Rising waters

When rain pummeled Charleston last Wednesday, a team of reporters and photographers fanned out across the region, assessing damage and talking to people as they waded through the floodwaters. Streets were closed, cars stranded and parking lots turned into ponds. The next day, The Post and Courier published the first package of Rising Waters, a new effort to cover the serious effects of sea level rise and flooding on people's lives and the region's economy. To accomplish the project's goals — which include creating a larger public dialogue about actionable solutions — the reporting will be a mix of breaking news coverage and investigative reporting that gets at the immediacy of the issue while delving in the science that explains why it's happening. The city has a front row view to the real-time impacts of climate change, and those impacts are just coming faster. Storms are not only more frequent but stronger and harder to predict. Sea level rise in Charleston has gone from rising at a rate of an inch every decade to an inch every two years. We talked with projects editor Glenn Smith and senior projects reporter Tony Bartelme about this new approach to covering flooding and sea level rise, what readers can expect in the future from Rising Waters and how they can contribute. Listen to find out.