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Lejeune hurricane aftermath1/17/2024 PRICE: At Lejeune, it's not just buildings that were damaged. UDVARDY: And what the military already knows is that climate change indeed is a national security threat. Other bases, including Parris Island, Naval Air Station Key West and the world's largest naval base in Norfolk, face even greater risks. PRICE: Udvardy was one of the authors of a 2016 report that underlined threats that climate change poses to U.S. And this means more powerful storms, more rising seas and heavy rainfall events. SHANA UDVARDY: What we know with climate change and global warming is that we're going to see more extreme weather events. Shana Udvardy is a climate resilience analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Climate experts say Congress should be prepared to pay for a lot more damage like this to crucial bases. PRICE: He says it must be demolished and replaced with a sturdier, more efficient building farther from the riverfront it sits on now. PRICE: Major General Vincent Coglianese oversees all Marine Corps facilities.ĬOGLIANESE: We don't want to repair a 376,000-square-foot building that really wasn't configured correctly. MAJOR GENERAL VINCENT COGLIANESE: It has 14 separate wings like the old hospitals would have. All told, 70 buildings need major renovations and about 130 will have to be replaced - among them, the main headquarters for East Coast-based fighting forces, which was built in 1942 as a hospital. PRICE: The huge, slow-moving storm first damaged hundreds of roofs on the base and then dumped water inside the buildings for three days. SHOLAR: Clearly, the roof still has some leaks in it, and last night's rain would've leaked some more. He took me inside the now-abandoned headquarters of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. PRICE: Tony Sholar is a civilian with the command that oversees East Coast Marine facilities. This water was - it was dry in here the last time. TONY SHOLAR: Obviously, we've had more water damage from last night. When you drive around the massive base, all you see is dozens and dozens of blue tarps draped over roofs. That's because it just isn't spectacular. JAY PRICE, BYLINE: In the four months since the hurricane, the extraordinary amount of damage to the main East Coast Marine base has kind of flown under the radar. Jay Price of member station WUNC visited the base and found the cost to the military of extreme weather events such as Florence is likely to grow. KELLY: That's the Corps' top officer, General Robert Neller, speaking to lawmakers last month. GENERAL ROBERT NELLER: The total bill comes to about $3.6 billion. Well, military officials finally tallied the cost of that damage. When Hurricane Florence barreled through the southeast four months ago, it wreaked damage on one of the country's most important military bases, the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
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