Joe Gaudiana is a busy man these days. His office, a wastewater treatment plant nestled next to the Willams River, looks like a bomb went off.It's been a month since a summer storm dropped eight inches of rain in two days on Ludlow, a village of 2,200, and there is plenty of clean-up still to do."It wasn't even a hurricane or anything. That’s what’s the scary part, it’s just a regular thunderstorm," Gaudiana said.The rainfall that walloped Vermont last month hit Ludlow so hard that floodwaters carried away cars and wiped out roads. It sent mud and debris into homes and businesses and forced officials to close a main road for days.Thankfully, the facility that keeps the village’s drinking water safe was built at elevation and survived. But its sewage plant fared less well. Flooding tore through it, uprooting chunks of road, damaging buildings and sweeping sewage from treatment tanks into the river. Even now the plant can only handle half its normal load.""It was pretty overwhelming but you just have to keep a cool head and think of your next move," he said.It’s not just Ludlow. Water infrastructure across the country is vulnerable as climate change makes storms more unpredictable and destructive, flooding low-lying drinking water treatment plants and overwhelming coastal sewage systems.Wastewater systems are designed for a climate that doesn't exist anymore, explained Sri Vedachalam, a water and climate adaptation expert at Corvius Infrastructure Solutions LLC.A big reason is geography. Wastewater systems — which deal with sewage or stormwater runoff — are often near water bodies because that is where they discharge. But this makes them vulnerable, and with increasingly frequent extreme weather, communities will need to adapt."This is going to be an enduring challenge for our communities," Vedachalam said. "How do we protect ourselves and make sure our people can survive, live, thrive and feel happy about being in that community?"When storms drop inches of rain onto lakes and rivers over a short period of time, water and debris can clog wastewater systems, power can be knocked out, and service disrupted.Government flood maps are not up to date; they don't reflect the risk of flooding in a changing climate. So the risk analysis firm First Street Foundation took a respected climate model and matched it to 5,500 wastewater treatment plants. Then it looked at the possibility of flooding today and 30 years from now.The Associated Press then determined the 25% of plants most at risk currently, and where the situation will worsen the most over time, mapping both.Some metro areas have an especially large proportion of sewage treatment centers at risk if a mega flood occurred today, the AP found. They include: South Bend-Elkhart-Mishawaka, bridging Indiana and Michigan; Charleston-Huntington-Ashland, bridging West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky; Madison-Janesville-Beloit in Wisconsin and Syracuse-Auburn, New York.Drinking water treatment plants are also at risk. Most U.S. cities and towns get drinking water from rivers and lakes, and water treatment plants tend to be near the water bodies from which they draw. Heavy storms can overwhelm systems, break pipes and clog pumping stations.The fact that the nation's water pipes are aging adds to the risk. The engineering society estimates that a water main breaks in the U.S. every two minutes, leading to six billion gallons of lost water each day, or enough to fill 9,000 swimming pools.Recent federal spending packages commit billions of dollars to upgrading the nation's water systems, but the roughly $55 billion for upgrades in the Biden administration's $1 trillion infrastructure law represent a fraction of what's needed to address climate-related risks to water and sewage systems. Part of the reason is that other problems — such as lead pipes — need urgent attention. Often, they have little to do with a changing climate, said Olsen.And while larger cities such as Boston and Chicago can fund new projects in part by raising rates on customers, smaller cities and towns have to find other funding sources — often through state or federal grants — to avoid driving up bills, according to Adam Carpenter, manager of energy and environmental policy at the American Water Works Association.When Tropical Storm Irene battered Vermont twelve years ago, it cut off power — including to Ludlow’s wastewater plant. Officials rebuilt it according to stricter guidelines from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Joe Gaudiana, the village's chief water and sewer operator.They put the plant's backup generator up on a block of concrete the height of a professional basketball player.But July’s deluge knocked the whole block askew and wiped out the generator's controls, rendering it useless. Municipal manager McNamara still isn't sure how that much concrete got moved, or what Ludlow will do next.Gaudiana would like the town to build a V-shaped wall to steer floodwaters away from the critical place he works, protecting people and the river from raw sewage. He called it “simple insurance that would definitely prevent all this."“Unless the wall failed,” he added.