Reporter's Notes: Redesigning the Bay
Sea level rise scenarios for San Francisco International Airport.
Click the map to see a larger image.
The most recent estimate looks pretty dire. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), a state planning agency, says it expects San Francisco Bay to rise about 16 inches by 2050, and 55 inches by the end of the century.
The map on this page shows what San Francisco International Airport and the surrounding area would look like, if the bay rose a meter (roughly 36 inches). You can check other maps around the bay as well.
And the real danger of that big rise in bay waters happens during storm season. High tides and storm surges could send that higher water inland, flooding Highway 101 and neighborhoods along the bay. If the bay runs right up to the edge of development and we build sea walls to protect property, then that deep pool of water will have much higher waves, stronger currents and will pound the shoreline much harder than where there is now graduated wetlands. The effect, experts say, would be similar to what happens when you churn up water in a bathtub, and the wave energy quickly builds up and spills over the sides.
Part of the challenge in BCDC’s design competition is to come up with barriers that might absorb some of the power of those waves, instead of simply deflecting those waves with straight walls.
Listen to the Redesigning the Bay radio report online.
2 Comments
The 5 foot rise in the bay by 2100 is VERY optimistic. Even so, the freeways around the bay would be mostly underwater, as would $2-3 Trillion in infrastructure and property. This is why it is time to dike and lock the Golden Gate. Sure, it would cost $15 billion, but it would permanently save all that infrastructure. The other side effect: no more water crisis in SoCal as all that now unneeded fresh water coming through the Delta would have to be diverted. Pays for itself. The Bay used to be an estuary until the Golden Gate developed. We'd just be restoring it!
@Linus Hollis: Bad ideas never die, they just recirculate. The idea to dam the Golden Gate was first proposed in the 1870s by C. E. Grunsky, one of the Bay Area's greatest engineering minds. Grunsky later suggested moving the dams inside the bay, perhaps to the Carquinez Straits, to protect the delta from salinity incursions. Everyone knows about the Reber Plan, the last and most highly articulated version of in-bay dams. The Army Corps desperately did not want to build it, and got funding for the Bay Model to show what a disaster it would create. Today we hear about damming the Golden Gate, one of the most costly ecological disasters in world history. Only possible dam to compare it to: The Three Gorges in China, which would be substantially smaller.