ICCE conference and Miami Beach SLR adaptations
This past week, Jeremy Bricker attended the ICCE conference in Baltimore, and visited seawalls and stormwater pumps in Miami Beach. He wrote a short summary of his experiences during this trip which is presented in this article.
Miami Beach is at the forefront of sea level rise adaptation in the US, because it is extremely vulnerable. Built on a barrier island with a subsurface of porous limestone, the city has embarked on a long-term plan of raising the elevation of the island together with the installation of concrete seawalls. Due to the higher sea levels, the city’s gravity-driven stormwater drainage system is being fit with pumps to evacuate stormwater to the back bay, and backflow prevention valves to stop seawater from backing up onto the streets through the pipes. One significant difference from the Netherlands is that Miami Beach’s subsurface is porous limestone, so elevated sea level will flood the city regardless of seawalls; this is the reason they are trucking in landfill from the mainland to elevate the city, beginning with streets, and using building code regulations to bring all new commercial structures to build their first floors at the new road level.
Jeremy visited Miami Beach together with Prof. Miguel Esteban of Waseda University (Japan), and they were briefed by the city’s Director of Public Works, as well as by an environmental scientist from AECOM, the city’s design engineer.
After this visit, they headed to Baltimore for the 36th International Conference on Coastal Engineering (ICCE), run by ASCE/COPRI. There were approximately 800 talks in 6 parallel sessions. Interesting findings were that Japanese scour research in the laboratory uses settling velocity as the scaling parameter of importance for maximum scour depth, not the Shields parameter. Furthermore, there are no parametric models for the spatial distribution of wind and pressure in extratropical storms, complicating efforts to address extratropical storm surge stochastically.
