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When the dikes around Humboldt Bay were built in the late 1800s, engineers had no way of knowing Humboldt County’s shoreline would rise 18 inches over the next 130 years — the fastest rate of sea level rise on the West Coast. Rising sea levels and wave-driven erosion have weakened the earthen dikes over the past century, causing breaches in some areas and increasing the risk of future failures.

In today’s episode of Humboldt Outdoors, local documentarian Ray Olson speaks with two local experts — Jen Kalt, executive director of the Humboldt Waterkeeper, and Aldaron Laird, a retired sea level rise planner — about Humboldt Bay’s decaying dikes and concerns surrounding sea level rise and the incoming king tides

“They built them high enough so that the king tides of 1890 wouldn’t overtop them and breach the dikes,” Laird explains in the video above. “So they built them probably a foot or so higher than the highest king tide [of the time]. Adding the subsidence of about 10 inches and the sea level rise of about eight, the dikes now are about a foot and a half lower in relationship to king tide than they were when they were built in the 1890s. They’re much more vulnerable.”

Click “play” on the video up top to learn more about the history of Humboldt Bay’s dikes and how much it would cost to fix them.

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