debt becomes a problem because obviously we have lots of costly government programs that we don't expect to break even and we don't expect to turn a profit. Um, but I think because the NFIP involves a consumer product, um, and has these kinds of, Resemblances to private industry, you know, that that kind of logic ends up filtering into the NFIP and the other part of that story is that policymakers for a long time, even before Reagan, were hoping that The federal government would get into the flood insurance business in part to jumpstart a private market for flood insurance.
But most recently with Risk Grading 2. 0. FEMA's taking this, this line that Actually, private insurers are starting to develop an appetite for flood risk, and they want to get into at least some parts of this market, right? They want the good risks. They want the low risks, right? The risks that are less likely to yield a claim. And they're starting to develop their own risk assessments and pricing strategies in order to service that market, which they're allowed to do. so the idea was like, let's transform the NFIP so that it rates in a more similar fashion,
So part of the, the justification of risk rating 2. 0 is about expanding coverage, dealing with this problem of low take up. By just kind of multiplying the number of players in the field who can underwrite flood risk and moving some of that risk onto the ledgers of private companies.
The other, I think, motivating factor behind risk rating 2. 0, was just decades, at this point, of criticism of the maps. You have this problem of kind of the political legitimacy of the maps because people are saying, Wait, wait, wait, you're telling me that my insurance costs 500 a year, but how do you know? Because your maps are wrong, right? So it creates this opening for people to contest the maps, to contest their rates, and that ends up being really kind of time consuming and costly for the federal government. And so I think part of the idea around Risk Grading 2. 0 is this is a more kind of science based way to assess and price flood risk. So that's the second thing.
But then there's a third factor, which is that, you know, this is, this is insurance and it's, it's very kind of technical on its face, but the fights about it have always been moral. They've always been about questions of fairness and responsibility. And the program has always been vulnerable to these claims about kind of who should be responsible for these increasing costs.
And who can afford these increasing costs. And so, Risk Rating 2. 0 also kind of changes the understanding of the level at which flood risk has to be dealt with. It goes from being the flood zone, which is a group of people, to the individual homeowner. Right? It's your individual responsibility to kind of figure out what your rate is and do what you can to lower that rate, kind of, independently of what, what else is going on around you in the flood zone.
CARLYLE: And so one, one way that's playing out is like, you could have a totally different amount you're paying every year than your next door neighbor, just depending if like, Hey, maybe you're closer to a little stream that's going through your yard or something like that. But I guess, even though. Risk rating 2.0 is more data driven. They've got kind of their algorithms and what, one big criticism is kind of the black box that FEMA's coming up with whatever your rate's going to be. the other big criticism in their kind of making this quote unquote fairer is that what that means for the majority of people is they're paying more or in some cases a whole lot more for flood insurance, which to many people does not feel fair at all, especially for low income families, low income communities that are just getting hammered by risk rating 2.0.
REBECCA: Yes. I mean, the fallacy of this is the suggestion that flood risk is something that anyone can individually own. Yes, maybe, maybe if you have the resources.
You can flood proof your home, you can elevate it above the base flood elevation, but flood risk is collectively produced, and most of any given person's flood risk has to do with decisions that predate them and that transcend them. So decisions about building there to begin with, about where to put schools, where to put industry, where to put roads, building bridges, building levees, all of these things individual homeowners exercise very little to no control over.
And so, um, When people, when individual people are seeing their rates going up, they're, you know, quite reasonably, I think, saying, well, wait a minute, you know, I, I, I can take every step to be prudent. I, I don't want my flood insurance to go up. I don't want to experience a flood loss. . But, If my local community keeps paving over green space to build more housing and there's less places for the water to go, then my flood risk increases regardless of what I do.
So it's these types of things that insurance is just not a very good instrument for addressing when it's all kind of hinging on individual insurance rates.
CARLYLE: And so I wanna give one example of, of kind of what's happening in different. Places around the country. So in our last episode of sea change, we traveled to this tiny town called point LH Louisiana. It's just below new Orleans on the Mississippi river. And that town out of the entire nation is expected to see the highest percentage increase in flooded insurance rates—over a thousand percent increase. This is a poor community. And a lot of the people I spoke with said, Hey, it's our town's only flooded once in my lifetime. And these are people who are in their upper fifties.
So they're also kind of saying like, why us? So I think this is all leading to criticism of, of 2. 0 and to just kind of, as you're saying, the bigger, questions around who is responsible for paying for risk and, and who is making the decision that ultimately determines who can live where.
REBECCA: Right. And I think as we see the continued effects of climate change, this is only going to become a less and less tenable commitment to hold on to.
I think there was a time where perhaps it was easy to say, you know, I don't live in a flood zone. Why should I? Be paying for someone who does. Um, the flood zones are growing, and if it's not your flood risk, then it's your fire risk, or it's your wind risk, or you don't live on the coast, but now we're having these rain events that are causing this tremendous inland flooding.
So, you know, I think, This, this idea that our fates are not linked always all the time anyway, um, just becomes really hard to sustain as the climate continues to change.
CARLYLE: and I mean, I want to be fair to FEMA too and, and realize that this is such a tightrope. I mean, one of their mandates is to make communities more resilient to floods, to prepare for floods. That obviously costs money. There's a limited amount of funds. And on the other side of that, there are so many equity issues that are coming into this. So, So, I guess, like, what are the biggest equity issues that you see and how could FEMA handle that tightrope better?
REBECCA: Yeah. I think letting go of this idea of sort of individual risk ownership, I think would sort of rationalize our whole approach to flood risk more generally to kind of accept and operate at the understanding that flood risk is a collective burden and it's a collective cost.
And we can provide insurance. I mean, the advantages of insurance relative to disaster relief are clear. You know, when you are an insurance customer, you get your claim. You know, you're not waiting for a disaster declaration, which may or may not come.
I mean, there are a lot of reasons why we might want to ensure natural hazard risks like flood and everything else. But I think, We just need to do it much more broadly. I mean, we just need to kind of spread the risk and spread the cost across more shoulders. Basically, I mean, this is kind of a fundamental premise of risk pooling.
To begin with, you know, insurance has its origins and trade unions and friendly societies. This is This idea of solidarity is really core to insurance, and I think we've swung a little bit too far to the kind of mathematical actuarial side, which, you know, is part of the commercial story of insurance, and away from the more solidaristic vision of insurance,
So, so I think, you know, that would deal with some of these issues of, of equity and making sure that everyone has some measure of financial security, particularly as the climate continues to change.
You know, the other thing about equity in, in this realm is we have to be thinking about the underlying hazards and risks themselves. And An important lever for reducing the cost of climate change is to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. And so thinking about a just climate transition is, is means creating a future in which these risks are not as bad and where we're navigating a path into a climate change future in which the, the bads aren't kind of continually revisited on the same groups over and over and over again.
CARLYLE: So what could examples of that be? One, the main mitigation that, you know, we're all aware of, um, The vast majority of us are aware of that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, But what are other ways that risk can be mitigated?
Are you talking about funds to relocate? Like what are things that people could expect to maybe see as options in the future?
REBECCA: Yeah, I, I mean, I think any kind of collective effort to think about. What safe and secure housing ought to look like, uh, in a climate change world is a good idea. So there are scholars who are working on, you know, thinking about housing retrofit programs, for instance, as something that, you know, addresses, uh, The kind of downside risks of climate change of flood and fire, but also makes houses more energy efficient and so reduces household costs and kind of does both of those things together, you know, while also being a kind of local engine of economic development because there are jobs to be had and retrofitting and all the rest.
Um, so, so there are, you know, things like that. I mean, I think also thinking about just our whole model of social provision being based on the idea that you need to. buy a house. That house needs to grow in value year on year on year. I think what we're facing with the insurance affordability crisis, not just in flood, but in fire, in wind, is really calling into question the, the integrity of that model of social provision.
Because now it's not looking like such a good deal. To, to secure your financial future by buying a home, if that, if that house is going to burn down, flood, or be too expensive for you to insure. And so I think we have to think about our safety net more broadly. You know, how do we make sure that people can work decent, jobs, retire at a sensible age, provide for their families, you know, build wealth, pass it on, you know, with and kind of just decouple that from whether you own a home that happens to be in a relatively safe place. Because for more and more Americans, they're, they're going to find that they don't actually live in a place that's safe from some of these climate impacts and it's not getting any safer.
CARLYLE: Yeah. And I guess the question of, of how we handle that and then What is the role of governmentin keeping people safe and especially as places are getting less safe. And I think that is the fascinating story of flood insurance and the national flood insurance program is that we're looking at it as through the lens of being a public program.
REBECCA: Yeah, and I think that it'll be really interesting to see how Things play out in California because, you know, for the longest time people, you know, critics of the NFIP have said, Why is the federal government in the flood insurance business?
Get them out of there. The private market can take this over.But what we're seeing in California, is not dissimilar to the conditions that prevailed around flood in the 1920s and 1930s, where there are major disasters, private insurers are dropping policies, they're going out of business, or they're raising prices so high as to be unaffordable.
I mean, just non, non products basically for people.
And you have a public option in California, at least, that's been created to kind of breach that gap. So I think the importance of kind of public backstops is only going to become clearer, uh, going forward. And so If there's a reason to rethink the federal government's role, which surely there is because there have been issues with the National Flood Insurance Program, then maybe, maybe we need to be thinking differently about that question. And it's not just a, you know, we'll let the private markets do it. And that'll solve all these problems, because that obviously is creating its own problems.
CARLYLE: Well thank you so much, Rebecca. This has been a fascinating conversation
REBECCA: My pleasure.
OUTRO
Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This episode was hosted by me Carlyle Calhoun and Eva Tesfaye. I’m the managing producer. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and The Water Collaborative. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
