The Marin County community of Stinson Beach is pretty much surrounded by water, which makes its flood risks off the charts in the climate change era, but the community is contemplating a billion-dollar plan to adapt to rising sea levels.
We’ve been following for a few years the saga on Marin County’s Stinson Beach planning for rising sea levels, a plan that last we heard was just telling people they would have to move or lose their homes. The state of California is now requiring detailed sea-level adaptation plans for coastal communities to avoid that scenario, but still Stinson Beach — like nearby Bolinas and Inverness — is particularly vulnerable to flooding, because it has the ocean on one side and the Bolinas Lagoon on the other.
Marin County officials just commissioned this fascinating interactive tool (though it takes a while to load) that shows how many homes would soon be surrounded by water with the predicted rates of sea level rise in various areas in and near Stinson Beach. The commissioning of that tool is part of Stinson Beach’s new plan to adapt to rising sea levels, according to the Chronicle. And it doesn’t take much rise to render many of those existing homes to being suddenly in the waters of the Bolinas Lagoon.
“It's not like a ding in the pocketbook. This is that your home is gone. There is no more beach,” civil engineer and hydrologist James Jackson, who was part of the team that performed a study and gave recommendations, told the Chronicle. “Your road has been washed out or (is) underwater.”
Jackson’s team has produced a plan to adapt to the anticipated rise, though it is not the final plan, and just goes to the Marin County Board of Supervisors on August 19. But the Chronicle pegs the overall cost of the recommendations at $1.2 billion, or “the equivalent of $2.4 million apiece for each of its approximately 500 residents,” in the Chronicle’s words. Though that price tag is lower than anticipated billion-dollar damage to homes and the community should sea levels rise by the anticipated 1.6 feet by the year 2060.
The recommendations include implementing a community wastewater treatment system, because septic tanks often overflow in storm situations. Additionally (and probably more expensively), pretty much every home at Stinson Beach would need to be elevated. The city’s main drag of Calle del Arroyo would also probably have to be elevated, because it has often flooded during winter storms.
Stinson Beach would not be completely on the hook for the whole $1.2 billion price tag, as several of those costs would be shared by the National Park Service, Caltrans, and the Stinson Beach Water District. The Chronicle reports that the Marin County Supervisors will also consider granting Stinson Beach “special assessment district” capabilities, allowing the town to create new taxes on itself, or on visitors.
Image: California, United States - Stinson Beach. Pride of Madeira (Echinum fastuosum) shrub. (Getty Images)
