When the dead don't stay buried
Sue Colson, a Cedar Key city commissioner, knows climate change is coming for her parents.
John and Clair Kuszyna rest side-by-side in a section of the cemetery on Florida's Gulf Coast that is most vulnerable to the rising sea levels. Colson planned it that way.
“My father was a big fan of the water all his life,” she said. “I knew he’d want to be in the water.”
Climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions is driving intense weather and rising sea levels across the nation. And the transition to wilder, wetter weather is making the future of America's cemeteries vulnerable. Swaths of cemeteries are already flooding under extreme precipitation levels caused by hurricanes and tropical storms, and the forecasts call for an even more underwater future.
👋 Nicole Fallert here and welcome to Your Week, our newsletter exclusively for Paste BN subscribers (that's you!). This week, we talk with Paste BN National Climate Correspondent Dinah Voyles Pulver about how climate change is coming for our dead.
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The grave situation at cemeteries amid climate change
Pulver drove to Panama City, Florida, in 2021 to research extreme rainfall. While driving around, she came across a flooded cemetery. As any reporter naturally does, she started making a few calls to learn more about the submerged graves.
"I started realizing this happen often with the new regime of rainfall," Pulver said.
As the Gulf of Mexico warms, moist air is rising and pushing across the Northeast causing heavier rainfall than ever before. Areas the previously didn't flood are no longer immune, she said.
And along the coasts, rising sea levels mean that storm surge or a tide can wash away graves near beaches. The West is affected, too: wildfires have destroyed brush, meaning heavy rainfall isn't absorbed.
You may have passed weathered graves before, but experts told Pulver something far more grim is on the horizon. Burial sites could be submerged forever.
"A cemetery represents a community's history," Pulver said. Graves, or lack thereof, tell us a lot about how people lived. They are a guide to how life was, she said.
But as burial sites disappear, climate change threatens efforts to find those stories. This is especially important in the case of Black cemeteries. Pulver spoke with researchers focusing on cataloging these sites, which may not have headstones or marked areas. These experts told her it's especially disturbing to think of these stories being lost to flood waters before the living can even find them.
"In some cases that history is being obliterated if the cemeteries are being washed over before they've had a chance to map the cemetery, or determine whose buried there," she said.
The takeaway: There is going to be a lot of discussion in the future about what to save as climate change puts our infrastructure at risk.
"I think there's going to be a battle for money," Pulver said, as experts battle for the resources to properly research and save sites at risk of being underwater in coming years. And the impact of her reporting is that it shows the personal side of climate change, including new decisions about how and where we want to be buried. Say a family has a shared plot in an area destined to be underwater, she said, would you opt to join them knowing you, too, may be submerged?
Climate change is un-burying graves. It's an expensive, 'traumatic,' confounding problem.
Over the course of her reporting Pulver found many people were surprised and hadn't even heard of the threat of drowning graves.
"It became clear to me like there were a lot of people who didn't know how big of an issue this was," she said, and it's vital that we keep telling stories like these to personalize a very otherworldly thing like climate change.
"It's something we have to prepare for," she said. "We need to be thinking about what's at stake."
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Thank you
How do you feel about maybe being underwater one day? I certainly feel like asking close ones this question after reading Dinah's incredible reporting. Thank you for supporting our journalism with your subscription. Our work wouldn't be possible without you.
Best wishes,
Nicole Fallert