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Flood barriers will line waterfront streets in downtown Boston tomorrow, but not because of an imminent hurricane

CommonWealth Beacon reports the city is working with downtown and Seaport landlords to have them put up their temporary flood barriers on Boston's first Deployables Day to get building personnel used to using one of the cheaper technologies city planners hope to use to ward off rising sea levels and more severe storms - a week after a king tide did is now usual flooding of Long Wharf.

The training exercise comes as city planners are still working on more expensive, longer-term plans to protect Boston from flooding from both sea and, inland, from more intense storms, with options ranging from flood barriers to underground storage tanks to redesigning major parks to serve as impromptu basins to hold storm and seawater.

Developers of proposed projects near the water now also have to detail how they will protect their proposed buildings and nearby land from inundation.

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Comments

Not to be confused with Deplorables Day.

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The only thing that could have been cheaper was foresight by the developers to have built the buildings higher and incorporate barriers in one of the most vulnerable places in the city for flooding and sea level change. Instead, they ignored all warnings flashing in their face. An utter failure in planning for coastal resiliancy, on top of the fact that all of these buildings are ultra-modern and were built in a time when we absolutely should have known better.

https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/06/16/boston-seaport-fort-point-climate-c...

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Everyone loves to talk about Climate Change this and Climate Change that. While everyone is not going to do anything to stop climate change.
We really need to do something about sea level rise and how to be proactive on protecting our the city from king tide and storm tide floods.
We are never going to build an unbroken barrier around the inner harbor.
We need to spend billons on building barriers in the outer harbor.
Using Long Island and connecting Deer Island as part of the solution.

I know the irony is nothing will be done until the City floods and billons of dollars in damages to underground infrastructure is done before anything is actually going to get built to prevent major flooding from happening.

We will never be proactive on stopping this incoming catastrophe.
I hope I am wrong.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/09/06/boston-harbor-barrier-proposals

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Forget it. It would cost way too much, take way too long, completely destroy the harbor ecosystem and still not be enough.

It would also funnel water into other cities and towns while massively sucking funding from anything an everything the rest of the state needs.

I think the best option now is the Seattle Wants Flush Toilets solution from the late 19th century. They built on a mud flat, needed to raise the city to create a proper sewer system, so they filled in all the streets to the first floor. Bonus: this created earthquake resilience, too, as the scheme prevented liquifaction.

There is a reason this is not taken seriously by state government - its a massive resource suck for one wealthy area.

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I was going to use Chicago as an example of raising a city but that only involved 5-6 story buildings. How about the city buy up the mega-office buildings, raze them, then use the rubble as a flood barrier? That's got to be cheaper than actually raising them...

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