Among a long list of hypotheses: climate change. Sea level rise, higher storm surges and more frequent high-tide flooding are deteriorating coastal infrastructure above and below ground.
At the very least, experts say even the possibility should be a wake-up call to vulnerable communities across the United States: Climate change isn’t a far-future threat; it’s happening now, and with potentially deadly consequences.
McNoldy has lived in Miami for more than nine years and has seen the impact of high-tide flooding, also referred to as nuisance flooding or “King Tide” floods.
“There are days where I have to adjust my route to work, because the route that I might normally take is inches of saltwater,” he told CNN. “And I don’t want to drive my car through it.”
“Some low-lying places that maybe didn’t use to flood are starting to now, and places that maybe always did have some issues during exceptionally high-tides have even worse issues now,” McNoldy told CNN.
William Espinosa, a former maintenance manager at the Champlain Towers South building from 1995 to 2000, was concerned about the amount of saltwater that made its way into the building’s underground garage, according to CNN-affiliate WFOR.
“Any time that we had high tides away from the ordinary, any King Tide or anything like that, we would have a lot of saltwater come in through the bottom of the of the foundation,” Espinosa told WFOR. “But it was so much water, all the time, that the pumps never could keep up with it.”
“I’m talking about a foot, sometimes two feet of water in the bottom of the parking lot, the whole parking lot,” he added.
“The observable damage such as in the garage has gotten significantly worse since the initial (2018) inspection,” Wodnicki wrote. “The concrete deterioration is accelerating. The roof situation got much worse, so extensive roof repairs had to be incorporated.”
Hamed Moftakhari, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Alabama, said that South Florida experiences nuisance flooding, or high-tide flooding, on a regular basis. Higher sea levels increase flood hazards and vulnerability, exposing critical infrastructure to saltwater.
Higher sea level increases the amount of saltwater building foundations are exposed to, Moftakhari told CNN. “Infrastructure like roads and foundations are not designed to be inundated by saltwater a couple of hours a day.”
Ben Schafer, a structural engineer at Johns Hopkins University said sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion — where underground seawater moves farther inland — typically threatens older coastal buildings like Champlain Towers South.
“The life of the structure would be greatly shortened,” Schafer told CNN. “It’s a corrosive environment. It’s not favorable for concrete or steel, which are your primary building materials.”
As climate change-driven sea-level rise accelerates, worsening tidal floods will put millions of coastal homes and businesses worth more than $1 trillion today at risk by the end of the century, according to a 2018 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Erika Spanger-Siegfried, a senior analyst at UCS and co-author of the report, was careful not to blame climate change for the collapse. But, she said, it is a consequence that can be anticipated when sea-level rise “is undermining the very ground that structures are built on.”
“We really shouldn’t need catastrophes like this to be a wake-up call,” said Spanger-Siegfried. “(Tidal) flooding is giving us that gentle nudge on a regular basis, because of climate change” that this is what coastal regions can expect in the future.
The areas flooded during high tides now will be the first to go permanently underwater, Spanger-Siegfried said.
She said, “it’s simply foolish” to make investments in infrastructure without considering that we already have a lot of climate change in the pipeline.
Schafer says that although climate change is already upon us, we have yet to do very much about it.
“People are still imagining that it will move slow,” he said. “The problem is much, much larger, and we need to be thinking much more broadly about how we equitably evacuate ourselves from some areas that won’t be available to us here in not so many years.”
As more parts of the world feel the dire impacts of climate change, Schafer says civil engineers such as himself also need to rethink how buildings are designed and how older buildings need to be reassessed to adapt to these changes.
“I don’t think we’ve owned up even to the scale of the problem,” Schafer said. “If you look at the median sea-level rise predictions and project that onto city maps, the scale of what we need to do is so far beyond the scale of what we’re so far considering.
Source : CNN