We talk to Mark Wilbert, Chief Resilience Officer at the City of Charleston, about the problems and opportunities with flooding and sea-level rise in this five-minute water short. We also share which Mayor offered a $100 gold medal to anyone who could develop a flooding solution.
The City of Charleston in South Carolina has a long relationship with water which is always being tested. They have experienced more than a foot of sea-level rise in the past 100 years, but half of this rise occurred in the last twenty years.
Learn more about the City’s initiatives to improve their ability to withstand flooding and sea-level rise challenges. These are discussed in the 2019 Flooding and Sea Level Rise Strategy. The Strategy recommends planning for 2.0 to 3.0 feet of sea-level rise over the next fifty years.
Transcript
Robert Osborne:
The City of Charleston in South Carolina is surrounded by rivers. The city has a long relationship with water, which has always being tested. They have experienced more than a foot of sea level rise in the past 100 years, but half of this occurred in the last 20 years.
Mark Wilbert:
Every time that it floods, we’re out in those favorite spots taken a look at it and we’re seeing that it’s really accelerating. On top of that, we’ve had this change in weather patterns caused by the changing climate that has increased the intensity of the rain storms. And so they really do exceed, a lot of times, the engineered solutions to be able to handle those rainstorms.
Robert Osborne:
This is Mark Wilburt, Chief Resilience Officer at the City of Charleston. He’s seen firsthand the effects of changing weather and tidal patterns.
Mark Wilbert:
These increasing high tides, they’re getting higher and higher, they’re beginning to impact us. So we used to get 20 high tides that would impact us just four or five years ago. We hit 50 last year, that are leaving anywhere between an inch to six inches of water on the roads. Well, that in and of itself, requires us, in many cases, to close the road, which means you’re diverting traffic, which means traffic is backed up, it’s impacting businesses, employers. So how do we deal with that, right?
Mark Wilbert:
Good example is the day after Thanksgiving in 2018, it was just supposed to be a higher than normal tide. And for a whole variety of meteorological reasons, it decided to come in and set a record in terms of the tide, it was in the top 10 of the high tides we’ve had. And it just covered the city in the low areas in water. That’s going to be a problem going forward. The prediction is by 2040, we can see one to six inches of water on the roads 180 times a year. That’s a lot of flooding. These are real roads, these are the roads that people use to commute. Now can you drive through an inch of water? Sure you can. Can you drive through six inches of water? Probably not.
Robert Osborne:
Mark is a gregarious guy, who’s been working hard to make the City of Charleston a more resilient place to live. So what does resilience really mean to him? And what is the biggest challenge?
Mark Wilbert:
Resilience means creating a community that is strong, that’s connected, that is ready to take any kind of stress that may be delivered to it. And even though you may not going to survive every stress, when you are a good, strong, resilient community, you’re ready to bounce back a little quicker. I think the biggest challenge I’d say that we have with the community, and it’s probably a misconception, is that one, this is something that can be fixed. I don’t subscribe that you can fix it because you build a new system, mother nature can always throw something at you that’s even more intense or a higher tide than your last experience.
Mark Wilbert:
So what we really have the opportunity to do is adapt to it. This is a perfect example, really. So three years ago, if you would’ve talked about people in our historic district here in Charleston, we have a very strong historic district, people of the historic district that take a great amount of pride, the city takes a great amount of pride in being a historical city. It drives a lot of our economy around tourism. Three years ago, if you would’ve started talking to people about raising homes in and that historic district, people would have said it will never happen. We’ve got a number of homes right now that are already raised. Some four feet, one house went seven feet to get to the FEMA flood standard.
Robert Osborne:
As early as 1837, the city recognized the need for better drainage solutions to help with flooding. The issue was so important to Charleston that Mayor, Henry Pickney, offered a $100 gold medal to anyone who could develop a solution. Unfortunately, the problem was never solved and the medal was never awarded. Collaborating with others, deciding what areas to protect and ultimately learning to live with water, really defined the future of the city of Charleston and other coastal cities. And unfortunately, it’s a battle with no medals.
Mark Wilbert:
As unique and as appealing as we are, how do we preserve that? And then maybe we have to adapt, and maybe there’s places where we have to say, “You know what, maybe mother nature gets this back and we move inland a little bit or move out of this area, this low lying area a little bit, and maybe we shouldn’t be living here, maybe we shouldn’t have been living there in the beginning.” I use three words, armor, adapt, and abandon. The biggest area we’d like to focus on is adaptation and getting it right.
