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With nowhere to hide from rising seas, Boston prepares for a wetter future
Boston dodged a disaster in 2012. After Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New Jersey and New York, the superstorm hit Boston near low tide, causing minimal damage. If Sandy had arrived four hours earlier, many Bostonians would have been ankle to hip deep in seawater.
Across the globe, sea levels are rising, delivering bigger storm surges and higher tides to coastal cities. In Boston, the most persistent reminder comes in the form of regular "nuisance" flooding — when seawater spills onto roads and sidewalks during high tides. Those nuisance events are harbingers of a wetter future, when extreme high tides are predicted to become a daily occurrence.
"The East Coast has been riding a post-Sandy mentality of preparing and responding before the next big one," says Robert Freudenberg, an environmental planner at the Regional Plan Association, an urban research and advocacy firm based in New York City. But a more enduring kind of threat looms. "Sea level rise is the flooding that doesn't go away," he says. "Not that far in the future, some of our most developed places may be permanently inundated."
And Boston, for one, is not waiting to get disastrously wet to act. In the seven years since Hurricane Sandy's close call, the city-run Climate Ready Boston initiative has devised a comprehensive, science-driven master plan to protect infrastructure, property and people from the increasingly inevitable future of storm surges and rising seas. The famously feisty city intends to be ready for the next Sandy as well as the nuisance tides that promise to become the new normal, while other U.S. coastal cities are trying to keep up.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 11 2019, @11:27AM (8 children)
This has been happening to cities throughout the world since there have been cities. The "why"? Yeah, knowing who to blame isn't going to keep your feet dry in Boston. Have a look around. There are plenty of examples of both how to deal with it and how to fuck it up. Hell, New Orleans is both.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 11 2019, @11:58AM (5 children)
Most of the country of the Netherlands... and along the North Sea coast in Germany they build "Koogs" - farmland reclaimed from the sea. Not exactly the most pleasant country I ever bicycled through in the summer, hot humid still air between the dikes, but, hey, productive farmland, so...
My observation of coastal development is that the "good" coastland gets developed first: deep water near shore with steep banked high ground. In Florida these settlement areas are generally easy to spot. The newer developments make do with less desirable lower lying more swampy land and the never built lots are often the worst examples of drainage problems.
In Houston, industrial pumping of groundwater has led to "subsidence" where entire neighborhoods lose many feet of elevation - sinking them into Galveston bay. Some have been condemned and abandoned due to persistent flooding problems that didn't exist when they were first built.
It's simple enough to survey elevations, predict tides, storm surges, and even some climate induced sea level rise (see recent articles about the slowing Gulf Stream and its impact on the US east coast...) What's not so cheap or easy is building infrastructure like the Netherlands which can reliably withstand storm water levels and wave action. And, yeah, for an example of what "not quite good enough" gets you, check out New Orleans.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:41PM (3 children)
New Orleans and Katrina, and "not quite good enough"?
Fact is, NO's infrastructure was good enough, until it was sabotaged. The worst breach happened where the dept of water and sewers had previously removed two panels, then replaced them without stabilizing the earth under and around them. That was in the Industrial canal. Link after link that I click on now, claims that the water came OVER the canal walls - which is false. That water first went under the wall, where the soil had been disturbed. After those two panels were undermined, they fell away, then the water washed out adjacent panels in turn.
As for the other, less serious breaches? The Army Corps of Engineers had been trying to upgrade the system, for years. But, the Sierra Club had all of that tied up in court, based on theories that the upgrades would ruin fishing, and other outdoor activities in the area.
I am convinced that if the Industrial canal had not been previously undermined, NO would have survived Katrina with only a fraction of the damage that did occur. Once Industrial was breached, the pumps went down in rapid succession, until power was lost completely. Without electric power and pumping stations, NO was doomed.
I can't refute your or Buzzard's statements, but I would like for people to remember the how, as much as the what.
Focusing less on specifics, I would also like to point out a generality. If a city relies on electrical power to prevent or aid in controlling flooding, then it really, really, REALLY needs to build the electrical infrastructure so that flooding can't short it out. NO and Katrina demonstrates that once the power goes, there's no magical, instant recovery. From that point, you just go along for the ride, and hope you survive.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:40PM (2 children)
This is a lesson also demonstrated in Fukushima...
The Sierra Club and friends have some very valid points about ecological change (and in the short term ecological change usually presents as damage) brought about by diversion of the Mississippi waters and sediments. These are some of the "hidden" additional costs of the ACOE projects: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/louisianas-disappearing-coast [newyorker.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 11 2019, @05:43PM (1 child)
That's an unexpectedly superb article. There are a lot of facts that are important, but even better, is the overall perspective. Those members who complain about walls of text need not bother with it, LOL!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday August 11 2019, @09:53PM
Walls of text? No wonder they got flooded.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:18PM
That's why they're called the 'Low Countries'.
The system you describe is/was modern farming practice. Pre-WWI there was an extensive network in place of dykes, sluices and sluice gates in a system where [parts of] those low-lying lands periodically were flooded with sea water. This served both as fertilizer and as a way to prevent flooding of the built area. On October 25, 1914, that knowledge was used to create a partial inundation along the Yzer river, establishing the Western Front. The whole system (in Flanders, Belgium) got destroyed during that war, while the Netherlands turned course after a disastrous large-scale flooding in 1953 [wikipedia.org], which demolished nearly half of all dykes in the South-Western part of the country, displacing over 100,000 people.
Since the 90s there's a trend underway to revert back to this pre-WWI system, due to flooding concerns, mainly. If you're ever visiting Antwerp, you might enjoy a bike trip through those polders: take about any (free) water ferry across the Scheldt river and you'll enter "polder" territory, now turned into nature reserve.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by c0lo on Monday August 12 2019, @03:24AM (1 child)
What exactly is is "this" that is supposedly "happening to cities throughout the world"?
'Cause... when was the last time La Paz suffered floods due to sea level rising?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 12 2019, @02:17PM
"This" = "Having to deal with water levels higher than you'd like them to be in relation to your city/nation/sandcastle/etc..." smartass.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.