High-tide flooding worsens, more pollution carried to sea

A Charleston, South Carolina resident removes debris from a drain during tidal flooding in October 2015. The city now experiences 50 days of "sunny day" flooding a year.
A Charleston, South Carolina resident removes debris from a drain during tidal flooding in October 2015. The city now experiences 50 days of “sunny day” flooding a year. PAUL ZOELLER/THE POST AND COURIER VIA AP

As sea levels rise, high-tide flooding is becoming a growing problem in many parts of the globe, including cities on the U.S. East Coast. Now, new research shows that as these waters recede, they carry toxic pollutants and excess nutrients into rivers, bays, and oceans.

JIM MORRISON reports for Yale environment 360


As high-tide flooding worsened in Norfolk, Virginia in recent years, Margaret Mulholland, a biological oceanographer at Old Dominion University, started to think about the debris she saw in the waters that flowed back into the Chesapeake Bay. Tipped-over garbage cans. Tossed-away hamburgers. Oil. Dirty diapers. Pet waste.

“This water is coming up on the landscape and taking everything back into the river with it,” says Mulholland, a professor in the Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences. “I was thinking how no one is counting this stuff (as runoff pollution). It drove me nuts.”

Nuts enough that she decided to sample those waters. That’s why on a recent Saturday morning she was steering her Chevy Bolt EV toward a narrow, flooded ribbon of Norfolk’s 51st Street at high tide. Marsh grasses bordered an inlet of the Lafayette River on one side of the street. A line of houses set back from the street rose on the other. Soon she came upon an overturned trash can, its contents underwater. A few feet away was a box. She opened it, and inside was a toilet. “Oh, this is good,” she said, pulling out her phone for a photo.

It’s an apt metaphor for her pioneering research project, which she has dubbed Measure the Muck.

With global sea levels steadily rising — already up 8 inches in the past century and now increasing at an average of 1.3 inches per decade — the incidence of high-tide “sunny day” or “blue sky” flooding is on the rise, especially along the U.S. East Coast. Those flooding events now routinely wash over sections of cities, and when the waters recede they take with them an excess of nutrients and a toxic mix of pollutants that flows into rivers, bays, and oceans.

Norfolk, which experienced fewer than two days of high-tide flooding annually in the early 1960s, had 14 in 2017. In Wilmington, North Carolina, tidal flooding grew to 84 days in 2016, up from two days 50 years ago. In Lewes, Delaware at the mouth of Delaware Bay, flooding days have topped 25 in recent years, a five-fold increase over a decade ago.


In Charleston, South Carolina, the incidence of sunny day flooding increased to 50 days in 2016, up from four days annually 50 years ago, causing millions of dollars in damage and disrupting travel to the city’s hospital district.

In Miami, sunny day flooding is becoming increasingly severe, accelerating to nearly 20 days a year. In Philadelphia, tidal flooding due to rising sea levels was responsible for 83 out of 120 days of flooding from 2005 to 2014.

An overturned trash can sits in high-tide floodwaters on 52nd Street in Norfolk, Virginia. MARGARET MULHOLLAND

According to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), high-tide flooding frequency along the southeastern coast of the United States rose 160 percent from 2000 to 2017. And with sea levels expected to rise another 3 to 6 feet by 2100 because of melting ice sheets and glaciers, scientists warn that much worse is to come. NOAA projects that as many as 85 days of high-tide flooding will occur annually along the southeastern U.S. coast by 2050.

Until Mulholland, however, few if any researchers had examined exactly how much pollution this sunny day flooding was creating. And what Mulholland found shocked her. Analysis of water samples indicates that one morning of tidal flooding along the Lafayette River in Norfolk poured nearly the entire annual U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allocation of nitrogen runoff for the river — 1,941 pounds — into Chesapeake Bay.

“That’s striking,” she says. “How do we expect to restore the bay if we’re not counting a lot of what’s going in?”

Mulholland is focused on measuring nitrogen, including ammonium, because of its effect on algae blooms, which create oxygen-depleted dead zones in bay waters. She said that other pollutants — including oil, gasoline, and trace metals — are also washing into waterways, as evidenced by the petroleum sheens visible on the water during high-tide flooding. “We can see it, and it would be great if we could measure it in the future,” she says. “But we don’t have the analytical chops to measure it so far.”



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Labor opposition to Green New Deal could be a big hurdle

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BY SARA SORCHER
with Paulina Firozi for the Washington Post’s blog, The Lightbulb
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The Green New Deal just got another opponent — and no, it’s not another Republican.

The national arm for labor unions is objecting to the ambitious new plan to combat climate change and could present a thorny problem for Democrats.

As my colleagues Colby Itkowitz, Dino Grandoni, and Jeff Stein report, “support for the Green New Deal has become a benchmark for Democrats running for president. But the AFL-CIO throwing water on the plan complicates matters for Democrats who rely on labor support.

“Without the backing from unions or the business community, it will be a hard sell for Democrats to get it beyond grass-roots support.”

In a letter to the Green New Deal’s authors Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the group warned that the resolution could harm U.S. workers and “is not achievable or realistic.”

Members of the AFL-CIO’s Energy Committee — Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, and Lonnie Stephenson, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — said they could not support a proposal that did not address their concerns.

“We will not stand by and allow threats to our members’ jobs and their families’ standard of living go unanswered,” they wrote, according to my colleagues.

“Their opposition highlights the new political fault lines forming over the controversial proposal that, as my colleagues note, “marries climate change and income inequality as one all-encompassing issue.”

As my colleagues note, the plan “calls for the federal government to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions with a ‘fair and just transition’ for all communities and workers, including by creating millions of high-wage jobs, health care and housing for all, a sustainable environment and enormous infrastructure investments.”

And “there has long been tension between the environmental and labor movements, two major parts of the broader Democratic coalition, over worries that rules meant to curb pollution can lead to job losses in regulated industries with high-quality, good-paying positions.”


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Army Corps has a plan to protect Jersey Shore’s back bays but ‘viable options’ will cost billions and years to install

Jon Hurdle reports for NJ Spotlight

Get ready for storm-surge barriers, floodwalls, and levees to protect New Jersey’s flood-prone back bays from sea-level rise, but don’t expect them to be built for at least another decade.That’s the latest message from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is doing a massive multiyear study on how to defend the back bays from higher seas and bigger storms as the climate changes.Many shore towns are seeing downward pressure on real estate prices amid growing public awareness that coastal properties are vulnerable to rising seas.
A new study on how sea-level rise is affecting real estate values on the U.S. East Coast said Ocean City experienced the biggest slowdown of property prices among 20 cities studied between 2005 and 2017 — greater even than Miami Beach, which is often seen as a poster child for the vulnerability of coastal cities.


Raising the roof 

Prices in Ocean City are now an aggregate $530 million lower than they would be without sea-level rise, according to the study from First Street Foundation, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit, and Columbia University. Seven other Jersey Shore towns were among the top 20 cities for real estate losses.Not receiving our free updates? Among 17 states covered, New Jersey’s real estate losses were the second highest, at $4.5 billion, after Florida with $5.4 billion, the study said.

First word from the Corps of Engineers

The Corps released an interim report on the early results of its work. It said storm-surge barriers are “viable options” at several locations including Manasquan Inlet and Absecon Inlet but probably would be wrong for some other sites because their costs would outweigh benefits, and they could cause environmental damage.To protect places including Cape May City, Stone Harbor/Avalon, and Ocean City, flood walls and levees are “potentially viable,” the report said.But it warned that structural measures such as flood walls could spoil the views that draw many visitors or residents to the back bays and could lead to the loss of natural habitats.

Another option would be to raise houses, as is now required for new construction in many areas of the Shore following superstorm Sandy in 2012. It also said there are environmental benefits to buying the most vulnerable coastal properties and turning the land into open space that becomes a buffer to rising seas — a policy that’s already followed by New Jersey’s Blue Acres program.Nature-based coastal defenses like living shorelines and reefs could also play a part, it said.And it warned that its primary focus is on managing the risk associated with storm-surges rather than so-called nuisance flooding that typically occurs because of the failure of storm sewers, which are not a federal responsibility. Whatever options are finally chosen, they will likely be “massive in scale” and may cost “several billion dollars,” said the Army Corps, which is working with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

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Enviro and energy bills on NJ Senate voting list – Mar 14



The following environment and energy bills are scheduled for votes on Thursday, March 14, in Trenton: 


S542 – Designates High Point State Park as High Point State Park and New Jersey Veterans Memorial.


S1606 – Permits small businesses to qualify for loans from EDA for costs of an energy audit and making energy efficiency or conservation improvements. 

S1729 – Designates Streptomyces griseus as New Jersey State Microbe.

S3040 – Prohibits the use of products containing asbestos in building construction.


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Army Corps has plan to protect Jersey Shore’s back bays but ‘viable options’ will cost billions and years to install

 

Jon Hurdle reports for NJ Spotlight

Get ready for storm-surge barriers, floodwalls, and levees to protect New Jersey’s flood-prone back bays from sea-level rise, but don’t expect them to be built for at least another decade.
That’s the latest message from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is doing a massive multiyear study on how to defend the back bays from higher seas and bigger storms as the climate changes.
Many shore towns are seeing downward pressure on real estate prices amid growing public awareness that coastal properties are vulnerable to rising seas.
A new study on how sea-level rise is affecting real estate values on the U.S. East Coast said Ocean City experienced the biggest slowdown of property prices among 20 cities studied between 2005 and 2017 — greater even than Miami Beach, which is often seen as a poster child for the vulnerability of coastal cities.
Prices in Ocean City are now an aggregate $530 million lower than they would be without sea-level rise, according to the study from First Street Foundation, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit, and Columbia University. Seven other Jersey Shore towns were among the top 20 cities for real estate losses.
Among 17 states covered, New Jersey’s real estate losses were the second highest, at $4.5 billion, after Florida with $5.4 billion, the study said.

First word from the Corps of Engineers

The Corps released an interim report on the early results of its work. It said storm-surge barriers are “viable options” at several locations including Manasquan Inlet and Absecon Inlet but probably would be wrong for some other sites because their costs would outweigh benefits, and they could cause environmental damage.
To protect places including Cape May City, Stone Harbor/Avalon, and Ocean City, flood walls and levees are “potentially viable,” the report said.
But it warned that structural measures such as flood walls could spoil the views that draw many visitors or residents to the back bays and could lead to the loss of natural habitats.


Raising the roof 

                                           Frank Brill photo
Another option would be to raise houses, as is now required for new construction in many areas of the Shore following superstorm Sandy in 2012. It also said there are environmental benefits to buying the most vulnerable coastal properties and turning the land into open space that becomes a buffer to rising seas — a policy that’s already followed by New Jersey’s Blue Acres program.
Nature-based coastal defenses like living shorelines and reefs could also play a part, it said.
And it warned that its primary focus is on managing the risk associated with storm-surges rather than so-called nuisance flooding that typically occurs because of the failure of storm sewers, which are not a federal responsibility.
Whatever options are finally chosen, they will likely be “massive in scale” and may cost “several billion dollars,” said the Army Corps, which is working with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

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Jersey Journal: This parting gift is an abuse of taxpayers

The superintendent of the Hudson County Schools of Technology district is on a paid pre-retirement sabbatical.Jersey Journal Editorial


The Hudson County Schools of Technology board has done county taxpayers a disservice by putting the 79-year-old superintendent of schools on a fully paid sabbatical in preparation for his retirement.



As Jersey Journal reporter Terrence T. McDonald wrote last week, Superintendent Frank Gargiulo is receiving his full $279,494 salary even though the day-to-day running of the school district has passed to acting Superintendent Amy Lin-Rodriguez, whose salary is $201,600.



Gargiulo “has kept in communication’’ with the district during “this transition period,’’ a spokeswoman said, which is hardly worth $5,374.88 a week.



The district, by the way, consists of 2,600 students at two high schools, a middle school and several adult education programs.



Thirteen years ago, the State Commission of Investigation found that pre-retirement sabbaticals create a further burden on the already strapped state pension system by extending employees’ lengths of service.



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As with so many games officials play to boost retirement payouts and pensions, it’s a legal but ethically dubious move. And it’s one we’re told the HCST board commonly employs.



There’s nothing to be done now to reverse the pricey present county taxpayers have been forced to give Gargiulo, but the HCST board must make this the last parting gift it gives on taxpayers’ behalf. As is the case in most offices, a card and a cake, maybe a luncheon and a gold watch, should suffice.



Beyond that, it bears noting that the HCST board isn’t the only one willing to throw tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars at someone headed out the door, especially when it comes to keeping well-connected political friends happy.



If Gov. Murphy and state Senate President Sweeney are serious about containing the rising cost of government, this is a place to start. The state budget that starts in July should be accompanied by legislation that closes the door to this abuse of taxpayers.



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