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A Rising Tide

A Q&A with Olympia, Washington, city manager Steven Hall and public works director Michael Mucha

Olympia is Washington State's capital city. Will Olympia also become Washington's Atlantis? That's a stretch, but city officials there are increasingly concerned about rising sea levels as global warming melts polar ice. Olympia abuts Budd Inlet, a southern arm of Puget Sound where extreme tides are normal. Much of Olympia's downtown sits on low-lying land that may be sinking, due to tectonic forces, even as the water level is rising.

To find out how Olympia is planning for that future, I spoke with City Manager Steven Hall and Public Works Director Michael Mucha. They talked about the unexpected impacts rising seas would actually have on a coastal community such as Olympia, how the city is considering dealing with them, and how the issue of sea-level rise affected Olympia's debate about where to build a new city hall.

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Swope: The first question any community looking at adapting to climate change is going to confront has to do with data. Climate change is a problem that has mostly been researched at a global level, not a local level where the impacts are felt the most. Here in the Pacific Northwest, you're fortunate to have the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington working to dial down that global data in a way that makes sense for local policy makers. But even you're not sure what to expect.

Mucha: I'm not concerned about getting the sea-level rise numbers precisely right. I think we all know the trends are moving toward rising seas. The number is not as important as moving our community towards understanding that this trend is happening and it's very long term. If we can all agree that there will be some amount of sea-level rise instead of arguing over how much, we'll get a lot further.

Hall: It's interesting, because when talk about sea-level rise, we get two reactions from the policy level. One is that we can't understand it--we can't know exactly how much it's going to rise, so we can't react to it. It's just too overwhelming, there's just too many factors of wind and subsidence of land and global warming, and maybe Greenland will melt and what do we do? So we do nothing.

And then I think there's another choice for policy makers, to make reasonable assumptions about what's going to happen. There's this trend toward global warming, there's this trend toward sea-level rise, and we're a coastal community. What's reasonable to do? And that's the approach we've taken. So we picked some numbers. We said, let's talk about two to three feet of sea-level rise over the next 50 to 100 years. What does that mean for our community? What does it mean for our utility infrastructure downtown? What does it mean for our roadway systems? And what does it mean for investment in our public and private facilities? Because downtown Olympia is more than a few buildings. It's the financial center of Thurston County. It's the cultural, social and historical center of the wider region. And so for us it's not a choice to run to higher ground. So given that we have reasonable projections that we can adapt to, we're starting to ask the questions about what should we do as a community?

In 2008 the council will spend a quarter of a million dollars to begin a technical assessment. Is the answer berming? Is it seawalls? Where are we vulnerable? What are the elevations downtown? Where are we vulnerable to a one- or two- or three-foot sea-level rise, and how do we deal with those? And what are the technologies used in Europe and other places that have already dealt with rising sea levels? Because we're not the first to deal with this.

Swope: What sorts of problems would a few more feet of water in the sound cause here?

Mucha: We have a natural spring as a drinking water source and it's very close to salt water. And as sea level rises, we've projected that we'll have saltwater intrusion in our drinking water within the next 20 yrs. It's just a given if we don't get off that spring system. So we're drilling other wells to find a more reliable water supply.

Also, as the seas rise, the storm pipes that drain into Budd Inlet no longer can discharge because the water is higher than the pipes. So what happens is rain water can't drain out of our community and we see flooding upstream in areas that aren't even close to the sound. And then as seas rise even more they start traveling up these pipes and start bubbling out of catch basins. We can berm all we want but if we don't deal with the entry points, which is the pipes, what happens is we might hold the water in by berming.

There are engineering solutions from the big hairy engineering solutions like putting a tide gate across Puget Sound, which would probably be a multi-billion dollar solution, to more affordable solutions like looking at how we build downtown, or using check valves. A check valve is something that allows water to go only one way. We'd pump fresh water into the Puget Sound to keep flooding from backing up. Installing a series of pumps and check valves would be relatively low-cost--probably in the millions of dollars versus the billions of dollars.

Swope: Of course, with every engineered step, aren't you looking more and more like New Orleans, relying on the engineers to get it right?

Mucha: I'm an engineer, so I understand that. We're human. We're fallible. Every time we try to battle nature, nature eventually wins. So we have to be humble and realize that any engineered solution has risks associated with it. There's no question about that. So that's the picture we're looking at. With our water resources team we're going to be figuring out over the next couple of years how to deal with this.

One thing we have going for us is we've been doing 100 year capital planning. We received an Innovations award from Harvard for this. We're trying to project out what our capital needs are going to be over 100 years and then back casting that to the current day, and then incrementally bring those facilities forward. Because we realize that everything has a lifespan and needs to be replaced on a continuous basis.

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