Submitted via IRC for Bytram
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: 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.