After the 2018 Camp Fire tore through Paradise and neighboring areas, claiming at least 85 lives and displacing 50,000 people, some older residents from that region relocated to Carson City, Nev., and nearby locations.

Months later, Dr. Elizabeth Haase, medical director of psychiatry at Carson Tahoe Hospital and Behavioral Health Services and a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance — a group of mental health professionals raising awareness of the effects of climate change on mental health — said she observed worsening health, including exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and rapid progression of dementia in some of the older people who had relocated from the Camp Fire zone.

“People can have a very dramatic decrease in their overall mental and physical health that’s connected to one of these climate events — that is likely to get missed, in terms of the association,” Haase said. One of her older patients developed pneumonia in addition to worsening of her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was hospitalized for several months, she said. Her patient’s mental health also deteriorated.

“In offering her the understanding — because I’m somebody that knows about climate and health — that what was happening to her now is linked to her experience in the fire was actually quite therapeutic for her,” she said. “And you know, a lot of sort of depressive and grief-related symptoms came out. And we were able to talk a little bit about what it means to be in your 70s and lose your home with absolutely no possibility, financially, of rebuilding.”

Like Haase, mental health experts based in the San Francisco Bay Area are exploring the ensuing physical, mental and emotional effects of climate change. Dr. Robin Cooper is co-founder and president of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, and an associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She also has a small private practice in the city.

Cooper spoke with the San Francisco Public Press about what needs to be done locally to address climate change’s mental health toll. The following excerpts from the interview have been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been working as a psychiatrist for decades, and in recent years, you’ve been exploring the threats of climate change to mental health. What got you interested in this field?

I have always been, outside of my professional endeavors, an activist. At the time that I began to learn about and think about and be introduced to the issues of climate change, it had that — “Wake up! Oh my God, this is a potential existential threat.” Once knowing about something that profound, I can’t turn myself away from it. And I began to be active in a number of organizations that were addressing climate change in its broader sense. But as I began to discover, I could use my voice most effectively in the realm that’s close to my work. So, I began to be involved much more in the health impacts of climate change.

A lot was being said about the general broad range of health impacts, but at the end of a talk, a pulmonologist or cardiologist or infectious disease person would say, “Oh, by the way, there’s some mental health impacts.” And I was shocked. I said, “Oh my God, we should be talking about that. We need to be the experts on that.” I met other likeminded psychiatrists, but our voice was very, very tiny at that time. And we came together with the idea that this was something we needed to take ownership of, know more about and be able to speak to it.

Could you describe how climate change affects the mental health of older adults?

So, you and I are both Californians, we know about the Paradise fire. Paradise was a community that had a large number of retirees. It was affordable. It was a place where people could go after years of living in other communities, buy a home that was going to be their place of retirement and live up the rest of their lives. The massive loss of their homes, their community, the place that they could live. These are people who retired, they’re on fixed incomes, who lost everything. So, when you lose your home, and you don’t have a lot of economic resources for rebuilding, you really have secondary emotional impacts. And so, where do you live? The loss of your social support — the greater level of poverty that you live out the rest of your life — interferes with the ability to make choices. And that has huge emotional impacts with depression, post-traumatic stress and a greater vulnerability.

If we look at the disasters that happened in Puerto Rico [in 2017 following Hurricanes Irma and Maria], particularly, the elderly were left on their own. They had no access to medications. Young people had gone to the U.S. mainland for jobs. So, the elderly were left on their own with little to help them recover. And those have huge implications for their emotional wellbeing and their physical wellbeing.

As extreme weather events continue to increase, what should local governments, hospitals, nonprofits and other organizations that are providing services to older people be doing now to strengthen the mental health infrastructure?

We’re in a big crisis, as you know, in health care delivery. We need to make changes in our health care delivery as we confront the vast kinds of troubles that people are going to experience from climate change. And that means shifting to funding and providing care in a more public health, community health manner using population-based ways of intervening. It means that the governmental agencies and those who pay for health care have to do that in a different way.

It also means empowering people in communities to do that before there are extreme heat waves and disasters. It means tightening up our neighbor-to-neighbor relationships, particularly for the elderly. That’s incredibly important, because they can be isolated, left alone, not able to care for themselves. If we have a public health model, and a model based on connectivity in communities, we can have partnerships. We can have buddy systems so Joe knows that Mrs. Smith, who is 86 years old and in her home, is alone and knows what she needs, and has someone to bring her to cooling centers, or help modulate continuing her medications as these disasters and climate events emerge.

Let me just give you another little example. Hurricane Sandy hit New York and the Eastern seaboard with ferocious impacts. Elderly people in this particular public housing that I’m aware of were stuck in their apartments for days without food, light or ability to get out because of the elevators not working. And then people came to the door. And they didn’t know if they were safe. They didn’t know if those were intruders who were going to hurt them, or people there to help them. It doesn’t have to be that way if we take care of some of these things before.

UCSF launched a climate change and mental health task force in June 2019. What did the group set out to do and what has it accomplished, especially for older people?

I would say our achievements have been in the realm of educating mental health trainees about the impacts of climate change in mental health. I believe that medical students need to be what we call climate literate in their educational endeavors. How can we train doctors, and anyone in health care, adequately, if we don’t train them to think about the most significant threat to our wellbeing of this century?

That task force is now being integrated more into this campuswide center on climate health and equity, which actually is a UC-wide endeavor that the Office of the President has supported that is multi-campus, although it’s primarily based at UCSF. I will say it is profoundly underfinanced.

Are you aware of other projects like that in the Bay Area?

There are things happening at many institutions, not with creating a task force, but other kinds of things. Stanford has a new faculty position for one person in the Department of Psychiatry to embed climate change and mental health into their department. Davis has a number of people who are exploring and doing research. But I will say to you, all of these things are siloed. Coming together is a really big issue in the realm of climate and mental health.

The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, last month sounded the alarm about the loneliness epidemic in the U.S., and how social isolation has a detrimental effect on the health of older people. And climate disasters could worsen this disconnection, especially if older adults are displaced from their homes and communities. So, on a local level, what steps can be taken to alleviate the loneliness crisis?

I think it is enhancing recreational, social meal programs that bring people outside of their homes and engage them with each other in socially involved activities. We know that caregivers are so underpaid, and that there’s been a massive loss in numbers of people who are doing caregiving for the elderly, because you can’t make a living off of it. We have to fund caregivers, so that those who are isolated in their homes have regular connection.

Given all the challenges and complexities of investigating and implementing solutions to address climate change’s toll on mental health, what gives you hope for the future?

Hope is a funny word. Hope is not optimism. Hope is not like, “I can see our way out of this.” We are going to have very, very significant, enduring, unrepairable damage from the impact of climate change. What gives me hope is this new way of defining hope — radical hope. I can envision a better world to live in. And when I see what’s happening, I can’t turn away from it, I have to lean into it. And some people are saying now, hope is a verb we create out of the activism that we do to confront our wicked problem. And what we do now is not going to make this all nice and better, but it will affect the kind of world that we’re moving toward in the future.

This Q&A, part of a series of stories on the health impacts of climate change on older adults, was produced with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Archstone Foundation.

See also:

• “Research on Climate Change and Health Reveals Risks for Older Adults: A Q&A With Dr. Andrew Chang,” 1/27/2023
• “Battling Despair Over a New Climate Change Reality,” 9/14/2021

The post Climate Change Can Harm Mental Health of Older Adults appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Sea level rise is forcing cities around San Francisco Bay to weigh demand for new housing against the need to protect communities from flooding. Builders say they can solve this dilemma with cutting-edge civil engineering. But no one knows whether their ambitious efforts will be enough to keep newly built waterfront real estate safe in coming decades.

Meanwhile, developers are busy building — and telling the public that they can mitigate this one effect of climate change, despite mounting evidence that it could be a bigger problem than previously believed.

On Treasure Island, a flat tract of 20th-century landfill with epic bay vistas, workers have poured the foundation for a 22-story tower, the first of six planned high-rise buildings, and broken ground on an affordable housing complex. Another, for families and unhoused veterans, is nearly complete. Townhomes, retail space and a waterfront transit hub are also in the pipeline. All told, the $6 billion development would be home to 20,000 people or more.

Engineers for the public-private consortium transforming the island, Treasure Island Community Development, say they are pursuing aggressive sea rise adaptation strategies. Improvements include raising some of the land by several feet, preparing a buffer zone for future levees and pumps, and setting aside low-lying open space that could convert to floodable marshland as higher bay waters spill onshore.

This is not a cheap endeavor. The development group’s director, Bob Beck, did not return multiple emails and phone calls regarding costs for this work. A 2011 report by the city of San Francisco, which includes Treasure Island, estimated that “geotechnical stabilization” measures would cost $137 million. Storm drains, soil grading and landscape and open-space improvements would add about $120 million.

Dilip Trivedi, the site’s project manager with international engineering firm Moffatt and Nichol, has been touting the consortium’s efforts for more than a decade. He said in a recent interview that the most built-up parts of the island should be safe from sea rise through at least 2070. Fifty years or so is a reasonable planning horizon for new developments, he added, and additional phased seawall construction can help future generations stay a step ahead of ever-higher tides.

“When you put together significant infrastructure, you don’t want to have to maintain it for about that time,” Trivedi said. “It is what we call project life.”

Climate scientists, however, commonly try to predict sea rise out at least to the year 2100, a time when some current schoolchildren could be octogenarian residents of the island.

Every contemporary climate model predicts that, even with deep carbon reductions starting this decade, several feet of sea rise are locked in. The debates for climate adaptation strategy are how many feet and how far down the road we should consider.

With ever more sophisticated climate predictions, the outlook for sea level rise has continued to darken, indicating that current trends will likely accelerate through the end of the century. In one pessimistic scenario — which researchers say is among the possibilities in a “business as usual” global greenhouse gas emissions future — much of the island could find itself underwater frequently, and some of the most developed areas could occasionally be threatened with flooding.

To home in on Treasure Island’s future, the San Francisco Public Press asked researchers at the United States Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, based in Santa Cruz, to provide an analysis of storm conditions under various climate scenarios using sea rise projections by the Ocean Protection Council. They found that bay waters could surge higher than the developers have long been saying publicly.

In that analysis, by 2100 there is a small but not insignificant chance of 4 feet, 11 inches of sea level rise — slightly more than what the island’s engineers have accounted for. Adding in the effects of tides, weather and other transient events, such as in the kind of extreme storm seen once in a century, that total could be 2 feet, 11 inches higher.

The resulting surge would, at least temporarily, send waves 1 foot, 2 inches higher than the lowest ground floors of some planned housing complexes.

While the project’s engineers never address this possibility in their public narratives, documents they have prepared show they have known about similar scenarios for years.

Their own maps, which superimpose flood conditions on existing land elevations, line up fairly closely to the Geological Survey’s map data. Yet the engineers have chosen to downplay the likelihood of these outcomes as they pursued permits to build, arguing that novel construction technologies could make the development invulnerable to flooding under any reasonable course of events.

In a 2016 sea rise adaptation filing with a regional watershed agency, Moffatt and Nichol included six maps showing potential flood conditions in each construction phase, side by side with maps showing how the planned short- and long-term sea level rise protections would prevent inundation. 

One map shows 4 feet of sea rise. Before any land improvements, nearly the entire island would have been inundated — up to 8 feet in places — during flooding calculated by FEMA to have a 1% chance of occurring per year. Another part of that document showed a graph that indicated a 4-foot rise was possible by around 2093. The Geological Survey’s analysis of the Ocean Protection Council extreme scenario for 2100 puts sea rise closer to 5 feet.

But Trivedi said that the raising of the land under many of the buildings, plus additional shoreline improvements, would protect key infrastructure. Beside that map, the engineers showed how the existing 3.5-mile perimeter wall could be raised by 1 to 3 feet, depending on location, which they said would keep much of the island dry, although a note appended to the diagram said: “Does not show intentional flooding from managed retreat on northern and eastern shorelines — TBD.”

Within the last year, regulators have started questioning whether the steps developers are taking are sufficient to guarantee that the island remains dry in the long term.

“This is a community that will be around a while,” said Ethan Lavine, chief of permits for shoreline development for the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. “At a certain point in time, they will need levee protection.” Lavine’s office is pressing Trivedi and his colleagues to use a more cautious view of climate change when assessing whether Treasure Island’s flood prevention techniques can handle what nature might throw at them. 

When evaluating permit applications, government agencies require developers to reference the “best available science” to assess threats from climate change. In October 2021, the engineers issued an update to the 2016 filing. In it, Trivedi compared his firm’s sea level rise expectations against studies by several scientific bodies, including California’s Ocean Protection Council and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His preferred predictions minimized the effect of the worst-case scenarios. The only needed change, he argued, would be to move up the time frame for planning adaptations by as much as five years. 

Yet climate policy experts point out that with significant scientific papers being released each year, guidance for builders has become a moving target. Because they admit a great deal of uncertainty in their predictions, scientists always publish their results in charts that consider an array of environmental assumptions.

That gives developers leeway to choose which predictions to focus on when describing the risks to their capital investments. Treasure Island could be the most expensive local project in the region’s history to take advantage of this ambiguity.

Projecting Optimism

All of Trivedi’s recent public statements conclude that the likelihood of the gloomiest climate scenarios is remote, and that the level of risk to property and lives is insignificant given the proposed engineering fixes. But a close examination of the 2021 adaptation plan offers a few reasons for concern:

• It dismisses high-end forecasts, in which global warming accelerates due to uncontrolled carbon emissions.
• It selectively cites climate models that make planned infrastructure appear sufficient to virtually eliminate future flood risk.
• It focuses on relatively short time frames, such as 20 or 50 years, while offering little specificity about expected conditions at the end of the century, which falls within the lifetimes of some children alive today.

Trivedi said in an interview that for planning purposes, he is focused on one recent predicted milestone: 3 feet of sea rise by 2080. In that circumstance, the ground floors of most buildings, to be built upon a now-elevated development pad, would still have a buffer of nearly 4 feet above the average highest tide of today.

He also asserted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific committee organized by the United Nations, recently reported sea rise could be less severe than previously forecasted, based on the track record of recent years. “What has been observed is that sea level rise is not tracking” to the most pessimistic scenarios, he said. But there are reasons to question his conclusion.

The localized scenario for 2100 examined by the Geological Survey — the one resulting in water levels 1 foot, 2 inches above some developed areas — relies on a climate change prediction assessed to have a probability of 5%, that is, a 1-in-20 statistical chance of occurring. That prediction was published by the California Ocean Protection Council, a body of experts organized by the state government, in recent guidelines for community planning.

Trivedi said the international group’s current report indicates there’s “low confidence in that scenario happening.” When asked for a citation to back up this claim, Trivedi referenced a “localized model” of the findings from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and five other federal agencies.

A report these agencies jointly issued in February 2022 in fact gave a more nuanced view. In a section titled “Future Mean Sea Level,” the authors did exclude one scenario used by the Ocean Protection Council that had been labeled “extreme” and not given a numerical probability. But that is not the scenario Trivedi said the group ruled out. This same report indicates that the West Coast is likely to see 4 to 8 inches of rise over 30 years, accelerating later in the century.

Regardless of the pace of the increase, Treasure Island developers say they have contingency plans relying on future residents or taxpayers to fund the construction of progressively higher walls around the urban zone — several feet every few decades. In its latest update, Moffatt and Nichol said sea level rise of 1 foot by 2043 would trigger the plan to elevate the perimeter.

A strategy reliant on levees might seem risky in light of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when faulty engineering of levees led to catastrophic flooding of parts of New Orleans that sit below the level of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. In light of this recent history, Bay Area regulators are starting to ask whether the Treasure Island plan is entirely watertight.

A March 2022 letter from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency that issued the island’s 2016 permit for waterfront areas, called the update too optimistic and tolerant of long-term flooding potential.

“Public access along a shoreline and a big mixed-use development require using a medium-to-high-risk projection for sea level rise,” said the commission’s planning manager, Erik Buehmann.

Re-engineering Shaky Ground

On an island built by the government generations ago out of rocks, soil and dredged sand, preparing high-and-dry land would be difficult even if it were not in an earthquake and tsunami zone.

In numerous reports and public presentations, Trivedi has said construction workers have elevated land on the 100-acre development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the “base flood elevation” — a height calculated by Federal Emergency Management Agency representing a 1% chance of flooding each year. The homes, hotels and businesses there will be set back from the shoreline by 200 to 300 feet on most sides and as much as 1,000 feet from the northern shore because that area is more prone to flooding. Building is planned to roll out in phases through 2035.

Workers have spent years using cranes to repeatedly drop heavy weights to compact the soil. They have driven vibrating probes into the earth, filling the holes with concrete for stabilization. They then piled 1 million cubic yards of soil atop the compacted layer. These measures are intended to prevent the kind of ground liquefaction seen in the Marina District and elsewhere during the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Other geological improvements include inserting vertical wick drains, akin to long drinking straws, to help remove water from the soil as it compresses. These techniques have been used by civil engineers around the world for more than 30 years to develop areas without easy access to bedrock.

Trivedi said these measures, together with a jagged, rocky seawall raised to allow for just over 1 foot of sea rise, would help take energy out of large waves, and the setback would use the landscape to dissipate any possible overtopping before it reaches valuable structures.

At the same time, the engineers have recognized that much of the island — particularly the low-lying northern end — are indefensible. Areas that have flooded in the past will eventually be sacrificed to rising waters. That strategy has immediate, concrete consequences: Dozens of existing structures, including homes of about 3,000 people currently living there, are set to be demolished to create open space. Over time these areas could be turned into tidal marshland to protect the newly developed areas from storms.

Regulators Balk at a Sunny Assessment

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency most empowered to weigh in on new waterfront building, is hamstrung by a legal mandate to regulate only what happens 100 feet inland, regardless of elevation — an artifact of legislation dating from before climate change was a dominant concern.

The 2016 permit the agency issued for improvements on Treasure Island’s margins, including a ferry terminal, required adaptation updates every five years. Moffatt and Nichol’s 2021 update concluded that the original adaptation plans needed few changes, except for possibly needing to accelerate, by five years, the planning process for building higher perimeter levees.

Regulators balked at the assessment. In a March 2022 letter, the commission advised Moffatt and Nichol to plan more conservatively. The agency demanded consideration of a 1-in-200 chance sea rise scenario, in which seas rise 6 feet, 11 inches by 2100. Adding in a 100-year storm surge, waves could plausibly overtop portions of the sea wall along the southeastern side by about 1 to 2 feet, and along the northern end by about 1 foot. That is an even worse outcome than that predicted by Geological Survey’s localized flooding model.

The commission said Moffatt and Nichol seemed too dismissive of chances that things could go wrong.

“The permittees decided to design the project considering very low risk of sea level rise related impacts” the letter said, noting also that engineers seemed too focused on the short time horizon of 2080.

Trivedi counters that the Treasure Island development was never built upon projections of a certain sea level happening by a certain date, because seawalls can, for all practical purposes, be built arbitrarily high, on whatever schedule is needed.

“We adopted an approach where we decided on an allowance we are building into the project,” he said in the interview. “As future projections come out, we will adjust the date of the adaptation.”

Commission staff met with planners from Moffatt and Nichol last summer to work out the requested additions to the 2021 adaptation strategy. Buehmann, who worked on the original permit, said follow-up discussions were to be expected because the Treasure Island permit was the first since the commission began requiring builders to submit sea rise assessments. “We didn’t expect it to be perfect the first time,” he said.

Whatever comes of this process  which Trivedi referred to as merely “an internal thing” that was required for the filing — the adaptation plan is unlikely to change significantly, because the development pad is already in place and huge construction cranes are sprouting up on Treasure Island’s skyline. What is left in the playbook is raising future seawalls, ceding the northern open space and the installation of pumps.

Government officials have long acknowledged the inevitability of Treasure Island’s relying on artificial barriers. In 2015, Brad McCrea, regulatory program director at the commission, told the Public Press: “At the end of the day, this will be a levee-protected community — there’s no getting around that.” Since then, agency staff have not changed their view.

Rapidly Outdated Climate Science

To determine how high to raise the building pad, Treasure Island builders consulted several climate studies published as early as 1987 and as recently as 2007. At that point, scientists were predicting that by 2100, oceans could rise as much as 4 feet, 7 inches.

This forecast was echoed by a state panel of scientists and policy experts in 2009, when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Treasure Island to announce its findings and call for better sea level rise mitigation.

Moffatt and Nichol then relied on these studies to anticipate that the oceans would rise 3 feet by 2075. So the company proposed raising the development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the predicted levels for a once-in-a-hundred-year flood.

Moffatt and Nichol did not spell out a rationale for setting the height of the development pad, as the Public Press reported in 2010. The firm did argue that raising it higher could create other problems, such as jeopardizing the island’s stability under the weight of packed soil and adding expense. “At some point it doesn’t become cost-effective — it’s a matter of acceptable levels of risk over your planning horizon,” Trivedi said in an interview then.

To be sure, when Treasure Island plans were drawn up, scientific modeling showed wide uncertainty about how much global temperatures could increase. In 2009, scientists around the world were saying that oceans could rise anywhere from a minimum of 3 feet, 3 inches to a maximum of 4 feet, 11 inches by 2100. At that time, the effects of ice melt from land via glaciers, snowpacks and ice caps were little understood.

Today, European and U.S. scientists using satellite imagery to measure the shape of Greenland’s ice sheets say melting is outstripping gains from snowfall. In a paper published last August, they found that no matter how much countries curb emissions, seas will rise by a minimum of 11 inches from this effect alone.  

Focusing Locally

The U.S. Geological Survey developed the Coastal Storm Modeling System to help protect waterfront communities. It simulates the forces behind wave and wind data and translates them into local flood projections that include tides, storm surges, waves and seasonal events such as El Niño.

The Public Press requested that the agency simulate a small section of San Francisco Bay, in the vicinity of Treasure Island, relying on probability scenarios for global sea levels in 2100 developed by the California Ocean Protection Council in a 2018 guidance paper. This report offered up sea rise projections of likelihoods as high as 50% and as low as 0.5%. 

The Ocean Protection Council’s examination of a wide array of probabilities heavily influenced the Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s critique of the Treasure Island adaptation update. The commission’s biggest concern was that change might happen faster than the engineers were anticipating.

[Explore sea level rise scenarios using Climate Central’s interactive tool. Here we show floodwaters at 7.8 feet above the present-day high tide line. ]

But Trivedi said the Ocean Protection Council’s past predictions had already failed. “If you look at the year 2022 projections, follow the OPC formulas,” Trivedi said. “We should have seen about 8 inches of sea level rise since 2000. In reality, it has been about 2 inches or less.”

Most forecasts predict increased global temperatures due to persistent carbon pollution. But the emissions projections are still hotly contested.

The Ocean Protection Council examined two emissions scenarios. One assumed that carbon dioxide output doubles through 2050. The other imagined more aggressive greenhouse gas reductions — 70% by 2050 and “net zero” emissions by 2080.

For the purposes of seeing how bad things could plausibly get, the U.S. Geological Survey used a midlevel emissions scenario. This decision was based on detailed simulations into the next century of swell and waves along the Pacific Ocean. What the researchers found was that paradoxically, milder greenhouse gas levels generated worse storms for California’s coast than do extreme ones. 

“What’s really changed in the research community is that worst-case scenarios have become more common,” said Patrick Barnard, a research geologist with the agency. “The state is asking communities to prepare for these.”

This approach helps waterfront areas learn to be more risk-averse to protect property and lives.

Avoiding Mistakes of the Past

Foster City is paying a high price for waterfront sprawl. Like Treasure Island, the mid-Peninsula community 25 miles to the south was built entirely on landfill, not unusual in the Bay Area, where efforts to accommodate population growth stretching back to the Gold Rush consumed most of the wetlands and tidal marshes.

Foster City did have worries about flooding decades ago. It is shot through with artificial waterways, including two sloughs, several small canals and an artificial lagoon. Barely above sea level before being developed, it would not exist if not for its levees and seawalls. 

Yet, in 2014 FEMA informed Foster City officials that new studies showed the levee system was neither strong nor tall enough to withstand a major storm and the large waves that would result. Update the seawalls and levees, or the entire city would be designated a floodplain, the agency said. 

Sixty years ago, developers there hauled in tons of sand to raise the land several feet to construct thousands of homes in what became a 33,000-resident community. That was a time when climate change was not a part of city planning vernacular. Today workers are busy widening and raising levees and adding interlocking steel plates as a bulwark against the storms federal regulators warned of, as well as rising seas.

But Treasure Island, which is slated to add 8,000 units of housing to accommodate more than 20,000 residents, is still more than a decade away from build-out. What the engineers put in place there in the next few years could avoid Foster City’s mistakes — or compound them.

To be sure, some cities are starting to alter blueprints on pace with the evolving science. In October, the Port of San Francisco announced it was collaborating with the Army Corps of Engineers to study how to shore up the city’s seawall along its eastern waterfront, from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Hunters Point Shipyard, to combat both sea rise and earthquake risk. This area includes attractions like the Chase Center sports arena, a project green-lighted before a city-commissioned study surfaced that predicted flooding from sea level rise in the new Mission Bay neighborhood, as the Public Press reported in 2017.

Port officials now say they anticipate 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. That is 2 feet, 5 inches higher than the level Treasure Island’s developers are planning for in their adaptation strategy.

The Port’s yearlong effort will consider elevating barriers along the Embarcadero, installing a system of locks at Mission Creek and buying back and cleaning up privately owned landfill areas around Islais Creek to return them to the tidal zone.

Not Easy to Abandon a Home

In the grips of a housing affordability crisis, San Francisco needs new construction. But is a flood zone the wisest place to build? That could depend on how long we expect buildings to last.

Barnard, of the U.S. Geological Survey, has traveled to many communities, including Okracoke Island, part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, to assess how to protect people from storms. In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian shut the island down to visitors. For residents, it was hard to consider leaving a place they have inhabited for seven or eight generations. “You can’t detach people from their place, or their heart,” Barnard said. “They’ll stay until water is up to their nose.” 

Before the developers moved in, Treasure Island had roughly 3,000 residents, according to the 2020 Census, many living in homes built for the U.S. Navy in the mid-20th century when it was a military base. Nearly half have a household income less than $50,000, and many do not speak English. 

Now these residents are on tenterhooks. Under an agreement with the developer, people who lived on Treasure Island before 2011 are guaranteed new affordable and rent-controlled units. But the wait times and other inconveniences have been tough. Everyone is living in a construction site with an unreliable electrical grid that browns and blacks out frequently. 

The new units are supposed to be comparable to what they had, but longtime islander Christoph Opperman said they have been offered “interim” units that, for example, might not have enough space for a family, or lack laundry facilities.

“They’re picking us off one neighborhood at a time by making us do two moves,” Opperman said. “We’re not entitled to just anything on the island, but we are entitled to fair treatment.”

Treasure Island’s planners are essentially acknowledging that they must sacrifice part of the island to the bay, even while pursuing a more built-up urban environment just several hundred feet away. This combination of advance and retreat is all part of the plan, the engineers say.

Asked whether he would move to Treasure Island, Trivedi did not hesitate to say yes, observing that no part of the Bay Area was completely free of danger.

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “I mean, should people be moving to San Francisco, because of the seismic risk? Buildings are being designed to codes. And flooding is the same way.”

A version of this story was republished in partnership with Inside Climate News.

This reporting is supported by grants from the Solutions Journalism Network’s Business and Sustainability Initiative and by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Correction 5/4/2023: An earlier version of this story misstated the process the U.S. Geological Survey used to report an extreme flood projection for Treasure Island. The model upon which it was based was produced not by the agency, but by the Ocean Protection Council. Also, the likelihood of that scenario is higher than originally given — 5%, not 0.5 %.

The post Promising to Prevent Floods at Treasure Island, Builders Downplay Risk of Sea Rise appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Rains this winter and early spring ended the drought in the Bay Area and brought a kind of weather whiplash that put San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management to the test. 
 
Early in the storm cycle, the department faced challenges communicating with the public, especially with people experiencing homelessness. Internal confusion over the forecast delayed the opening of its Emergency Operations Center until a major storm was under way. In at least one instance, flood barriers were deployed too late to prevent homes and businesses from being inundated. 
 
Despite those missteps, the city rallied a coordinated response from its Emergency Operations Center, where multiple city agencies, along with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. representatives, gathered to discuss and act on emerging issues in real time. 
 
It has been years since California faced this kind of barrage. The National Weather Service said that at least 14 powerful atmospheric rivers have slammed into California since October, triggering flooding and downing trees that have killed at least 22 people statewide, including two who were struck by falling trees in San Francisco.
 
And there could be more trouble to come: The Sierra snowpack is at a staggering 225% of normal, and while it will fill reservoirs, a fast spring melt could cause even more flooding. 
 
In a new “Civic” episode, we examine how the city responded to the first big deluge of the season and what it learned from that harried experience to improve response to subsequent storms. 

The biggest rainstorm hit San Francisco with 5.5 inches of rain on New Year’s Eve, when many city employees were away on vacation. Adrienne Bechelli, deputy director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said city departments were able to mount a full response despite being short staffed. 
 
“The city tasks that were the most urgent priority were, of course, flood mitigation and clearing catch basins ensuring that all of our storm drains were clear,” she said. 

Emergency response teams also helped drivers whose vehicles were stranded in floodwaters and worked to get people living on the streets into emergency shelters, she said.  
 
Despite those efforts, some residents and businesses in the Mission District said the city was slow in providing information and failed to put up additional flood gates as it has done before previous storms. 

Blame game

On Jan. 3, Mayor London Breed began a news conference saying the city didn’t expect so much rain. 
 
“We were under the impression and notified by our National Weather Service that we could anticipate not even an inch of rain,” she said. Less than one inch of rain is not considered a threat according to the city’s winter storm and flood plan. 
 
Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, echoed the mayor’s claims and said the city scrambled to increase its response on New Year’s Eve: “Our city employees rallied and we activated our Emergency Operations Center late morning when we realized what was actually happening was a little different than the actual forecast.”
 
Brian Garcia, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in the Bay Area, disputed those claims. He said the forecast showed a strong system hitting San Francisco days before it arrived. 
 
“We started messaging that on the 26th and 27th, when we started putting out information for the New Year’s Eve system,” he said. “We issued a flood watch on December 28. So, we definitely saw something coming in.” 

The weather service issues flood watches when the risk of a hazardous weather or flood event increases significantly.
 
San Francisco’s own response protocol lays out an elaborate system to prepare for major storms. The city activated its emergency response on Dec. 28, after the National Weather Service issued its flood watch 96 hours ahead of the storm. 

Garcia said city leaders’ forecast concerns seemed to center on whether the New Year’s Eve fireworks show — which had been cancelled during the first two years of the pandemic — could proceed as planned over the bay near the Embarcadero. 
 
“There was a focus for all of us to see if the rain was going to clear out by then, on the briefing that we provided on December 28,” Garcia said. “We were talking about the wind and the rain across our entire area, including the city, and how nasty it was going to be. The fireworks were definitely a bit of a focus.” 
 
The city seemed to have moved past the “one inch of rain” forecast claim in late February, when Bechelli said the forecast didn’t hamper the city’s efforts. 
 
“We were full out in terms of our operational response,” she said, shifting the focus to the city’s storm water capacity. “The built infrastructure of San Francisco is not built to handle five and a half inches of rain in a 24-hour period — we’re going to see inevitable flooding.” 
 
Garcia is ready to move on. “You’re always learning how to communicate better,” he said. “We continue to look forward to many years of a strong partnership with the great city of San Francisco.”
 
A representative from the Department of Emergency Management wrote in an email that the city hopes to bring National Weather Service representatives into the Emergency Operations Center during future storms. 

Seeking shelter

Following the New Year’s Eve storm, San Francisco Public Press reporters Yesica Prado and Madison Alvarado visited eight San Francisco neighborhoods over three days to talk to homeless people out in the rain. 
 
Prado said that access to shelters varies a lot by neighborhood.
 
“Some places, like in the Bayview, people are able to be more settled down versus being in the Civic Center or being in Japantown, where people are constantly on the move, and they will have to seek shelter if they want accommodations for the night,” she said.

Alvarado said nonprofits were scrambling to find spots for people and, in some cases, sent them across the city where there were beds available.  
 
“We were visiting a shelter and dining room down in the Bayview. We actually heard that at the end of the day the St. Anthony Foundation bused people down to Mother Brown’s in the Bayview, because they knew that there were shelter options down there,” she said. 

San Francisco added more beds to all its shelters in anticipation of a demand surge and worked with nonprofits and churches to add more, but Alvarado said finding information about where beds are available can be difficult for people without access to the internet. 
 
“If you don’t have a phone, you don’t know where you can go because you don’t know where they are,” she said. “Maybe you know of another shelter, but you don’t know how to get there.” 
 
During their reporting, they came across a man shivering on the sidewalk. 
 
“We noticed that nobody had actually approached him,” Prado said. “We didn’t ask for an interview. We went to ask ‘do you need any help?’ And then all he could muster is that, yeah, like he was cold. So we went back to our car, and we got some supplies for him, some dry clothes. But once we came back, he wasn’t really responsive. And that’s when we thought, he really needs some other kind of help.”
 
Prado and Alvarado said they looked online to see whom they should call. The Healthy Streets Operation Center website indicated that calls from concerned citizens would not be returned. Prado and Alvarado were reluctant to call 911, which they said they thought might bring a police response to a medical issue. So, they ended up calling 311, and a team designated to help homeless people showed up a few minutes later. 
 
Confusion over whom to call was understandable. During the Jan. 3 news conference, San Francisco Fire Chief Janine Nicholson discouraged people from using 911 for anything less than an emergency. 
 
“I can’t stress it enough,” she said. “Call 911 for life threatening emergencies only. We still have to run all of our critical 911 calls, whether it’s a cardiac arrest or a car accident or a fire.” 
 
But Bechelli said that calling 911 is the right choice: “Our 911 dispatchers are trained to send the right resource for that particular problem. If there is a medical emergency, they will send a medical response in order to help that person.”

Encampment sweeps continued 

Representatives from the Department of Emergency Management said that they reached out to people in encampments to offer them shelter ahead of and during the rain storms, and in some cases, to warn them that the place they were in was prone to flooding or other dangers. Meanwhile, the Department of Public Works continued to dismantle tent encampments during the inclement weather, as witnessed by our reporters. 
 
Alvarado spoke with a man named Duane who said he had been camping on 19th Street near Harrison Street for about a month, and that city workers kept asking him and other people nearby to move. 
 
“They were making us move every week, every week, back and forth, back and forth. No matter if it was raining,” he said. 
 
Our reporters said the city was offering temporary shelter stays to people in the two encampments they visited, but few of the people they spoke to said they were taking the offers. 
 
Duane said he thought congregate shelters and even navigation centers, which allow groups of friends to stay together, were too dangerous. “You got to deal with a bunch of crazy people. They pick fights with literally no reason,” he said. “It’s like, yeah, they offer you housing. But you gotta jump through hoops to get in.”

Mitigating floodwaters

The city has long known where flooding is most likely to happen and has some plans to mitigate it. After the December and January storms, residents and businesses affected by flooding were asked to fill out questionnaires to help the city track damage and potentially help San Franciscans get federal relief. 
 
Bechelli said 117 people submitted responses about flooding affecting their homes and 17 submitted responses about their businesses. Many responses came from people in the Marina, Mission, Bernal Heights, Glen Park, Castro, Potrero Hill and Dolores Heights neighborhoods, she said. 
 
Most had flood damage, but few had flood insurance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency declined to offer emergency grants to those affected, but will offer Small Business Administration Disaster Loan assistance. Applicants must apply in person at the War Memorial building on Van Ness Avenue. 
 
The city has plans to address some areas prone to flooding. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has allocated $632 million for three large drainage projects in low-lying areas. 

• The Wawona Street Stormwater Project in West Portal will be under construction until 2024.
• The Lower Alemany Area Rainwater Improvements Project in Bernal Heights will improve stormwater management near the Alemany Farmer’s Market, and the Interstate 280 and U.S. 101 interchange in Bernal Heights. Construction isn’t expected to begin before 2025 with completion in 2028.
• The Folsom Area Stormwater Improvement Project would cover multiple streets in the Mission to reduce flooding in one of the neighborhoods hardest hit in even moderate storms. The project is in the planning phase with no date set for construction to begin. 

In a more modest effort, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has distributed $2.5 million in grants to schools and nonprofits to fund rain gardens, green roofs and other green infrastructure projects to help slow down and redirect floodwaters.

Weather response report card

So, how did the city respond to our wild and wet winter? 
 
There were communication problems. 
 
It’s unclear why city officials and the national weather service got into an argument over the New Year’s Eve forecast. Confusion over the forecast delayed the opening of the city’s Emergency Operations Center.
 
Given conflicting instructions, San Franciscans may have been confused about when to call 911, especially around helping homeless people. 
 
Finding information about shelter locations generally requires access to a smartphone or the internet. Direct outreach to the homeless is limited by staffing constraints and the fact that those needing the information move around a lot. 
 
Overall, the city’s response to protecting people in need was hampered by the same factors that have led to so many people living on the streets: a lack of long-term housing and a focus on temporary shelters, which are often considered by the homeless to be worse than staying outside. 
 
The city knows where the most problematic flood areas are and has plans to mitigate many of them, but those infrastructure projects are years from completion. 

The New Year’s Eve storm was the city’s second wettest on record, only surpassed by a Nov. 11, 1994, storm that brought 5.54 inches of rain to San Francisco. It is too early to know whether California will break its previous record set in 1952-53 for wettest season based on snowfall. The total snowpack results are usually measured and reported April 1. 

Inconsistent weather patterns

For the last few years California has been experiencing a series of La Niña weather patterns, which normally mean drier than usual conditions. An El Niño pattern usually means a wetter than average winter. But within those two major patterns are lesser intra-seasonal oscillations that can change from month to month. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that variations in tropical rainfall can shift the wintertime jet stream and atmospheric circulation over the North Pacific and western North America, thereby overriding the dominant seasonal weather pattern.
 
The weather service’s Garcia explains that if the intra-seasonal oscillations “all come together in the right way, they can override a strong entrenched signal. We can have El Niño years that are extremely dry. And conversely, we can have La Niña years that are extremely wet. It’s not unheard of, it’s just not the norm.” 
 
The La Niña pattern officially ended March 9. It’s unclear whether we’ll see an El Niño pattern by next fall or a neutral pattern.
 
“In California, we typically end major droughts with major floods,” Garcia said. “This has happened multiple times throughout California’s history. So, is this related to climate change at all? The way that it’s related to climate change are the extremes at which we’re seeing those higher heights and lower lows. It’s not happening any more frequently than historically, it’s just getting deeper and higher at the same time.”

CLARIFICATION 4/10/23: The Department of Emergency Management responded to this story to characterize the changing activation status of its Emergency Operations Center. Though only described as “open” during specified times, it is otherwise continuously in standby mode and monitoring events.

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Against this backdrop and with extreme weather events on the rise, physician-researchers like Dr. Andrew Chang, an attending physician specializing in cardiology at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, are investigating how the biological mechanisms of aging and a warming world will affect the health of older adults.

In 2022, Chang and his colleagues examined medical literature to study the intricate and nuanced ways that climate change-fueled disasters and other environmental factors influence the cardiovascular health of older people. They summarized their findings in the journal Current Cardiology Reports. In an interview with the San Francisco Public Press, Chang shared some of the concerns expressed by older patients during environmental disasters like wildfires, and explained the challenges researchers often face while gathering data on this subject.

Below are excerpts from the interview, which have been edited for length and clarity.

What was the motivation for you and your colleagues to embark on researching the health impacts of climate change specifically on older adults?

In the immediate phase, the group of people who most suffers from the effects of climate change are our older adults and some of our senior citizens, and the reason for that is sort of twofold. First is, there are pretty unique biological changes that happen to the human body with aging, which actually increase the susceptibility to environmental factors. And the second thing is, there are social factors as well which make older adults less resilient against some of these events. So not surprisingly, if you look at the casualty rates from both natural disasters, as well as long-term exposures to things like air pollution, disproportionately, it is older adults who are dying from some of these conditions or developing conditions or suffering from the effects of these things. I think, very quickly, it became clear to us that the study of climate change’s effects on human health disproportionately involves the health of our older adults.

Wildfires are an ongoing concern here in the Bay Area as well as across the state. And your article explored the relationships between climate change and wildfires and cardiovascular risk for older people. Could you explain how they are linked?

The biggest thing is that older adults don’t have the same barrier functions that younger adults and younger people do. And what I mean by that is that most of the injury that happens from wildfire smoke is from inhalation. So, you breathe in particles, and particulate matter we know is highly inflammatory, and it enters your body. It enters the circulation through the tiny blood vessels called capillaries that are inside of your lungs. Older adults don’t have barrier functions at those blood vessels that are as robust as younger adults. So, you kind of have more of a leaky effect, where more of those toxins are absorbed. And then they enter into the bloodstream. 

Now, not only are more toxins coming in, there’s underlying susceptibility. There’s just the normal process of aging that causes us to have reduced lung capacity. If you imagine that we’re already starting out with reduced lung capacity as an older adult, then losing even more of that is more dangerous. Similarly, just due to normal aging processes, the heart muscle becomes stiffer, the arteries are less elastic. So, any of these toxic effects basically become magnified. 

And then on top of all of that, of course, older adults are more likely to have preexisting cardiopulmonary diseases — things like heart failure or high blood pressure or diabetes — and all of those things work additively or multiplicatively in terms of your injury from air pollution exposure.

Were there any other particularly startling or surprising findings that you came across as you were doing this research?

I was really surprised how so many of the deaths that are attributable to heat waves or heat events were actually cardiac rather than things coded as heat stroke or heat exhaustion. Because, I guess in my head, it had seemed that the actual exposure to the heat itself was probably going to be the biggest determinant of injury. As a clinical cardiologist, it kind of reinforced to me that heat-related injury for older adults is a cardiac problem.

Were there any challenges that you and your team experienced as you were working on this paper? Did you run into any hurdles in finding data about how climate change will affect the elderly population?

The paper that you’re referencing is … our synthesis of what the entirety of the literature looks like. In terms of data, our group also does a lot of primary research using primary sources of data. In general, in those situations, there are some challenges. One of them is that a lot of exposures tend to be gradual, over long periods of time. Things like air pollution, for example, we know climate change makes air pollution worse. But everyone experiences some amount of air pollution at baseline. So, there’s a challenge of studying something that’s sort of insidious, and occurring over a long period of time, in terms of things like air pollution. 

On the flip side, studying things like wildfires or extreme heat events, which are very intense, very short exposures. Part of that is also challenging because it’s hard to gather data in the moment. When there is a natural disaster, say like a wildfire, the priority on the ground really is to evacuate people. It’s to make sure that they’re being safe, that they’re being cared for. And a lot of research ends up happening retrospectively, trying to kind of go back and cobble together what exactly happened. So, you start to lose some of that individual granularity. 

You can gather much more granular data. For example, some of my colleagues are putting air sensors in people’s homes and looking forward to future wildfire seasons to see how much does that impact their health outcomes. The challenge on that side is also that’s very granular data that tends to be kind of hard and expensive to do on a large scale. 

And are you currently doing any research?

I’ll speak more generally, just because these studies are ongoing. But some of the questions that we’re interested in generally are: What were the effects of specific wildfire seasons on emergency room visits? Did emergency room visits for certain types of conditions — say, asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes — change before and after specific wildfire events? 

Other things we’re looking at are things like subclinical markers. What I mean by subclinical markers is: Is there an early detection system for injuries to the organs from these insidious, prolonged exposures? To give you an example, I look at ultrasound data of the heart in older adults — people over 65 — to look at over the course of five years or so of air pollution exposure. Are there subtle findings like subtle changes that happen to the way the heart moves? The way the heart muscle moves that may mean worse things are down the line? Can we identify these things early on? Can we identify people who are at risk for worse things like heart failure down the line from air pollution exposure? So that’s another thing that I’m interested in. 

In your clinical practice here in the Bay Area, do conversations about climate change come up with your older patients who have cardiovascular diseases?

The climate change issue that I field the most questions about are usually during wildfire seasons. I think part of that has to do with the visibility of it. When it looks like “Blade Runner” outside, the skies look pretty apocalyptic. I think it’s pretty clear to everybody: If you’ve ever tried to go jogging during a bad air quality day, it’s quite apparent that your heart and lungs are not happy with what’s going on. And I have to say most of our patients are also aware of that. I think that’s less of a thought during the extreme heat, because most people don’t immediately connect extreme heat events with heart disease, but I will definitely say I get a lot of questions from patients during wildfire season asking: What does this mean for me? What are the dangers to me? And most importantly, what should I do?

How can healthcare professionals help older people understand the risks of climate change?

We do know that unfortunately, older adults are less mobile and less able to evacuate in times of climate crises. I think one of the saddest statistics I’ve ever heard is that during Hurricane Katrina, over half of the people who died were over the age of 75. That really speaks to the fact that emergency planning has to be done in advance for older adults.  

I know a few of the environmental agencies do in general recommend that people at higher risk for harm from these situations have a disaster response plan. And having these types of disaster management plans is something that we can and should be talking about with our patients, particularly those who live in parts of the country with seasonal emergencies like hurricanes or wildfires or extreme heat waves. I think, as of now, that’s probably something that we as clinicians should be talking about with our older and vulnerable patients that we probably aren’t doing.

While older adults overall are vulnerable to climate change threats, your paper mentioned how those experiencing poverty and structural racism are at greater risk. Could you say more about this?

People who are at a lower socioeconomic status are almost always at higher risk. Part of that has to do with the fact that a lot of current solutions that have to deal with these things involve money, things like air conditioning for heat, and the fact that people who have money and means are more likely to afford higher quality care, so they are less likely to have developed some of these risk factors even if they are the same age as somebody who may be poor. 

In terms of racial, ethnic breakdowns, we’re increasingly recognizing that certain policies, for example, redlining, have marginalized certain groups of people such as African Americans to unfortunately live in parts of cities and communities that may be exposed to higher rates of air pollution — for example, near highways or industrial areas. And as you can imagine, having a higher baseline underlying rate of air pollution exposure means you’re more likely to be injured when there’s a spike in it from something like a wildfire. 

Anything else you wish to add?

I think, moving forward, we shouldn’t take a paternalistic attitude. There are a lot of things that older adults can also offer in the fight against both climate change and climate change-mediated disasters. There’s a certain resilience that you gain from life experiences. 

Also, older adults, a lot of them have this transgenerational thinking, this ability to imagine and advocate for a world for future generations — for their children, for their grandchildren, for their great grandchildren. That, I think, is really powerful. And in many societies, like First Nations societies, elders are quite respected and are important decision makers. Anything that we do in terms of policy, we need to make sure that older adults are equal partners in the decision making, and that we try to leverage their specialized skill sets or their strengths or their worldviews in order to craft our responses to these things, because we’d be surprised at a lot of the strength and resilience that we’ll find from our elders.

This Q&A, the first in a series of stories on the health impacts of climate change on older adults, was produced with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Archstone Foundation.

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Foghorns sounding on the Golden Gate Bridge signal that San Francisco’s “natural air conditioning” is rolling in, keeping San Francisco cool. During summer, the fog prevents triple-digit heat in the East Bay from roasting the city’s homes and businesses.

That pattern is changing. Since the 1970s, San Francisco’s average temperature has increased by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, city leaders are developing new strategies to keep people safe, with infrastructure designed for much cooler weather. The question is whether San Francisco is ready for the next deadly heat wave.

During the summer, chilly waters off the Northern California coast create a cool marine layer that is pulled inland like a blanket by the warmer air in the East Bay. On the other side of that weather pattern, an upper ridge of high pressure usually indicates where temperatures will be hottest.

On Labor Day 2017, the cool marine layer never reached San Francisco, and temperatures predicted to be in the upper 80s, soared to a record-breaking 106.

National Weather Service Meteorologist Brian Garcia said his agency didn’t see it coming — prediction models were off.

“It looked like the peak of that ridge was going to set up over the East Bay,” he said. “We were looking at temperatures upwards of 115 for Livermore.”

The ridge ended up 30 miles to the west — right on top of San Francisco. Any possible ocean breezes were blocked by a wall of high-pressure air.

The extreme heat took the lives of three elderly San Franciscans and three more people on the Peninsula. Most died alone in overheated buildings. None of them had called 911. Dozens of other people in San Francisco were taken to hospitals with serious heat-related illnesses, overwhelming local emergency medical services.

Threat Starts at Lower Temperature in SF

Most San Franciscans live without air conditioning. The 2020 Census found that in the metro area that includes San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, only 47% of households had air conditioning. That percentage is certainly lower in San Francisco, which is typically cooler than the East Bay. 

Adrienne Bechelli, deputy director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said people in the city are at higher risk with even moderate heat.

“Our thresholds in San Francisco are much lower than in other comparable cities nationwide, or even in other neighboring counties, because a lot of homes don’t have air conditioning in our work or commercial spaces,” she said. “So, our spectrum starts with pre-planning — depending on the incident — in the high 70s, but usually low 80s.”

Bechelli said setting heat protocols in motion starts with the forecast.

“A couple of days out, when we get that spot report from the National Weather Service, we will hold various levels of meetings with our key city partners, as well as other community stakeholders,” she said. “That would include policy-level meetings, as well as operational coordination meetings.”

Agencies participating in such meetings include the Department of Public Health, the Human Services Agency, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the Recreation and Parks Department, as well as the police, fire and sheriff’s departments. Elected leaders and representatives from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and the San Francisco Unified School District would also take part.

While the Department of Emergency Management coordinates the effort, no one person in San Francisco makes the decision as to which level of response is appropriate.

On average, San Francisco has three days a year over 90 degrees. By comparison, San Jose sees 16.

San Jose Deputy City Manager Kip Harkness is the person who makes decisions about heat emergencies when San Jose’s Emergency Operations Center is activated during an extended heat wave.

“We believe that it’s important to have the authority to act at the appropriate and lowest level possible,” he said.

In most situations, San Jose agencies independently decide to do things like open cooling centers, Harkness said.

“Now, it’s just standard protocol,” he said. “If it got longer or larger, we’d pull everybody together. And we’d work through what additional resources were needed to support the people in the field.”

San Francisco’s response system can’t be set in motion by one official, Bechelli said.

“We do so much pre-planning, where we have all of these specific thresholds and triggers where all the city departments responsible during extreme heat know what that threshold or trigger is,” she said. “The Department of Emergency Management holds that authority to ask other city departments to activate their extreme heat operations protocols at a lower threshold.”

Keeping Track of Heat

When San Francisco officials found themselves scrambling on Labor Day in 2017 to deal with an unexpected, deadly heatwave, many were asking why the forecast was off by 20 degrees.

Garcia, the National Weather Service meteorologist, said the problem was one of scale.

“When we look at models, typically they are in 3-kilometer, 12-kilometer or larger grid boxes,” he said. “And around here, in 3 kilometers, you can go from sea level to 5,000 feet up Mount Tam, and it’s a completely different climate regime.”

Garcia said the system has improved over the last five years, and now the models are based less on a precise forecast and more on probabilities.

“So, instead of saying, hey, it’s going to be 85 degrees in the city, we’ll be able to say the probability of it being 85 degrees in the city is 90%. The probability of it being 105 in the city is 5%,” he said.

Since 2017, the National Weather Service office in Monterey has been reaching out proactively to local municipalities as soon as it sees the threat of rising heat.

Cooling Near You

In the past, San Francisco would open cooling centers and encourage people to travel to them to get out of the heat. That proved a challenge for some seniors, disabled people and families who had to leave their neighborhoods to find a place to cool down. 

Bechelli said the city now offers three categories of weather relief centers.

“The first are overall public locations, things like shopping malls, museums, local parks, local swimming pools, locations that are accessible year-round to the public,” she said. The second category includes city-operated facilities, such as libraries and community buildings. The third category includes sites that people use in their neighborhoods, such as YMCAs, senior and community centers and homeless shelters. The Department of Emergency Management coordinates with all those groups and tries to get the word out to people who need to use them.

When heat and wildfire smoke came to the city during the COVID-19 pandemic, some people avoided leaving hot houses to go to weather relief centers. Bechelli said that fears about COVID-19 and smoke could put people with underlying health risks in serious danger.

“Extreme heat is much more serious than extreme smoke for most people,” she said.

That’s also true when sheltering at home. Opening a window to bring in cooler, but smoky air is less dangerous than being shut up in a hot room for long periods of time.

Bechelli said she is confident the city is focused on managing increasing numbers of heat waves as the climate warms.

“As emergency managers, we do everything in our power to try to stay out ahead of the hazards that impact our communities,” she said. “We always have areas for improvement, we always are looking for specific corrective actions that we can implement to make our citywide response even better. But I definitely feel confident that we are better established to respond to an extreme heat event now than we were in 2017.”

Heat Safety How to stay safe in the heat: Stay somewhere cool Drink plenty of water Wear light clothing and hats Take a shower Close blinds during the day, open blinds at night Avoid: • Being outside between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. (when it is the hottest) • Strenuous activity • Eating or drinking sugar, alcohol, caffeine and high-protein foods Drink water and cool down right away if you: Feel tired, weak or dizzy Have a headache or muscle cramps Are sweating heavily Faint Look pale You may be experiencing heat exhaustion, which can become heat stroke if not addressed promptly. Get immediate medical attention if someone: Has difficulty breathing, a headache or nausea Has a fever (body temperature of 103 F or higher) Has red, hot, dry skin without sweating Is confused, delirious or hallucinating Is dizzy, unconscious or unresponsive They may be experiencing heat stroke, which can be deadly. Call 911 if someone is having a medical emergency. From SF72.org

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The Bay Area can house millions more people without increasing its water use, according to a new report from the urbanist and water-use think tanks SPUR and the Pacific Institute. This could be done by continuing to improve water conservation efforts while concentrating on developing infill housing to prevent urban sprawl.  

“Assuming that the region will add 2 million new jobs by 2070, that means that that will attract about 4 million new people to the region,” said Laura Feinstein, sustainability and resilience policy director at SPUR and, with Anne Thebo, co-author of the report.  

Feinstein said the region needs to build 2.2 million homes to accommodate current housing needs as well as anticipated growth and to prevent a continued decline in housing affordability. 

Not only can adding people without increasing water use be done in theory — the report notes that it has been done before. Since the 1980s, the Bay Area population has grown by about a quarter while the region has decreased its total water use by about the same fraction.  

 “People are using water more efficiently indoors,” Feinstein said. “They’re using less water outdoors to irrigate their yards, and businesses are using less water to produce their goods.” 

The report stresses infill housing as a water conservation strategy in part because half of residents’ water use comes from outdoor applications like watering large yards and gardens — particularly those with plants poorly adapted to the region’s Mediterranean climate. Indoors, updating appliances to more water efficient models when old ones are replaced can help, as can detecting and addressing leaks.  

“People lose about 10% of their water use just to leaks in their homes,” Feinstein said. “So, finding those leaks and fixing them is huge.” 

Statewide, the agriculture sector is the largest water user, accounting for 80% of consumption. In the Bay Area, however, 90% of water use goes to supplying homes and businesses, the report says. Indoor residential use consumes the largest share, followed closely by businesses and institutions. Feinstein said businesses have been decreasing water use by about one percent every year, even though no new statutes require them to improve water efficiency. 

Another strategy the region should implement, the report suggests, is improving the way it allocates water to municipalities. 

“Historically, California has not distributed water according to need. Water is distributed according to the water rights that people got many decades ago,” Feinstein said.  

East Palo Alto, which is surrounded by extremely wealthy Silicon Valley communities, consumes very little water per person compared with adjacent cities. All of these municipalities buy their water from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which draws it from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. In 1984, when the agreements were put in place, East Palo Alto received the lowest per-person water allocation in the area. 

“East Palo Alto, when they were handing out those allocations decades ago, got a sort of — I could say ‘inexplicably small’ allocation. But it’s not that inexplicable. As always, the town that was primarily people of color, and that was lower-income, got the least amount when the negotiations were happening,” Feinstein said.  

That remained the case until 2017 and 2018, when nearby cities Mountain View and Palo Alto agreed to sell some of the water they weren’t using to East Palo Alto.  

The previous decades of chronic shortage affected East Palo Alto in ways that go beyond everyday water use. While the region can add more homes without using more water in aggregate, local water shortages have halted construction in some cities, East Palo Alto among them. From 2016 to 2018, the city enacted a building moratorium because it did not have enough water to service new construction as well as existing uses. 

Beyond redistributing resources from one community to another, the region might also consider giving water rights to the environment, Feinstein said.  

Because human uses divert so much water from the state’s rivers, the delta is too salty for certain wildlife to flourish during drought years. That diversion happens even if local consumers use less water, so the SPUR report recommends that the region find ways to ensure that unused water is returned to the environment. 

“There’s no way to ensure that if the city of San Francisco decreases its total water use by 10%, then that amount of water stays in the rivers of the Sierra, rather than being diverted,” Feinstein said. “It just means that another person who’s in line for water is likely going to take the water.” 

The state’s water regulation agencies have told the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission it should reduce the amount of water it diverts from rivers, which the utility claimed it could not do. The local agency also filed suit to fight the proposed restrictions.   

“It would be a dramatic hit to our entire service area, both in San Francisco and outside of San Francisco,” San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Assistant General Manager of the Water Enterprise Steven Ritchie told “Civic” earlier this year. “Trying to identify additional water supply would really be harmful to the communities and the Bay Area as a whole.” 

Feinstein said the report’s findings show that readily available technology to reduce water use, and best practices that residents and businesses have already been putting in place, can help the region reduce its water use even more.  

“If we just continue those trends for the next five decades, that per-capita water use and total water use would drop off quite a bit,” she said. “We could actually decrease water use for the whole Bay Area by about a quarter. And we could therefore leave a portion of that water for the ecosystems.” 

That will, however, take many years and careful planning. 

“It takes decades to really decrease water use on a per capita basis really substantially,” she said. “So, we can’t just do it overnight. We have to be looking decades out to see those big gains in efficiency.” 

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Growing Bay Area Need Not Use More Water, Report Says appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Thousands of delegates from around the world will meet next week in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss their nations’ commitments to addressing the climate crisis at the 26th annual Conference of the Parties, also known as the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Among those attending will be local organizers from the NDN Collective, an indigenous-led and -staffed organization dedicated to building indigenous power.

Kailea Frederick, who also sits on the Petaluma Climate Action Commission, is attending the conference for the third time. Her local work overlaps with what she will take to Glasgow, but her focus there will be on supporting the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus and strengthening the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

“These are frameworks that are about indigenous peoples being able to say ultimately, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ what happens on their lands,” Frederick said.  

That right, said Cy Wagoner, a San Francisco-based organizer with NDN Collective, is not upheld consistently around the United States.  

“You have communities who have supposed self-governing, and supposed sovereignty in nations like the U.S., who will refuse a project that’s happening and coming through their community, through their town, through their water. And a simple ‘no’ is not enough. But other states and other cities, who practice that same governance, can say ‘no,’ and will be granted, and will negotiate,” Wagoner said. “Whether a pipeline is coming through or whether a ski resort is being built, or whether a dam should stay functioning — these are some of the things that are brought to the communities’ attention. But it’s not necessarily a conversation. The decisions are already made.” 

Decisions at a state or even local level also matter on the global stage, particularly when a country is not inclined toward climate action. Frederick said one staff member of the Biden administration who worked on climate initiatives told her that during the Trump years, cities and states did more than the federal government to advance climate action. 

But for local policies and measures to be effective, municipalities must have elected leaders who will uphold them, she said. At one point in her advocacy work in Maui, where she grew up, she and others successfully advanced a ballot initiative to end the testing of pesticides on her community’s lands.   

“We actually won on the ballot measure. But what we failed to do as a populace was elect in the city council that was going to protect this initiative,” and ensure it was upheld, she said. Shortly thereafter, she attended her first of these climate conferences. “I really remember just ruminating on how critical it is to make sure that people understand the implications of local election processes on their actual day-to-day experience, their actual day-to-day lives.” 

Frederick described the process of accessing the climate conference as laced with inequities. 

 “The COP process has never been equitable for so many different reasons,” Frederick said. Nations with more resources can access spaces in which decisions are made and send multiple delegates to attend many events at once more easily than poorer countries. This year, because of the pandemic, some delegates will also face the cost of extended trips to comply with quarantines. 

The conference operates with an “inside zone,” where governmental negotiating parties meet to make decisions, and an “outside zone,” where non-governmental participants may make appearances to support decisionmakers or stage demonstrations. To access the inside zone, delegates need authorized badges. For new, small or minimally-resourced organizations, getting that accreditation can be a challenge. NDN Collective’s delegates received badges from bigger organizations.   

“What we ended up doing, what a lot of organizations end up doing, is approaching different allies that, other orgs, that we’re aware of have potential extra badges. And stating: ‘Our delegation is in need of a badge.’ And even in those moments, it’s a conversation of equity. Because oftentimes, these are white-led organizations,” she said. “We approach them from a place of, ‘we’re an indigenous-led organization and delegation, and we don’t have the badges to get access into these spaces. And as a part of being a good ally, we would really appreciate it if you could lend us some badges.’” 

Organizers are also planning local actions around the world on Oct. 29, including in San Francisco, to bring attention to the discussions at this year’s Conference of the Parties, which will focus on how finance supports climate-harming industries and practices.  

“The COP is happening and we want to put it on people’s radars,” Wagoner said.  

He added that collective action does not necessarily have to happen in densely populated or urban areas to be meaningful.  

“You don’t really need to go to a major city to be involved,” he said. “Chances are, you’re even more effective in the place that you’re at and organizing with those around you.” 

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Bay Area Organizers Take Climate, Indigenous Rights Advocacy to Global Summit appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Dr. Robin Cooper, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, told “Civic” that the constant wildfires and air pollution in California have caused some of her patients to become overwrought with grief.

“I’ve seen moms who have been in complete breakdown, distraught, weeping as they confront a feeling of helplessness, of being unable to protect their children. I’ve also had patients say to me, ‘I’m not going to think about that at all. Because if I do, I can’t take care of my children and work.’”

Cooper said while it’s important that we remain in touch with those powerful feelings, they can also prove too much for some.

“We’re in trouble when the feelings are so overwhelming and create a kind of apathy or withdrawal. I think it’s really important to be in an in-between state, tolerating the upset feelings, but not falling into despair, which creates the helplessness, because we’ve got to act now.”  

Acting now is what Lily Cohen, a youth organizer with 350 Bay Area, an international organization addressing the climate crisis, is doing. For her, the climate change threat — now becoming reality — is spurring greater action. 

“It was a huge awakening when I think these multiple crises just came hitting all at once,” she said. “Of course COVID, the wildfires and a multitude of other climate justice issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement and many others. But I think, in general, taking action is what helps me to get through this.”

That isn’t a universal response among young people. Cohen cited an April 2020 poll commissioned by Seventh Generation, a company that sells eco-friendly products to finance environmental activism, which found that 71% of Millennials and 67% of Generation Z respondents reported their mental health has been impacted by climate change.

The magnitude of the climate change threat and the scale of action needed by governments and institutions is unprecedented, but Cooper said there are lessons from earlier generations that rose up to organize against an existential threat.  

“I had that exact same experience when I learned about the potential for nuclear destruction. I think they’re comparable,” she said. “Historically, that was a time of awakening and putting myself into an activist mode to address the issues of nuclear destruction, just as I think it’s important at this point, as we face climate destruction.”

The threat of nuclear war hasn’t ended, but the massive nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger alerts have been drawn down from their heights during the Reagan administration. President Reagan entered office with an aggressive posture to the Soviet Union which included a massive buildup of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.

That posture changed amid greater public awareness of the consequences of a nuclear war with tens of thousands of warheads, many of them more powerful than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   

The model of activism from below, changing the course of governments, is one that Cohen is betting her future on. 

“What inspires me most is the perseverance of the activists from the past,” she said. “The fact that these activists didn’t give up, even though they were the toughest situations that they could possibly be in, was a real factor in what’s pushing us today, and also just inspiring us to continue going, no matter how bad they seem to get.”

Cooper said every generation has learned that there is really only one way to overcome feelings of despair.

“Despair is a permission to disengage,” she said. “As much as it may feel awful, it is a protection from actually grappling with solutions. And so put aside the despair, find the areas that you can engage in. Taking action is one of the ways to make a real contribution and also to manage those horrific uncomfortable feelings.”

The post Battling Despair Over a New Climate Change Reality appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Environmental Policy Analyst Makes Case for Building Electrification appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

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