MTC Report Identifies Bay Area Locations Most Vulnerable to Climate Change

By Bay City News Service:

Transportation agencies in the Bay Area should consider investing millions in levees near the Bay Bridge and Oakland Coliseum to mitigate rising sea levels, according to a report presented Friday to a committee of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

The report, Climate Change and Extreme Weather Adaptation Options, released this month, details five strategies to protect key transportation corridors that are vulnerable to rising sea levels.

The discussion comes on the heels of a major storm that ripped through the Bay Area last week, uprooting trees and flooding portions of U.S. Highway 101 in Menlo Park and the Embarcadero BART station in San Francisco, among others areas.

The strategies encompass three areas within Alameda County that are critical to the area’s transportation infrastructure, including areas around the Oakland Coliseum, the state Highway 92 corridor on the Hayward side of the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge, and an area known as Radio Beach where the Bay Bridge connects to Oakland.

Those three focus areas were selected because they represent areas where major regional transportation assets are interwoven with other important regional and community assets, according to the report.

MTC spokesman John Goodwin said they were also chosen because the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, Caltrans, and BART, which partnered with the MTC on the report, have made significant transportation investments in those areas.

“The areas were selected to have a discrete geographic area for study,” Goodwin said. “It’s not that they were the most valuable, but that they are critical regional assets.”

The report builds off a 2011 study titled Adapting to Rising Tides: Transportation Vulnerability and Risk Assessment Pilot Project, which identified critical transportation assets that are vulnerable to sea level rise.

The first study identified 30 transportation assets including roads, railroads, and transit hubs that are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

The new report narrowed down the mitigation proposals to areas where there were questions about government management and regulation oversight, places where information about the needs was limited, physical and functional characteristics of the assets, and how vulnerable they are to climate change, according to the report.

To mitigate climate change-related impacts, the report proposes building a levee at Radio Beach, where the Bay Bridge touches down in Oakland, along with an “offshore breakwater,” or bulkhead, to reduce the impact of waves as they hit the shore and prevent the possibility of water breaching the levee.

The levee and breakwater are expected to cost roughly $15 million, according to the report.

At the Coliseum, the report proposes building two levees near the Damon Slough to reduce flooding and to protect the Coliseum BART station, the Amtrak station, the Union Pacific railroad, the Oakland airport connector, and Interstate Highway 880, Goodwin said.

The report proposes constructing one levee along the south edge of the slough to protect the Coliseum, Oracle Arena and related facilities from flooding, and another levee placed on the north side to protect the BART, Amtrak and other assets.

The levees are expected to cost $8.1 million, according to the report, and could be constructed in tandem with any future residential or commercial development that is planned for the area.

In Hayward, the report calls for further study of the drainage systems between the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge and surrounding areas at a cost of between $125,000 to $250,000.

Goodwin said the intent is to get a better idea of how storm water runoff reaches the bay through existing drainage channels in the area.

“An in-depth understanding of the drainage network and capacity performance is critical because additional vulnerabilities in the watershed may exist, but have not yet been identified,” the report reads.

Although the commission did not vote to approve any action on the proposals, Goodwin said the report would inform the next update to Plan Bay Area in 2017, a state-mandated planning document that assesses transportation and land use development.

Once funding sources are identified, Goodwin said they would be eligible for inclusion in the report.

Commissioner Julie Pierce emphasized the importance of thinking ahead when it comes to climate change.

“It’s a whole lot easier not to build the stuff you need right away, but we better start putting these things in the plans today,” Pierce said.