Sea rise threatens Oakland's sewer system, Garzon quoted
Along Oakland’s coast, 19 inches would wash over runways at Oakland International Airport, railway lines and roads that lead to the Port of Oakland and some of the treatment facilities at the vast wastewater treatment plant in West Oakland.
What the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the East Bay Municipal Utility District and others forecast is that storm surges would flood this infrastructure and the water would then gravitate to the storm drain system, only to be pushed back because the storm drains are already full. The water in the saturated earth would seep into sewer systems, overwhelming them.
“Nobody from the hills to the flatlands will be able to flush their toilets,” if a storm surge or rising tides were to top four feet, said Jeremy Lowe, sea level rise program manager at ESA and author of a tidal wetland design guidelines for San Francisco Bay and an ecosystem-based climate change adaptation plan
And the messy spillover will settle in the flatlands.
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When environmental and community activists try to get people galvanized over the risks that global warming-induced sea level rise could bring, they don’t find much interest among residents – nor among elected officials.
“It’s a hard sell because people’s immediate priorities are unemployment, crime - immediate crises,” said Catalina Garzon, community strategies program director at the Pacific Institute. Also, “People have been hearing about the drought, and they say so now you’re talking to me about flooding?’”
