SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.