Source: Port of San Francisco
BY STAS MARGARONIS, RBTUS
The second day of the Storms, Flooding & Sea Level Defense 2020 conference featured sea level defense strategies being developed by ports from New York/ New Jersey, Hawaii, Washington, California and Rotterdam.
The conference was produced by the Propeller Club of Northern California and the Society of American Military Engineers and took place virtually on November 19th, 2020 .
The Port of New Orleans discussed its plans on the first day of the conference.
Conference highlights from November 19th included:
- Elaine Forbes, Executive Director, Port of San Francisco, described progress on the $4 billion sea wall project to protect port property and downtown San Francisco from sea level rises and storm surge flooding. The project is also designed to re-enforce building foundations so they do not sink as a result of an earthquake. Forbes urged a nature-based solution to building sea level defenses: “adding Nature back to the (San Francisco) Bay.”
- Heather Tomley, Managing Director Planning & Environment, Port of Long Beach said the Port received a shock when in 2014, Hurricane Marie breached the breakwater protecting the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Tomley said the new threat of hurricanes threatening the Pacific Coast has motivated the Port to enhance its defenses to storms, wave conditions as well as higher sea levels. She also noted that the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles continue to make progress in implementing their Clean Air Action Plan, which will require zero emission harbor trucks and cargo-handling equipment.
- Jorge Chavez, Assistant Director of Ports, Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, and Sarah Colasurdo, Senior Climate Resilience Specialist, Port Authority of New York & New Jersey told attendees that the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was a wake-up call about the need to upgrade port facilities and meet challenges caused by worsening storms and sea level rise. Chavez said the Port is much better prepared for another Sandy, if it hit in 2020, but upgrades “take time.” Colasurdo provided a detailed description of facilities and assets that have been upgraded in anticipation of higher sea levels. Chavez said that a comprehensive solution to protect the region was to revive the storm surge barrier plan developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect New York and New Jersey which is projected to cost $119 billion. The project was rejected by President Donald Trump who described it as “foolish.”[1]
- Derek Chow, Deputy Director, Hawaii Harbors Division, said the Hawaiian Islands are vulnerable to sea level rise due to a lack of space just as are all islands around the world. The new $500 million Kapalama container terminal in Honolulu Harbor was built at a higher elevation to anticipate sea level rise. However, Chow noted that other Honolulu harbor facilities, harbors at other Hawaiian Islands and those at the Kalaeloa Harbor in Western Oahu will have to be upgraded. Hawaii is looking at incremental upgrades that could be cheaper than major overhaul of port facilities The problem is that changes will be disruptive to operations. On Oahu, Hawaii is considering a cost benefit analysis to decide how to proceed. One possibility is construction of a new port facility that would be protected by a storm surge barrier and a lock system to allow access to vessels.
- Joseph Gellings, Planner, Port of Seattle, said the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma, now organized as the Northwest Seaport Alliance, are working together to anticipate the impact of sea level rise on cargo-handling facilities. Gellings cited upgrades to the storm water system as one means of mitigating the threat of flooding. He also outlined three Alliance objectives that address sea level rise: best practices for electrical equipment, modeling storm water system performance and major terminal upgrades allowing for rising elevations.
- Brad Benson, Waterfront Resilience Program Director, Port of San Francisco, described the Port’s recently released Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment (MHRA) that warns that the City and Port of San Francisco could face up to $30 billion in damage by 2100 from the combined effects of sea level rise flooding and a major earthquake. The Port is planning to prioritize projects by March 2021 that must be upgraded: “The Port’s goal is to identify the measures that are most appropriate to protect the many different conditions along the waterfront in ways that reflect city and community priorities, combining seismic and flood risk improvements wherever feasible and cost-effective.” The projected cost for the upgrades is $4 billion, Benson said.
- Jan Novak, Associate Environmental Planner and Scientist, Port of Oakland, said that nature-based solutions and the application of dredging to build up watersheds and wetlands will require concerted political will by San Francisco Bay Area communities and political leaders. He noted that the Port is planning to accommodate 18,000 twenty-foot unit container ships and larger by widening the Turning Basin in the Oakland Estuary. This effort will generate several million cubic meters of dredge materials. Novak said these materials could be utilized to support wetlands and other nature-based protections in the San Francisco Bay.
- Brenda Goeden, Sediment Program Manager, Bay Conservation & Development Commission, argued that a comprehensive nature-based solution will require more federal funding and challenging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Federal Standard. She said the Federal Standard awards dredging bids to contractors based on “the least costly alternatives consistent with sound engineering practices.” Goeden said the the lowest cost bidder, defined by the federal standard, often results in dredging contractors transporting dredge materials for disposal into the oceans rather than redeploying clean materials for reclamation and wetlands restoration which tends to cost more. A new policy is necessary to change the federal practice, Goeden said.
- Dave Halsing, Executive Project Manager, South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project agreed with Goeden that more funding is necessary to finance dredge material being used for wetland restoration. Halsing cited a proposal to transport dredge materials from Bay Area port maintenance dredging to the Eden Landing restoration project in the South San Francisco Bay. The project had to be abandoned as too costly. Halsing noted that a Moffatt & Nichol study found that the cost of transporting the dredge material to an offloading site in the South San Francisco Bay and moving the dredge material from the offload site to the restoration site would be very expensive. Halsing had previously noted: “We don’t have sufficient funding or volumes of material to support the over $100 million that we would need to develop the Eden Landing site with dredge material. So, we are using the cheaper means of breaching the ponds and allowing the natural sedimentation process to occur, which will give us a natural flood protection as well as wildlife habitat for $25-$30 (estimated) million as opposed to $100 million of added cost to deliver dredge material for beneficial use.”
- Lieutenant Colonel John Cunningham, San Francisco District Commander, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), agrees with recent remarks made by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District Commander, Colonel Stephen Murphy, that there are insufficient dredging vessels in the U.S. dredging fleet. Cunningham also agreed with Murphy that the shortage of vessels will drive the costs of dredging up at a time when dredging needs for sea level defense projects are on the rise. Cunningham told attendees that one way to bring down the cost of dredging is to increase construction of new dredging vessels and augment the dredging vessels in the USACE fleet.
- Increasing the supply of new and modern dredgers based on European designs has begun. A new venture by the dredging vessel builder, Watermaster based in Finland is one example. On November 18th, Peter Dreyfuss, Co-Founder, Watermaster North America, told conference attendees how the Finnish builder of single-operator dredging vessels is collaborating with a Michigan fabricator to build the first Watermaster vessel in the United States. This will meet requirements of the Jones Act. The Act requires vessels sailing between U.S. ports be built in the United States, manned by U.S. crews and owned by U.S. citizens. The Watermaster experience could be a model and for other foreign-designed dredging vessels to be built in U.S. shipyards and end the shortage of U.S. dredging vessels, Dreyfuss said. According to a recent Tulane University study, many vessels in the U.S. dredging fleet are old not as productive as newer vessels operating in Europe. [2]
- Joost de Nooijer, Civil Engineer, Port of Rotterdam, told attendees that Port of Rotterdam’s Massvlakte 2 container terminal and cargo-handling complex was built on 2,471 acres of reclaimed land dredged from the North Sea and completed in 2013. This provides a buffer that protects the Rotterdam area from storms coming from the North Sea. De Nooijer said the project took years of planning and considerable stakeholder involvement. One example: a site for surfing was to be displaced by the new Maasvlake complex. Port of Rotterdam planners worked with local surfers to design a new area to surf from. This was included in the land designed for natural uses that the Maasvlakte project generated. De Nooijer reports that the new surfing site provides better surfing than the former site!
- Matthijs Bos, Consultant Flood Risk Management and Coastal Engineering, Royal Haskoning, discussed a flood prevention and risk management software program that Royal Haskoning has developed for the Port of Rotterdam. The program has the following benefits: 1) Creates flood maps based on sea level rise scenario’s: 1-foot rise (~35cm) in 2050 and 3- feet rise (~85cm) in 2100. 2) Calculates economic damages and flood risk for future asset inventory for given climate scenarios; 3) Determines cost effectiveness of options through cost-benefit analysis and provides a guideline for future asset inventory implementation. Bos said the type of software Royal Haskoning developed will speed up analysis and planning for ports and cities.
- Randy Truby, President R.L. Truby & Associates described a new desalination technology using a module that can be floated offshore and provide desalinated water using renewable energy to pump the desalinated water from a barge or offshore platform onto land. Truby noted that as sea levels rise and storm surges threaten water tables on land, the result is coastal water tables are subject to salt water encroachment. The capital costs of conventional land-based desalination plants and the permitting process can be long and expensive. A Norwegian company, Waterfountain, is developing the first floating desalination module which could make desalination plants portable, located offshore and not on land, and able to utilize renewable energy to reduce costs and generate zero emissions. The Waterfountain desalination system is a floating desalination plant with the reverse osmosis membranes suspended in a depth of water of 1,000 feet below the ocean surface. Using a low-pressure reverse osmosis process, the Waterfountain technology proposes to pass more seawater through the system than traditional desalination plants on land. The seawater returned to the ocean by the Waterfountain technology proposes to be 95 per cent less saline than the brine of a traditional desalination plant.[3] The technology could offer a more efficient and renewable means to provide fresh water to cities and towns, according to Truby. The Waterfountain prototype will be completed in 2021, a company official said.
- Marc Walraven, Senior Advisor Storm Surge Barriers, Rijkswaterstaat & I-Storm. Walraven works for the Dutch waterway authority that has designed and operated the storm surge barriers that protect the Netherlands. As a result of years of experience, Rijkswaterstaat is making its expertise available to countries around the world through an international organization called I-Storm. Walraven says I-Storm provides Dutch sea level defense expertise that, for example, has helped design the Galveston Bay storm surge barrier system. This was discussed at the first day of the conference by Tony Williams, Environmental Review Coordinator, Texas General Land Office. Williams praised the assistance provided by the Netherlands. The proposed Texas storm surge gates are estimated to cost $12 billion. The designs were influenced by the design of storm surge gates protecting Rotterdam that Rijkswaterstaat operates. Walraven said that such complex storm surge systems require constant upgrades and maintenance and require personnel to undergo constant training. The Dutch storm barriers are subject to constant review and analysis to ensure they work when required under storm surge conditions. The investment in modern storm surge barriers outweighs the cost, he said. New Orleans discovered this when its obsolete levees and barriers failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and caused massive flooding. Walraven warned that outsourcing of water protection responsibilities and jobs to private contractors has eroded expertise within the Dutch agency. He urged more public investments in national water control agencies around the world to plan and assure sea level defenses. Walraven emphasized that this financial investment must include hiring more qualified personnel to support the work of the agencies. Trained professionals will enable nations to safeguard vital infrastructure and cities as well as enhance national security.
FOOTNOTES
[1] https://rbtus.com/texas-promotes-37-billion-coastal-protection-complex-including-12-billion-galveston-bay-barrier-to-protect-cities-ports-petrochemical-industry/
[2] https://rbtus.com/tulane-university-institute-warns-high-u-s-dredging-costs-will-undermine-u-s-coastal-sea-level-defense-efforts/
[3] https://www.theexplorer.no/solutions/waterfountain-innovative-floating-desalination-system/