How Climate Change and El Nino Are Literally Pushing California Off a Cliff
by Zachary Slobig
A 10-story-tall cliff in Pacifica, California, is crumbling as huge chunks of hillside, along with iron and concrete—evidence of years of attempts to fight the inevitable—plummet into the surf below. Perched atop this slow-motion coastal avalanche sits a row of apartment buildings, many now condemned and abandoned as waves spawned by El Niño batter the coast. Officials last week red-tagged at least 20 residences as unsafe for habitation.
El Niño, with its extreme high tides and punishing swells, offers a bleak glimpse into the not-too-distant future for the West Coast, when flooding and erosion will increasingly threaten infrastructure and communities. The clock is ticking loudly, but even in California, a state with the political will to fight climate change, a “stand your ground” mentality dominates coastal planning.
A 2009 study commissioned by state agencies found that if the models of climate scientists prove accurate and sea levels increase 4.6 feet by 2100, half a million Californians and $100 billion in private property and critical infrastructure will be underwater.
In the Bay Area, San Francisco International Airport will vanish, as will a good portion of the city’s financial district along with the entire waterfront. The 101 freeway from south of San Francisco to Google headquarters in Mountain View would be submerged. Most of East Palo Alto would sink into the bay.
“Our work is cut out for us,” said Sarah Newkirk, senior coastal project director with the Nature Conservancy. “It’s not a palatable thing to talk about. People don’t want to talk about neighborhoods and their houses. That doesn’t go over very well. We’ve decided to invest in managed retreat in places that are lightly developed or underutilized—like coastal power plants. We’re looking at those as potential opportunities.”
So far, this year’s El Niño has ripped pylons from piers in Pacifica and Ventura and swamped low-lying roads from San Diego to Santa Cruz. In Los Angeles County, authorities have spent millions of dollars to shore up a vulnerable stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that threatens to tumble into the sea. El Niño storms historically are at their most relentless in February, so the next few weeks will likely continue to test coastal infrastructure.
“We’re growing to know better where the vulnerability is, and the science of sea-level rise isn’t the question,” said Marc Beyeler, a lecturer and researcher in the department of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It’s the social political order and the culture. To Americans, even linguistically it’s antithetical—we don’t retreat, we conquer.”
There are only a few case studies of “managed retreat” to point to on the California coast. But the outcome is undeniable—when structures are pulled back or removed entirely from the coast, the beach erodes and restores itself naturally.
An old Army officer’s club tottering on a bluff above the ocean at Fort Ord near Monterey was demolished in 2001 and its protective seawall dismantled. The beach had shrunk from 300 feet of sand to 11 inches, but without the coastal armoring, the beach has returned. A 2011 project in Ventura, which Beyeler managed while working with the California Coastal Conservancy, moved a bike path and parking lot back from the water’s edge 65 feet and replaced it with sand and cobblestone. Both of those spots are weathering El Niño just fine.
Read more at TakePart.com