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Bay Area Schools Face Sea Level Rise Threat

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Flood warning signs are posted at the Mill Valley Middle School staff parking lot on Tuesday, June 4, 2024. In October 2021, Mill Valley Middle School closed down for two days due to flooding and storm damage caused by rain induced flooding and high tides. (Gina Castro/KQED)

View the full episode transcript.

52 Bay Area public schools are already at risk of being inundated with ocean and groundwater, according to a new analysis by KQED and Climate Central. KQED’s Ezra David Romero tells us how the threat of sea level rise has already ignited a debate over rebuilding a middle school in Marin County.


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Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra:  I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. A new analysis from KQED and Climate Central found that more than 50 public schools around the Bay Area are already at risk of sea level rise thanks to human caused climate change. And that includes a middle school in Marin County, where rising water is already at the school’s doorstep.

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Miranda O’Connell: When we drive here or the kids ride their bikes on the bike path here, it is pretty often flooded.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: The high tide line in the San Francisco Bay has risen by eight inches over the last century, and much of the bay shoreline has more flooding in its future. Today we go to one school in Mill Valley that’s already feeling the impact of sea level rise.

Ezra David Romero: I went to Mill Valley in Marin County. It’s this town at the end of Richardson Bay. You know, there’s San Francisco Bay and then there’s Richardson Bay. And this is the very end of it.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Ezra David Romero is a climate reporter for KQED.

Ezra David Romero: It’s a more affluent community, just like Marin County is. And it’s a beautiful place. It’s like kind of this like little mountain valley next to the bay. It’s quite cute. And they have a cute downtown.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I know you went to a public school there. Can you tell me what what school you went to exactly, And what did it look like when you arrived?

Ezra David Romero: Yeah, I went to Mill Valley Middle School. It’s this school literally, like ten, 15, 20ft away from the bay itself. It’s quite beautiful, right? There’s Mt. Tam in the distance. There’s the bay right there. There’s a cute little park in front of the school. It kind of looks just like a regular school to me, right? But just in this serene location right next to the bay.

Miranda O’Connell: Is it? And I think. Yeah. Miranda, Pleasure for having.

Ezra David Romero: Me. I met up with Juliette Hart and Miranda O’Connell. They both have sixth graders going to the school and both had kids who left the school recently.

Miranda O’Connell: So this is in addition to kind of the bike path and the safe routes to school, the community center.

Ezra David Romero: We met up at the school because they are quite concerned about this school district wanting to rebuild that school right in the same place.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: You went to this school because of your sort of broader reporting on sea level rise. But what exactly is happening at Mill Valley Middle School when it comes to sea level rise and how is it affecting people there? Now, what did Miranda and Juliet tell you about that?

Ezra David Romero: Well, this is a place that floods, you know, when we have high tides or extremely high tides because it’s so close to the bay. So basically, the school has a creek that runs on one side. There’s a little marsh, and then there’s like some human made channels. So when there’s a high tide, that water comes up and like floods the road that the one road in and out of campus.

Miranda O’Connell: Yeah. So the main drop off area is in one of the spots that routinely gets flooded.

Ezra David Romero: Miranda showed me the outside of Mill Valley Middle School where it floods. There’s basically one road in and out of campus that ends kind of in this cul de sac. She basically said that, like this area floods multiple times a year.

Miranda O’Connell: And so it just causes a huge safety mass because there’s you can’t drop off the kids there. And so they end up kind of jumping out at random spots on a very busy road.

Ezra David Romero: You know, it creates this like traffic chaos and a quite difficult way to just start your day when you just want to drop off your kids and get to work. And so they’re worried that the school, because the school wants to rebuild there, that they’re just going to put kids in danger in the future and then they’re not actually fixing the problem. There’s been this long debate over whether the school should be rebuilt.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So, I mean, it sounds like the threat of sea level rise is very present for parents and families at Mill Valley Middle. But how does this problem go beyond Mill Valley, this problem of sea level rise affecting schools in the Bay Area specifically?

Ezra David Romero: So this school is like a case example of all the schools around the Bay Area where this could happen. We have 400 plus miles of shoreline. There’s many, many schools in that area. We’ve only had about like eight inches of sea level rise since the industrial revolution. And that’s supposed to speed up as human caused climate change exacerbates and seas rise.

Ezra David Romero: We found that 52 schools around the Bay Area already are at risk of flooding from sea level rise. Whether that’s like groundwater being pushed up or like water actually coming over the shores like we see here at Mill Valley. And that just gets worse as it goes into the future. I linked up with this group called Climate Central. They’re a non advocacy news group.

Ezra David Romero: They have a data journalist named Katie Worth, and we worked on this together. We looked at USGS data around where groundwater is and how it’s going to rise in different places. And then we basically superimposed all that information onto a map. And then we saw all the schools that were at risk. And so what we found, though, is that there’s 52 schools already at risk of groundwater floods linked to sea level rise.

Ezra David Romero: And seven of them also carry the risk of coastal floods, compounding the likelihood that they could be inundated. And by 2050, 16 will have both risks. And the bulk of these schools are pretty much in San Mateo, Alameda and Marin counties, you know, all low lying places, places where there’s like fill. That’s where we like filled in part of the bay. And some of it’s like actually below sea level or just right above it.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah. And so and you’re talking not just about the threat of the bay sort of rising, but also groundwater rising as well. Right. Can you talk about that and kind of explain what experts say about that?

Ezra David Romero: So when we think about sea level rise, we’re often thinking about like, say, the Marshall Islands or somewhere out in the water where the actual ocean. Right. Is like covering land, Right. But groundwater is a phenomenon that scientists are talking about right now.

Ezra David Romero: For the past like five, ten years, that could happen before we see so much water coming over the shore. When you think of the ocean or the bay, you know that water is above ground. Right. But it also saturates the ground underneath the land. So what happens is the seas rise. That water also rises in that ground, that saturated soil.

Ezra David Romero: And we also have groundwater in there, right? Like natural groundwater, shallow groundwater. And so the idea is as seas rise, it can push that groundwater up, become more saturated and eventually become emergent or right flooding inland.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I know you also talked with some experts for this story. What do experts say about how they see the threat of sea level rise potentially impacting schools?

Kevin Befus: Schools haven’t dealt with this issue before.

Ezra David Romero: I talked to Kevin Befus a lot about this. You know, he’s an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas Department of Geosciences, and he studied the hydrology of the Bay Area lot, specifically for USGS, creating the maps that we used for our story.

Kevin Befus: Do you get a storm, a 20 year storm, So it has a 5% chance of happening in any given year. A 5% chance storm in a year could make the school an island almost.

Ezra David Romero: When I talked to Kevin about how schools are going to be impacted by this, he thought about like high water days, kind of like foggy day schedules or snow days.

Kevin Befus: Those sort of events, I think will become more and more common for these schools along the coast. The administrators will have to be keeping track of tides, the king tides and the size of storms coming through and be ready to to have a high water day.

Ezra David Romero: He sees this as an imminent threat to schools, to businesses, to highways all around the Bay Area, because as seas rise. Right, it’s going to affect everything around that lap of the bay. For example, at Mill Valley, they want to raise the school five feet above the 100 year storm level where it can be put in flood really bad. But he is saying like the school can raise it. But what about everything around it, like the roads, the community?

Kevin Befus: I think the cost will be astronomical no matter what. A lot of this happens so slowly that I think that’s why people don’t necessarily think of that right away. It’s not on the front of their mind until it’s their house. It’s their car. It’s their school.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, the plan to rebuild Mill Valley Middle School. Stay with us.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I want to come back, Ezra, to where we started in this story. Mill Valley. You already described the threat of sea level rise being imminent for parents and the students at that school. So what exactly is being done to address that?

Ezra David Romero: Yeah, well, the community in Mill Valley voted on a bond measure called Measure G back in 2022, and it was for like $194 million to modernize and beautify schools in Mill Valley. So the school district decided they wanted to use a portion of that money. $130 million would go to rebuilding Mill Valley Middle School.

Sharon Nakatani: It’s very, very expensive, too. So we are taking it very seriously. We are a medical share.

Ezra David Romero: I met up with Sharon Nakatania. She’s the board president for the Mill Valley School District.

Sharon Nakatani: And this is our, you know, it’s a really large library, actually, for a middle school.

Ezra David Romero: We are we toured the campus and, you know, she showed me the area that floods. We thought we had like the cool library they have. And she talked about their plans.

Sharon Nakatani: Now we have deemed the school is has reached its age and it will be demolished and rebuilt in the same spot.

Ezra David Romero: What they want to do is they want to raise that school about five feet above the 100 year storm. That’s basically like a historic big storm, you know, that could flood the area. So they believe that they’re raising the school out of the risk from future sea level rise.

Sharon Nakatani: I think there’s a plan to for what we can demolish from this building. We will use this film to to raise the site.

Ezra David Romero: Sharon told me that, like, you know, there are other sites, but there’s like an existing school there. So they’d have to like, figure out what to do with this elementary school. And then there could be uproar from parents about like, you’re moving our kids. And so they felt like this site is still the best site even with future sea level rise because point blank, they just didn’t feel like they had the land and or the money to like go buy some new land and also have the money to rebuild this school.

Sharon Nakatani: To do a new middle school in Mill Valley. Again, 10 to 12 acres. So there’s no available flat land. That’s 10 to 12 acres. There might be hills that are really accessible. But when you look at the larger picture of Mill Valley, this school is really right in the middle, which is why.

Ezra David Romero: So when I asked her about, you know, what about the road that that currently floods or, you know, the community around it. Her answer was like, it’s not in the school’s purview.

Sharon Nakatani: The sea level rise is everyone’s issue, frankly, and it’s up to us to do what we can for our school and our students. And it’s also up to the city to do what we can for the residents and for the county Marin to do and say to California, etc., etc..

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: But I know it’s very contentious among parents. Right. What do you what do they say about the decision to build on this same spot? And what are the parents you spoke with want to see instead?

Ezra David Romero: Yeah, the parents I spoke to, you know, Juliet and Miranda, they were quite angry that this school district still wants to build on this site.

Miranda O’Connell: These are long lived assets that we built. So why are we building something that we know in 20 years will be vulnerable, will be have standing water surrounding it? Why aren’t we thinking about places that don’t have that risk?

Ezra David Romero: So a few months ago when I interviewed Miranda, you know, she had an eighth grader at the school and she was just quite tired of seeing the flooding happening. Right. She was living through it multiple times a year. And so she was really worried about the future. Right. She has another sixth grader coming into the campus this year.

Miranda O’Connell: So I have one that’s leaving and then I have one that’s starting this coming school year for the three year period and another one starting in two years for an additional three year period. Yeah, you’re.

Ezra David Romero: Going to deal with this for a while.

Miranda O’Connell: For the next six years. Yeah.

Ezra David Romero: She was worried about like the kids having to be at the school as they rebuild this site and into the future as as. CS Right. So she had like concerns about right now and into the future. And when I interviewed Juliet Harte the same day, you know, she has a sixth grader coming into the school. Her concern was really about sea level rise.

Miranda O’Connell: I look at this site and think sea level rise because that’s what I do. But it’s not surprising to me that people haven’t thought of that. What’s surprising to me is that now that they know they’re still moving forward.

Ezra David Romero: Professionally, she’s actually like an oceanographer, so she knows how much sea level rise is going to impact the school. She knows how many feet and by what year and what time. So she was just really worried about the future because, you know, when you think about climate change all day and what’s it going to do to the Bay Area, then your kids go to a school right next to the bay. I mean, I think those two things coincide.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Right? And her her sixth grader who’s starting there this year is going to have a couple more years at that school. So, I mean, it sounds like these parents basically want the district to find somewhere else to rebuild.

Ezra David Romero: Yeah, they want the school district or build the school somewhere else. But the school district, when I talked to Sharon Nakatani, she basically said it’s a done deal. Like this is where we’re rebuilding the school. We’ve look, we’ve exhausted all of our other options. We’ve been in many meetings about this, but I think the last thing that’s might determine what happens there is in this environmental review.

Ezra David Romero: So, you know, every building project, you know, in in the state has to go through environmental review when you know, when it’s in the process and that they look at everything from like sea level rise to flooding to storms to what’s a site like? What’s the hydrology there? One also caveat about this site. It’s on an old city dump site.

Ezra David Romero: So like under the school, it’s a bunch of dump material, trash and stuff like that. The school measures how much methane is coming off of that site every day. So they’re paying attention to that. So there’s a lot of concerns at this site. I’m not sure where it’ll go from here.

Ezra David Romero: I could see and I think the parents are really hoping that, you know, this environmental review that like state regulators will really think about this site, especially when it comes to the dump. There’s a lot of factors here that are going on. And I think it’ll just we’ll see what’s going to happen in the next couple of months or maybe a year or so.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: When we’re talking about these schools, right. That are built to last 50 years, what should be done in order to really address and and adapt to. The threat of sea level rise.

Ezra David Romero: A lot of my reporting, we look at like an individual cases like this in Mill Valley. But really solutions for sea level rise are regional, right? Or citywide, Right. Like in San Francisco, we’re thinking about a whole waterfront sea level rise plan for seven and a half miles of the of the bay. And then there’s other plans for other areas, Right?

Ezra David Romero: It’s like this huge thing. So something for Mill Valley or another part of the bay. They need to think about this regionally. Well, when it comes to schools, they can do whatever is in their purview, like how much money they have and they can raise the school. But, you know, not all schools have that luxury, right?

Ezra David Romero: It costs a lot of money to build a school or in this case, they’re going to spend $130 million to rebuild this school, which is a lot of money. Right. For especially for community that doesn’t have that kind of funds or maybe isn’t in an affluent area where they can pass a bond measure to do that. And Kevin Befus from the University of Arkansas talked about that.

Kevin Befus: It ends up being for those who can afford to protect themselves well, and those who can’t, you know, end up with the extra water.

Ezra David Romero: I mean, I think what our reporting does right, we’re like we lay out what schools are at risk. Right? We found these 52 schools. There’s of each has a varying level of risk. But when you think of a school, they’re really like a community center, right. If this school is in danger from sea features, sea level rise or current sea level rise or current flooding, then the entire community or large portions of it might be. In some way. Our analysis is like a red flag for these communities to pay attention about what’s to come.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Ezra, thank you so much.

Ezra David Romero: Hey, thanks for having me.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Ezra David Romero, a climate reporter for KQED. We’re going to leave you a link to Ezra’s story in our shownotes, which includes graphics of where schools will be impacted by sea level rise. This 30 minute conversation with Ezra was cut down and edited by senior editor Alan Montecillo. It was produced and scored by me. Music Courtesy of Audio Network.

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Ericka Cruz Guevarra: The Bay is a production of listener supported KQED Public Media. If you liked this episode or you learn something new, consider sharing it with a friend. Word of mouth is one of the best ways that you can support our show. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you next time.

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