Posted on 02/03/2017 9:40:00 AM PST by rey
Surveying flooding along Highway 37 in January, ecologist Fraser Shilling began doubting his projections for when climate change will cause severe, perhaps catastrophic impacts on the major North Bay thoroughfare.
In an influential 2016 report used as a guide for the highways future, Shilling, co-director of the Road Ecology Center at UC Davis, had established a timetable of several decades for those impacts to be fully realized.
But that was before January storms forced the full or partial closure of the highway for roughly 12 days, causing havoc for thousands of daily commuters.
Were starting to overwhelm the system in places that we were thinking we had 20 years of lead time. But we dont, Shilling said this week from his office in Davis. Delaying action could be catastrophic, he said, predicting that one day water will push over embankments and levees and the highway will be gone.
Highway 37, one of the lowest-lying in California, has long been threatened by climate change and rising sea levels, inadequate levees and political waffling over who bears responsibility for maintaining and upgrading the road. The 21-mile highway meanders across four counties Solano, Napa, Sonoma and Marin traversing tidal marshlands, rivers and creeks, and farmland where flooding presents a threat to livelihoods.
(Excerpt) Read more at pressdemocrat.com ...
Oh no! How much time do we have before it gets to us in Flagstaff?!?
“If you build an inadequately engineered highway through tidal marshlands, do not be surprised that it gets flooded and wiped out from time to time”
Coastal NC—every year at some place or another.
OMG! These Californians will have to start living like the Dutch along the North Sea! It’s a horror!
They are preaching the same Bull Ship around Humboldt Bay every time a major storm surge pushes the tides higher as the tidelands continue to sink from settlement and compaction of the soils...
Al Gore says that by 2010...you will be SUNK!!
Yep, I was stationed at Camp LeJeune..................
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.