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| Should downtown Highlands, New Jersey be raised by ten feet to avoid future bad storms and climate change? |
Here in Vermont, we are struggling to make culverts bigger, buying out low lying properties, shoring up highways and streets to make things more resistent to the floods we seem to be getting more and more of.
The cost and complexity of just little Vermont's adaption is daunting, as I wrote for the Burlington Free Press back in February.
If you think that's difficult and expensive, check out one New Jersey town. The not very well named town of Highlands, New Jersey was smacked hard by Hurricane Sandy last October.
According to ClimateProgress.org, Highlands is going to raise its entire downtown by ten feet.
Says ClimateProgress:
"City officials estimate the cost of elevating the town 8 to 11 feet would range from $150 to $200 million--in comparison to the $574 million the real estate is valued at post-Sandy, according to assessment records."
About 1,250 Highlands homes and businessses were damaged or destroyed during Sandy. With the prospect of rising sea levels and the possibility of stronger coastal storms in a warmer world, the city fears such a disaster will happen again unless they take the drastic action of raising the community's elevation.
No word yet on how Highlands would pay for such a project. They do hope for help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but that funding is highly uncertain, to say the least.
And Highlands is just one community and the project cost is estimated at $200 million. What of all the other low-lying cities and towns along coastlines and vulnerable waterways? We're talking trillions of dollars.
If the worst of the climate change predictions come true, maybe some coastal and low lying communities will just have to drown. A sad prospect indeed.
I guess we can only hope climate change over the next century won't turn out to be as bad as some people fear.
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