Hey, there! Log in / Register
Another Long Flood
By adamg on Fri, 03/22/2019 - 9:38pm
As has become usual during nor'easters, Long Wharf flooded this afternoon. Human, Actual Size surveyed the briny deep where people normally walk.
@universalhub Long Wharf on the short side at 1:10 pm. pic.twitter.com/00nS844WJN
— Human, Actual Size (@Multimodalmama) March 23, 2019
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Who's
Going to be paying the billions in aid for the seaport when a Nor'Easter hits during an astronomical high tide and floods/wrecks the 100 billion dollar "New Venice"?
Marty? BPDA?
Q: who's paying for the billions in aid? A: Massachusetts is.
Federal Emergency Management Agency is supposed to be paying a $10 million grant to Boston.
If Quincy wants any of those sweet, sweet Boston climate change mitigation funds then they'll play nice & let Boston rebuild the Long Island Bridge.
https://boston.cbslocal.com/2018/10/17/boston-climate-change-sea-levels-...
Governor Baker authorized the $1.4 billion bond bill:
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/boston-mayor-outlines-plan-to-prote...
The legislation was announced in Scituate, the long-suffering, battered wife of a Massachusetts coastal town (they got the Ellis Estates back though!)
https://www.mass.gov/news/baker-polito-administration-files-legislation-...
https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/03/15/baker-climate-plan
Who knew?
Magoo knew.
Have you seen the Boston SCAPE project?
Carefully planned changes that are cost-effective. SCAPE is a credible grade A planning firm. When you get the pseudo designers & fear mongers like MAPC, Utile, and Boston Harbor Now stoking fear and making unscientific drawings, the rhetoric drives up the costs.
It's only going to get worse, and quickly
At some point Boston will have to reckon with the fact that efforts to prevent sea level rise have been a failure, so attention must be turned to dealing with the consequences, which for Boston will devastating. The geography of Boston Harbor and the islands would seemingly make some kind of a partly movable dam a real possibility. It could be built from Deer Island to Long Island and from Long Island to Moon Island or from Deer Island across an island or two to Hull, which would additionally protect Quincy, Weymouth, and Hingham. Of course the project would cost many billions of dollars, but what is all that endangered real estate worth?
Revere, Hull, Quincy, Salisbury
This would be an excellent time for Quincy to rethink it's resistance to Boston rebuilding the Long Island bridge.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/06/18/sea-level-rise-massachusetts-homes
I agree with your first
I agree with your first sentence, not so much with the rest. Dams that would cost in the tens of billions $ would only back a few feet worth of sea level rise. What happens after that?
That's enough
Sea level rise even at it's most catastrophic, has limits. A 20' dike across the harbor would do a lot and save the city for maybe a hundred years. Long enough to get to a day where new technologies can be used to mitigate climate change.
Agreed
If sea levels rise 10 or 20 feet, it's a catastrophe, but for some cities, it's manageable. (Boston, with a relatively high tidal range and solid bedrock, is one of these. Miami, with minimal tides and limestone underlying, well, is in more trouble.)
If they rise 100 feet, it's cataclysmic. Hills in Everett, Revere, Somerville, Brookline and Boston become the new Harbor Islands. The new shoreline moves to Roslindale, Milton, Newton, Arlington and Medford.
Reality
You know that sea levels only rose 2 centimeters in the last 100 years right?
You should ask your imaginary kids
to explain about what the difference in carbon output between 1919 and today is. If you wanted to understand this issue, which I'm not sure if you do. Don't worry, Joe Rogan is there for you.
Okay
The sea levels only rose 2 centimeters in the last 100 years.
Pay attention.
Context tells the truth, out of context tells falsehoods
Look at the graph is on this NASA website showing sea level rise since 1880. It shows both a consistent rise but one that is increasing in the rate of rise. It also shows that the sea level has risen 225 mm, or 22.5 cm (thanks Waquoit) or 8.85 inches.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
NOAA reports 1/8 of inch per year - meaning 8 years equals a rise of 1 inch, 16 years equals 2 inches, etc.
But then NASA and NOAA are probably of the deep state that is controlled by the globalist Jewish Tri-lateral Commission world banking masters who are the servants of environmentalists who themselves are slaves to aliens that want to turn the Earth back to the Middle Ages.
At the rate that sea levels are rising - if they continue to rise - the rate and amount will continue to increase. Melting of the polar caps is not an arithmetic progression. It is closer to a geometric progression as more ice is exposed to heat more ice melts into water causing the sea levels to rise faster. I would leave to scientists who are versed in both mathematical progressions and the rate and form of ice caps melting.
It's important to provide facts and tell the truth. Just saying that sea levels rose only 22 cm in the past 100 years is the kind of statement that Trump would make.
Yup
2 centimeters.
That is what I said.
The problem with quoting
The problem with quoting numbers without context is that it easy to imply utterly false conclusions. Straight out of the Trump-Cohn-Rove-Atwater-McCarthy playbook.
According to the EPA (of all agencies given Trump's campaign against it) global average absolute sea level change from 1880-2015 is over 9 inches.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-sea-level
From the National Geographic site, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/sea-level-...
Since most folks writing today will be dead by 2100 maybe it's a problem that can be kicked down the road. Perhaps the Libertarian attitude, "If it doesn't affect me, then I don't care" is what we should all adopt.
Sea Levels are rising. The increase in sea levels is cumulative. The oceans are reclaiming the land. We can either keep our heads in the sand until the sea floods the sand and drowns us; or we can take action to stop our own destruction.
Anyone who has grandchildren is looking at the grandchildren, and their great grand children living in a miserable world - trashed by our actions and ignorance.
You both cited a math error
225 mm is 22.5 cm, or between 8 and 9 inches.
And we were told metric would be easier!
Thanks
Thanks for the correction.
Another big chunk of missing context for the fact-free post
Severity and frequency of storms.
This flooding I see in these pictures is not consistent with the tide level. It is consistent with the tides that I've seen at about a foot above that tide level.
We missed the flooding that NYC got by a handful of hours in 2012. We had flooding like that on a dead low tide.
The most recently damaging flooding resulted from storm surges on top of high tides on top of sea level rise. That's what we need to worry about.
WRONG!
Sea levels are not rising the same amount everywhere.
The geologic rebound rate is not the rate controlling factor anymore.
Sea levels are rising more sharply in colder regions due to that sciency thing where non-frozen water tends to expand as it warms up.
Sea levels are rising more quickly in areas where currents have slowed due to arctic warming - like HERE
SOME ACTUAL FACTS FOR OUR AREA: (not that you let actual scientific facts bother you, like, ever)
Yeah, I know - the metric system are COMMUNISTIC
https://www.whoi.edu/main/topic/sea-level-rise
https://www.mass.gov/service-details/massachusetts...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/25/sea-l...
I guess you'll just be KapeKnodpiece, yelling Nihao at the tide?
Okay
Your chart looks to me like the sea level rose 2 centimeters.
That is what I said.
Pay attention.
Someone flunked 5th grade math
The chart is marked in METERS
Centimeter = 1/100 of a meter
Over the span of the chart is a mean rise of nearly half a meter.
Around 40-50 centimeters depending on whether you are looking at the trend line or the recent upturns with less influence on the trend lines.
You redacted the facts
No.
Over the span of the chart is a RELATIVE mean rise of nearly half a meter.
The mean rise is 2 centimeters.
Nice try
Let's look at the tape
You are looking at ACTUAL DATA - not projections. Yet you keep saying that 30 cm in 100 years is 2cm.
You either cannot understand how to communicate denominators like one learns to do in late elementary grades or you are just that unable to read a chart of observed data in any normal way. 30cm is not 2cm.
See you again in 5th grade next year? Or is that when you dropped out?
Nope
Nope
You posted relative trend data.
The actual data is 2 centimeters.
Read Waquiot
2 mm per year equals 200 in 100 years. That means 20 cm, not 2 cm over 100 years. 20 cm is nearly 8 inches. An 8 inch rise as the average sea level is a lot. That is a lot of water.
Here is another graph that does a good job of showing what to expect:
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html
This sounds like an argument against Trump who calls himself a genius. The same man who claims he knows more about international security than all the people employed at the government security agencies.
My bad
Let it be known that I am not to be trusted with the metric system.
You are, of course, 100 percent correct.
More important is that I buy it.. and I pretty much do. I have been around for a majority of those 100 years and 10 centimeters is not beyond reason from what I witness.
On the flippyflip, I have seen normal erosion eat hundreds of feet away from coastlines in my life. Battery Taylor on Long Island had about 400 feet to the high tide line in the 70s. I have a picture of myself in front of it back then. Now the center of it is the high tide line. However, if you check the seawalls around the fort end, you cannot even tell there was a four inch rise in the last 50 years.
All these bomb tossers
don't realize that this is nothing new. Rowes Wharf, Long Wharf, Fort Point and Haymarket have been flooding for years. BPL has photos of these places under water going back to the 40's and 50's.
It wasn't until these lots were developed and people were foolish enough to spend big bucks on luxury condos did we start hearing concerns on flooding.
You bought waterfront property, live with it.
Expensive boondoggle
NYC is in a fjord, so flood gates would work for them. All this would do in Boston is back the water in to the coastal inlets to the north and south, and that water would come right around and back in. People who say these things have no idea of topography or the fundamentally estuarine nature of our coastline.
I've seen the projects in other places - they only work where you don't have an entirely flat space. We have nearly entirely flat coastline. Even the MOSES in Venice hooks up to hills at the far sides.
Boston would be far better off to adopt a Seattle 1890 approach: fill in the flats around the buildings to a height of one story. Other than that, there are extreme equity issues involved with spending so much for so little in Boston when there are other areas in the state with far more pressing climate adaptation needs - like the need for electricity that is reliable or riverine flooding protection and drought resistant water supplies and water management (1/4 of MA is on well water).
I just want to make sure you know
That there are other ways for water to get to Manhattan than the Verrazano Narrows.
Yes and No
Any scheme would have to deal with water coming down the Hudson and East rivers, sure. But that's a technical issue that the Dutch seemed to have solved for the Rhine. Note that this is also an issue with the Charles and the Mystic, which have limited ability to pump water coming downstream up and over water coming up.
It is a ridiculous idea that Boston could be saved by this. NYC topography is vastly different. Flanking is far more remote a possibility for NYC than water pouring into Belle Isle Marsh or the Fore and Back Rivers is for Boston. The only people I know who take this scheme in Boston seriously are people who want to make a shitfuckton of money on it. Profiteering off of fear is the American way! Technically it is a joke - and the cost versus other options is really a non-starter.
NY
Is far from being a fjord.
Um, the italicized parts of my comment
are literally copy and pasted from the linked WBUR article reporting on the study.
SeeLevel
Umm...could you all explain to me how a city built upon filled swampland is gonna spend money forcible taken from people to reduce the usual for this part of the world storm tides???
Maybe I'm as dense as a city hall paver,but I just don't see how you would hold back the tide with a flood of legislated theft...
In other words ...
I got mine, the rest of you can die.
If you don't like how the city is preparing (or not) for sea-level rise, work for candidates who agree with you.
Who should pay? Those who benefit the most.
Nearly 10 years ago the Fort Point Channel rise was already high enough to flood the sidewalks in front of the Federal Courthouse. Apparently this was a day when there was a perfect storm kind of events where a full moon, a storm at sea and hight tide were at play.
But perfect storms are not one time events.
Given the increasing rate of sea level rise the urgency of downtown flooding should be seen as immediate. But with a nation where part of the political base keeps its head in the sand will it take destruction at the level of New Orleans and New York AGAIN to get more action than just a lot of conferences and words?
The Koch brothers, huge investors and the other members of the plutocracy benefit directly from the wealth created in coastal cities. But affording to live wherever they choose they can avoid the destruction and deaths that coastal flooding will cause.
For both of those reasons they are the people who should pay for securing coastal cities against destruction from rising sea levels.
We should do nothing.
No government bailouts. The property owners can rely on insurance.
Why should we do anything when someone loses on a risky investment?
Massive recession
Have you had to rely upon insurance for massive damages? I have. They do their best to underpay.
Honest question
This is all happening on land that was reclaimed/filled in within the last 100-150 years, right?
Long Wharf has been there since early settlement
Possibly even longer.
This map was 1760s:
Flooding will be a problem in filled areas first, as they were just filled enough to make them dry. The issue here is that flooding is getting more frequent and going further inland over time.
Sea level rise BELOW normal but flood insurance available
Despite the good news on sea level rise, flood insurance is still available for those buying or building near the coast. In fact, it was over half a century ago that the inherent, undeniable risk of building near the coast led to the passage of the National Flood Insurance Act, long before the birth of the
Global WarmingClimate Change industry.That's nice pops
Shawmut...
Some historical context is called for here.
Boston is an island at high tide.
At low tide,Boston Neck was the only road(path) to the mainland(Roxbury).
Since the days of the Shawmut,men have been wharfing out and filling in the tidelands(Back Bay,Fort Point,South Cove/Bay and even something once called Commonwealth Flats(Seaport)to expand the little island into a city.
No matter how much money is confiscated from the producers,our government cannot control the tides or weather.
If what you believe were true,meaning man can change the weather,why have we not made use of this ability and made it easier to grow more food and therefore make it easier for all of mankind?
Could you explain the glaciers(that gave New England these wonderful geographic features) that covered most of North America( including Boston) and why did they recede?
Just looking for some answers...
Ocean nuclear explosions solve the problem?
Glacial recession is based upon global warming regardless of the causes of the warming. That is my layman's understanding. But an expert is the person to give a fuller answer.
What is important however is to not simplify and just think that this is some normal pattern and all will be well.
Possibly one of the best examples of how air pollution (which includes too much CO2) is the summer of 1816 when a volcano disrupted the weather patterns to the point of global famine.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer#Effects)
Just as too much cold will destroy so will too much heat.
Global warming is not a natural cycle of the Earth's atmospheric changes. It is a human made forcing into the atmosphere of the particulates that prevent heat from leaving the Earth. The result is too much heat causing glacial melting resulting in higher sea levels, worse hurricanes and changing climates.
Perhaps all these things combines can still balance themselves out. But inevitably there will be additional crisis. Volcanic eruptions and more massive forest fires throwing yet more particles that keep heat inside the atmosphere.
Shifting growing seasons, increased insect and disease destruction due to higher temperatures in the breadbox regions.
One solution is possible: explode a few nuclear bombs in the middle of the ocean floor. Create holes so massive that much of the oceans will sink into those whole reducing the sea levels as they impact coasts.
That was part of the early promise of nuclear weapons after all. Use one nuclear bomb to do the digging that would otherwise take thousands of human beings over years.
Imagine how much cheaper expanding the Panama Canal or creating other canals reducing transportation costs of goods if we used nuclear bombs to do the initial digging?
Yeah, I foresee absolutely no
Yeah, I foresee absolutely no unforeseen problems with a massive unprecedented nuclear earthscaping project.
Insurance?
Insurance companies do their best to underpay no matter the actual cost. Massive flooding would itself be a major drain upon insurance companies even if they pay the least. The retail insurers would then need to call upon the re-insurers. What happens if the re-insurers don't have enough money?
Then the property owners have to suck it up.
Katrina was great enough of a disaster that the retail insurers had to call upon their re-insurers. To maintain capitalization those companies had to issue new stock to keep afloat.
If the northeast coast was flooded there would just not be enough money to rebuild. That would lead to massive, massive to the degree that we can not imagine, numbers of people loosing their homes and being homeless. One stadium would not be enough for temporary housing.
One silver lining: This would be the biggest boom for the construction industry ever. It would make the Olympics look like a tiny project in comparison
Problem: Once the insurance companies go under who would pay the billions if not trillions in property damage?
For super-storms only
Insurance carriers will pass on the price of increased flooding probability to the consumer. Sea-level rise may even prove profitable for insurance carriers, at least in aggregate.
Super storms that concentrate losses in one area are a concern, of course, but it's not clear that even rising frequency of these "CAT" storms will severely damage carriers. Some sort of massive loss, or a series of large losses, would need to intersect with shared and under-priced exposures in the RE market (think 2008 credit default swaps) to truly imperil the industry.
Insurance?
This wound up repeated; please ignore.
Increase in storms and hurricanes
Missing from this discussion has been the effect of additional free floating water in the oceans upon the strength of hurricanes and storms. The more water in the ocean the greater the greater the amount of energy in the ocean. That will result in both more evaporation and stronger hurricanes happening more frequently. That is proven by the storms and hurricanes of the past 10 years.
The disastrous flooding in the mid-west is proof of the problem.
The proof that that too much freely flowing water in the ocean is disastrous to urban and rural environments is there for anyone to see.
But just as many folks deny the utter corruption of the Trump organization they choose to stick their heads in the sand. They are the first who will drown when the beaches disappear while their heads are stuck in the sand.
Dredging?
Could be that the harbor dredging is exacerbating this trend.