As he walks around his Oakland office near I-880, environmental advocate Brian Beveridge sees obvious issues: diesel exhaust and piles of trash. But he has deeper concerns — literally.
Beveridge, co-founder of West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, is worried about solvents and other chemicals in the soil, a legacy of spills from polluting industries that long operated in West Oakland. If a severe storm rolls in, bringing surging seas and heavy rain, the dormant contamination could be brought back to the surface, drowning the area in a toxic stew.
“We operate with a kind of false sense of security because we’ve been living in a drought for 15 years,” Beveridge said. “Within three months, we could have a flooded neighborhood, emergency crews trying to clear out storm drains, toxic water going into the bay.”
That threat will worsen with a rise in the sea level driven by climate change. On a glossy map propped up against the whiteboard in his office, Beveridge points at West Oakland and Alameda and imagines both inundated with water. The threat of sea-level rise is one of the hazards tracked by the Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS), which predicts the myriad effects that coastal storms and shoreline change could bring.
The modeling system, developed by a team led by Patrick Barnard and Li Erikson of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, combines data from weather services, measurements from monitored sites and detailed data on the shape of the coast and seabed. It also factors in the effects of future sea-level rise and increasing storm intensity to show how those will increase with climate change. The information provides a crucial resource for environmental advocates and city officials planning for the effects of climate change.
Officials in San Mateo County, for instance, turn to the modeling system before purchasing any land parcels, ensuring that they understand risks posed by rising groundwater, erosion and coastal flooding.
“These tools are really, really important for us,” said Isabel Pares Ramos, the county’s senior sustainability specialist.
In the office of Andy O’Neill, an oceanographer and storm modeler, the desk space is taken up by widescreen monitors that she clicks between as she talks. Displayed across them are lines of computer code, a presentation on the modeling system, and maps zoomed in on various Bay Area cities.
A blue sphere floats in the corner of a presentation, showing wind and water movement for the globe. “You can’t go straight from global changes to local impacts without a couple steps,” said O’Neill as she explained how CoSMoS incorporates data from global climate models into local predictions of storm impacts.
Knowing where storms will hit hardest is useful, but planners also need to understand what that means for residents and infrastructure.
“Just showing hazard maps doesn’t really mean a lot to people, but when there are dollars and lives that are tied in, that opens up the discussion with governments,” said Barnard of USGS, which also developed the Hazard Exposure Reporting Analytics tool to show the human and economic effects of storm-impact projections.
Nate Wood, one of its developers, provided a demonstration on a Zoom call from his office in Portland, Oregon. With a mouse click, projected sea levels that incorporate data on storm surges climbed up to 10 feet, bathing cities in the Bay Area in azure.
Further clicks set the map awash with new blocks of color showing how many residents, homes, employees and buildings might end up underwater given potential storm surges and predicted sea level rise.
“It’s setting the scene for more relevant conversations about what people truly value,” Wood said. “And if my data can be part of that conversation, then I’ve done my job.”
One of the major Bay Area assets that’s already being affected by coastal storms is the San Francisco Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant. The El Niño winter of 2009 and 2010 brought storms that caused severe erosion and destroyed parts of the Great Highway, which separates the southern end of Ocean Beach from the plant. The city took drastic measures, protecting the plant with a 425-foot-long embankment of boulders known as riprap.
If the plant were to fail, it would cause sewage to spill straight into the sea, destroying coastal water quality. But in 2011, the California Coastal Commission denied permits to add additional armoring.
“The wastewater treatment plant is in the way of where the coast wants to be,” said Dan Hoover, also with the USGS in Santa Cruz. “So there’s really no way you can protect it in the long term.”
For many people living in parts of the Bay Area most threatened by sea level rise and storm surges, moving isn’t an option, given the costs of relocation.
“Our council strategy so far has been very clear to us: that we should be doing everything possible to protect the coastal shoreline, to protect those communities and to keep people rooted within the community,” said Daniel Hamilton, sustainability and resilience director for the city of Oakland.
In West Oakland, communities asked for a central location to gather during emergencies. This year, Oakland partnered with the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project and other grassroots organizations to fund a resilience hub at 18th and Adeline streets. This includes the DeFremery Recreation Center, the West Oakland Senior Center and West Oakland Branch Library. If flooding were to occur, residents would be able to access resources such as food and electricity to charge their devices.
Oakland is also protecting its waterfront by putting down riprap mixed with eelgrass and native plants to create floodable zones that could prevent water from reaching neighborhoods such as West Oakland.
Working out how best to protect local communities from the ravages of storms and sea level rise depends crucially on tools developed by the USGS and local research organizations, including the San Francisco Estuary Institute, Hamilton said.
Cities “don’t have the ability to do that science independently,” he said.