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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday August 12 2019, @03:27PM
Boston will be alright. Its current downtown is high enough, such that if some areas along the Charles or Back Bay flood they can raise those areas with fill. If flooding outpaces the rate of remediation, then downtown can migrate further up the peninsula Boston sits on where there is high ground; it's the same high ground, incidentally, that permitted the American revolutionaries to shell the British occupying force in the city into surrender.
It should be noted that while some cities experience erosion of their shores, others see the important seaside retreat untenably farther away. Ephesus falls into that camp. It used to sit on the sea in Roman times, but now that sea is several miles away because silt from its river built up and pushed it back.
One constant is that human civilization adapts.
What happens with ecosystems as the climate changes, as the extra solar radiation trapped by the CO2 in the atmosphere drives extreme weather and climatic shifts, is more concerning. Ultimately life will find a way because it's damn tenacious stuff. But will humans still be along for the ride?
Washington DC delenda est.