AUDIO:

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JEN KALT:

Welcome to the Econews Report and another episode in our special mini-series on sea level rise along Humboldt Bay. I'm Humboldt Waterkeeper Director Jen Kalt. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, 90% of Humboldt Bay's tidal wetlands were manipulated and cut off from the tides by levees and dikes. Many of these wetlands were filled and developed, while others were converted into agricultural land which is now used mostly for cattle grazing. These areas have high groundwater tables, meaning groundwater is close to the surface, which combined with heavy rain often results in persistent flooding. As sea level rises, groundwater will also rise, causing more and more frequent and extreme flooding events in and around neighborhoods. As we discussed in a previous episode, on low-lying contaminated sites such as former lumber mills, this could push the remaining toxic chemicals in the soil into our bay streams and onto adjacent lands. We have ongoing regional studies, experts working to understand the dynamics of our changing environment, folks working to address current and future needs to ensure the health and well-being of our local communities. What can we do about the flooding that we currently experience, and what recourse do we have to deal with a future of more extreme events?

LAURIE RICHMOND:

Wigi Humboldt Bay feels to me like maybe a national leader. We know it's an issue we're going to have to contend with and it's going to be particularly tricky and interesting in our area. We're really lucky where we are that values this.

KALT:

That's Laurie Richmond. She's the director of the Humboldt Bay Sea Level Rise Institute at Cal Poly Humboldt. Later in the episode, she'll help us understand more about sea level rise in our region. She'll talk about some of the research and restoration happening around Humboldt Bay. In this episode, we'll hear from community members, some newcomers to the Humboldt Bay area, as well as longtime Humboldt residents. Whether they are aware of the science behind our changing climate or not, people who are familiar with the bay are experiencing these changes, sometimes right in their backyards.

MAURICE VIAND:

I'm Maurice Viand, I've lived here in Fields Landing for 53 years, I'm a retired commercial fisherman and we are at the foot of Railroad Avenue at the county boat launch.

KALT:

I met up with Maurice on a sunny morning in his hometown along the edge of Humboldt Bay's southern reaches. We took a walk together to explore some of the changes he's seen along the shoreline.

VIAND:

But if we get down there and walk, you'll be able to see where the tide's starting to erode the banks. Talking about where the beach used to be. The beach was out here, not here. So this is a direct result of sea level rise. And if the county doesn't do something, they're gonna start losing their parking lot here in another couple of years. So, I mean, about the only thing they could do would be to rip-rap it, but it's gonna go away.

KALT:

Riprap is what we call the large rocks and sometimes chunks of concrete that's used to prevent shoreline erosion around the bay. There's quite a bit of it here in Fields Landing. Many former wetlands around the bay were filled with soil hauled in from elsewhere, and dikes were built to keep the tidewater out, and then riprap was used to armor the shoreline.

VIAND:

Hunks of piling he put in here, trying to stop his fence from eroding away. You know, like, they moved this fence back, this entire section of fence back a couple of times and then they gave up on it. You can see where the cement was. Those things were originally right at ground level. So you can see how things have moved. As we go to the southeast here, you'll notice how this section of the bay gets quieter and quieter and quieter. Even on really windy days, this section isn't affected much. So you don't get the sorts of erosion you got out there on the main channel.

KALT:

The same reason I have a lawn chair on the southeast side of my garage.

VIAND:

In my yard, years ago I used to have to go down about two feet before I hit water, and now I don't have to go anywhere near that far. Really? Yeah. How far? Depends on what the tide's doing, but sometimes at a foot I hit water. I've got a couple of pine trees that I planted in 76. They're probably 60 feet tall that have died in the last two years.

KALT:

from the rising groundwater.

VIAND:

I don't know, I haven't got a clue what killed him.

KALT:

What trick? Why can't I...

VIAND:

They're Monterey Pines, they should be salt tolerant.

KALT:

Well, if their feet are too wet, they probably don't like that.

VIAND:

Well, I suspect that's what happened. One of them, I would definitely say that's what happened. I don't know about the other one, but yeah.

KALT:

Are they still standing?

VIAND:

One is, yeah, I'll show you when we get back. Yeah, I'd love to get a picture of that. One of them I already cut down.

KALT:

I mean, that's what a lot of experts and engineers say is the problem with building seawalls is that you're still going to have rising groundwater, so the seawall is really just a short-term fix.

VIAND:

Yeah, I mean, the groundwater is rising, there's no doubt about it.

KALT:

About 13 miles north of Maurice's home in Fields Landing by road, but less than 5 miles by boat, on the Samoa Peninsula is the town of Fairhaven. Lia Stoffers and her family love their life surfing and boating, living in this unique and beautiful spot, but there are some real concerns about changes to the environment. With a population of 341 people, the town of Fairhaven is near the southern end of the Samoa Peninsula. Made up mostly of sand dunes, seasonal wetlands, and defunct pulp and lumber mills, the peninsula experiences erosion and flooding. Like many low-lying areas around the bay, the groundwater is very shallow, as little as two feet below the surface in some places, and it's all within a tsunami hazard zone. You mentioned people who've had property in their family for generations, and I just was going to ask about your kids, and like what do you think about the future for them in terms of your house in Fairhaven?

STOFFERS:

So my own personal property, I have flood insurance. If you have a tsunami, it's rising water and it's covered. So at least the personal belongings and anything like that would be covered. And then as far as, you know, my kids and the future for them and this property, I don't know. It's hard to tell because it seems like everything is actually accelerating with predictions. So like our own personal neighbor, three generations right next door. And I mean, they're gonna be out there till the end. But, and they're also not the ones that would be able to move their house on their own time.

KALT:

As Leah is alluding to, one of the major concerns about sea level rise in our region is that people with fewer financial means will be impacted the most. They will be the ones less able to simply pick up and move or reinforce or elevate their homes or take other measures to deal with the flooding. Do you ever think about selling your property sooner rather than later and getting what you can out of it and just moving somewhere else?

STOFFERS:

I mean, as far as my own personal investment in Fairhaven is like I have my own home and I had considered purchasing another home in Fairhaven and I just decided, you know what? Too many eggs in this basket. It's just not worth it. I think it's too risky and I would just rather not have to cross that bridge on another property besides my own.

HILANEA WILKINSON:

I think Humboldt Bay is one of the cleanest bays around and we want to keep it that way and make sure we still have the bay and clams and seaweed for future generations.

KALT:

Hilanea Wilkinson is a Wiyot tribal member born and raised along Humboldt Bay, also known as Wigi in Sulatluk, the language of the Wiyot people. Helena interviewed tribal elders about their views on sea level rise and what changes might be coming. She asked her elders what, if anything, they thought should be done.

WILKINSON:

They all said that we should keep trying to get back as much as we can, focus on our upland sites with our good gathering areas is one of the most important things to preserve more land for the future generations. The Wiyot tribe now is on an 88 acre reservation in Loleta. We don't have a casino. We don't have a gas station. We are very small right now and we need to have more land. The Wiyot people need a place that we could go to to have a ceremony, to go out and pray. There's a very important prayer site up at Siar.

KALT:

CR is College of the Redwoods, a community college encompassing 268 acres south of Eureka.

WILKINSON:

They do allow us to go up there. We went up there before the World Renewal Ceremony and was able to do a mini ceremony with like the medicine people, which was me and my aunt Cheryl and some other relatives. Especially with sea level rise and the coastal inundation of the public access, when that's gone, we will need land to go to, to gather, to get our food, to get our animals and plants for regalia. The Wiyot tribe just got, just purchased a property in Marashawak over in King Salmon, which is amazing because it's the first real like forest property we have that has spruce, that has manzanita, berries. It's got angelica, which is our medicine, our sweet root. And it's so great that we finally have somewhere that we can go and like be able to go out there and work on the traditional dugout canoes and being able to take elders out again and teach the younger generation because there are not very many places that we can go to gather. Even at the reservation, we've got a park, but it's all field and everything around us is cow pasture. And that's not how it was. To be able to, yeah, take our elders, take them out again and be able to teach the younger generations the importance of the environment and the importance of caring for it.

KALT:

Helena and many others are deeply concerned with the environmental and cultural impacts of sea level rise. Seeing some of the consequences of our changing climate in their lifetimes, these concerns are top of mind for longtime residents like Maurice, Lia, and Hilanea. Recent newcomers to the Humboldt Bay Area are also paying close attention.

SUDKRATHOK:

Hi, my name is Weeramon Sudkrathok. You can call me Cake. I'm from Thailand. I live in the U.S. for five years.

KALT:

Cake and her husband live in Eureka, and they have two young daughters.

SUDKRATHOK:

I love, I love Humboldt County. It's a good place for me and my family, and I love the weather and the people around here. My kids love it.

KALT:

Do you think about how climate change will affect them as they are growing up? Yes.

SUDKRATHOK:

It's a large problem to my kids because in the future, my kids growing up around here, and if they meet the sea level rise or climate change, for example, flooding or the ocean, yeah, it's make a problem in their life. Groundwater is rising. I think it's impact to them in the future.

KALT:

Like many others, Kate is concerned about our use of fossil fuels. She knows that in addition to finding alternative sources for energy, we must address our consumption levels that impact and contribute to our climate issues. So what are the solutions, the steps we need to take to deal with changes to the water and land around our communities and around our homes? I met up with Lori Richmond, who is a professor in the Environmental Science and Management Department at Cal Poly Humboldt, and she is also the co-chair of the Sea Level Rise Institute.

RICHMOND:

Yeah, so I'm trying to connect communities on the coast with resources, science related to marine and coastal issues.

KALT:

What year was the Sea Level Rise Institute founded?

RICHMOND:

The Sea Level Rise Institute was founded in 2018. I got approached by Alderon Allaire, a revered member of the community who initiated a lot of the work of trying to understand and communicate sea level rise and what a challenge it would be for Humboldt Bay or Whiggey and really just wanted to create a home that was more than one person so that the work and the legacy could continue. One of the first really big partners was the Wiyot tribe, you know, Humboldt Bay being part of their ancestral territory. They had a real interest in the issue and there were some opportunities to do climate adaptation planning and they started building out sort of knowledge and expertise around sea level rise, looking at the whole bay. We now have over 60 people who are affiliated with the Institute in some way. And it's really creating a knowledge sharing network around the issue. This vision, bringing all different types of knowledge, all disciplines together. It's kind of an all hands on deck issue and thinking about working across sectors, academia, local government, tribes, NGOs, civic and community groups, and private sector consultants. It spawned a lot of really cool projects to solve problems that we all face and to see the Wiyot tribe becoming a real leader in sea level rise adaptation and planning, like throughout the state. We get involved a little bit in policy. So when the state passes decisions or issues guidances, now we're someone that when the government is thinking about policies, they'll call us and be like, we want to come meet with your group and get your opinion.

KALT:

It's been really helpful to connect people who are normally sort of in these different silos or compartments. So for me, it's been great hearing from hydrologists and geologists because, you know, I normally am talking to other biology-focused people, ecologists and whatnot, and having their viewpoint, it's good because we all try to understand each other better, for sure.

RICHMOND:

Like you said, a lot of C Level Rise work is kind of siloed. There's different local governments working on it, different NGOs working on it. Yeah, so we created through the library a document repository where we keep C Level Rise documents that have been produced from government reports to peer reviewed publications, to student projects and presentations, and those are all indexed. And I think what's exciting once they go into that repository, even if you're not specifically going to that repository, they're indexed, so they come up on Google. So if someone's just doing a search, suddenly they can find these documents. So a lot of these reports are getting more visibility that way, too.

KALT:

Yeah, it's just great to have a central location, too, because before the Institute was formed, these studies, they would be scattered all around, and so now the Digital Commons is where they're all housed, and we'll put that in the show notes so people can know where to go. So maybe you could just talk about the communities at risk in the Humboldt Bay area, what work needs to be done, what the key issues are? Yeah.

RICHMOND:

When scientists in there running their models of Whiggey or Humboldt Bay started kind of doing their science and producing their maps, there's transportation infrastructure, wetlands or ag land or, you know, wastewater infrastructure. So there's all these important issues, but in terms of like residential areas, there was kind of three areas that came up as more likely to flood on sooner timeframe. And those are Fairhaven, King Salmon and Fields Landing. In King Salmon and Fields Landing, they're in South Humboldt Bay, which tectonically is sinking even faster than the rest of the bay. So they've got slightly higher rates of sea level rise than the other parts of the bay, which is fascinating that the rates are even different just within the bay and their areas that already flood. They're identified a need that communities should probably learn about these projections. And so in 2018, the county held workshops in each of the three communities where they showed these projections and kind of asked for feedback from the community. And I think it was a great start to get the community having a conversation about it, but there wasn't a lot of followup. The communities were dropped off the cliff with like these really scary projections. And, and so I'm really excited that graduate student, Christina Conkle went out and talked to community members and she had interviews. She spent a lot of time in King Salmon, built a lot of relationships, different residents, and she asked about their experiences with flooding now and in the past and then showed them projection maps. And I think what was really interesting is that to like you or I, the idea of flooding is really scary. It seems like a crisis, but they live with regular high tide flooding. So sometimes they would sort of recount stories of flooding with a little bit of a laugh, you know, like there's an old photograph in the time standard of someone in King Salmon, like in a little inflatable tube with like an umbrella drink, just like kind of floating down the street, you know, for them, there's a lot of things they already do to adapt, like they look at tide tables, they will put their cars up on blocks, they have waiters by the door because they know they have to park their car in a different street and go and walk to it. So a lot of folks she talked to were seniors who were like, yeah, I think we know this is coming in the future, but we hope to stay in our house until the worst comes. I'm really excited that the California Coastal Conservancy had targeted fund for coastal resilience work specifically with disadvantaged communities, which King Salmon and Fields Landing kind of meet that definition and we, Humboldt County is taking the lead, the university's partnering with them to do more detailed vulnerability assessments in these places, do more detailed community engagement and identify adaptation solutions and mitigation. We have to plan for new futures and that has to be a democratic process. So we have to innovate on ways that we can engage with communities about future risk and plan with communities.

KALT:

So speaking of timeframes, what timeframes are we talking about here as far as sea level rise projections? What's the best science at this point?

RICHMOND:

You always have to be careful putting a projection to a year, but I think you have to be careful not doing it too. Cause I think we want to get a sense of like about what risks to expect and about what time and the science around CLVRI's projections about every five years gets updated and sometimes, Ooh, it's worse than we thought and it's not as bad as we thought. And so we can expect things in some ranges, but like pinning it to an exact date might never be possible. And so a lot of planners have moved to, instead of planning for a year, they'll plan for a water elevation, or they might have trigger points where when water reaches this particular elevation, we will make this move. And when it reaches this elevation, we'll make this move. So the ocean protection council, the state's government entity, they have put together a sea level rise guidance for the state of California that highlights and summarizes kind of the best science and what to expect within that report. They have tables for each tide gauge up and down the state. They have projections specific to that place. And what's really interesting in Weegee or Humboldt Bay is that we live in the Cascadia subduction region. We live in a really tectonically active area. So a land around Weegee or Humboldt Bay is subsiding, going down at the same time seas are rising. But what's amazing is an hour and a half north of us in Crescent City, that land is uplifting. So within like a two hour drive is the fastest rate of sea level rise in the state and the slowest. And as I mentioned, even within Weegee or Humboldt Bay, parts of land are going down at different rates. So we have to get a lot of geologists helping us understand our projections because if you just look at what the sea's doing, it's not enough. You have to look at what land next to the sea is doing. And so for Humboldt Bay, I'll just talk about the intermediate and intermediate high scenarios from the Ocean Protection Council. So for 2060 under the intermediate scenario, they're projecting about a 1.5 feet increase in sea height. And for 2060 under intermediate high is two feet. So I think about us being prepared for 1.5 feet or half a meter of sea level rise in the nearish term is something that we need to consider. Those are just good markers for us to have, but even the low scenario, like if we stopped our emissions now, we're still baked in for, you know, at least a foot of sea level rise. And so regardless of what scenario you use, it's something that we're going to have to plan for. And because of like the nature of Weegee shoreline is artificial, it's actually even a risk now because some of these levees are old and could break down. And so we know it's an issue we're going to have to contend with, and it's going to be particularly tricky and interesting in our area.

KALT:

And these time frames may seem like they're so far into the future, but when you think about how long it takes to plan things, if it's not going to be an emergency, now's the time to start planning for it and getting a better understanding of what the people living in these areas experience as part of what we're planning for the future.

RICHMOND:

Even 2040, which is something we can envision being around the corner for us, has 0.9 feet under intermediate and one foot under intermediate high. So even things around the corner, and then you think about that, we have places that already flood during high tides. We don't actually have a lot of room for much more water.

KALT:

I want to ask you about your hopes for the future and your goals for the Sea Level Rise Institute or for the Humboldt Bay region more generally.

RICHMOND:

I just want to create a generative space. I teach about sea level rise to students and I think it's easy to be like, this is really depressing and I'm not thrilled that it's happening, but I feel like it's a really exciting and interesting problem to think about. I want to feel inspired for the great work that our young people are going to get to do working on problems like this that are going to have to bring together a lot of different people that are going to have to try to do really hard things. We talk about climate transitions and academics have coined this concept of climate transformations. We have to make whole scale changes to our energy systems. We have to think about how we live with water and with nature. Climate change has this unprecedented opportunity for things to have to shift and that gives you an opening to think about doing things in different ways, overcoming the baggage of the past from colonialism, this idea of man versus nature and we're just going to build seawalls and keep it out. So there's just like what we center and what we value and what communities we prioritize. So it's sort of like this window of opportunity to reimagine society in a lot of ways and that feels really exciting. We've talked about it as sort of like transformative adaptation. So I'm really excited to see the tribes take leadership, potentially pairing Seal of Arise adaptation with land acquisition and land return and them taking the lead on projects. I think opportunities from barriers to come down of the ivory tower of academia being a little bit more getting their hands dirty and not being the lead, being the follower and being the supporter. When thinking about adaptation to Seal of Arise, there's categories. One category is protect, like you want to keep stuff where it is so you need to build different structures to kind of keep water out. Engineers kind of think about this a little bit of a continuum. They kind of call it green to gray. And so gray protection is the hard stuff, things like seawalls that you put up. It can include levees and kind of like constructing hard structures that keep the water out. Research and science shows that those can have unintended negative consequences. They tend to convert the wave energy to other places. So that's why we need to work together because if one community builds a seawall, it can just transfer that energy to another community. And so there are all these unintended negative environmental consequences. On the other end of the spectrum, experimenting with a lot of techniques to keep water out that are on the more green end and they have different names like living shorelines, nature-based solutions. And so these ideas that you build constructed wetland features or features that break the wave in like a more natural way and you can actually produce habitat and have fish and oysters growing and grasses. And so you have this sort of more of a buffer rather than a hard surface. And then the other method is called accommodate, which is figuring out ways to kind of let the water in. So you're not moving stuff out of that area, but you're preparing it. And this can include elevating houses or flood proofing areas, just letting the water come in. These are things that you kind of are weighing when you think about sea level rise. And I don't think it's just do one always. A lot of academic social scientists really think about equity implications. So often it's like a cost benefit analysis and how that could actually exacerbate inequalities that kind of low income areas don't get protections and wealthier areas do. So there has to be a lot of thinking about how those decisions are made. Wigi Humboldt Bay feels to me like maybe a national leader. I feel blessed to live in California, sometimes I'm frustrated with our state, but no other state on the West Coast has a sea level rise guidance, not even Washington or Oregon. So agencies are kind of using a consistent set of numbers and science. I mean, I think about what resources we have. We're really lucky where we are that values this.

OUTRO:

For more information on Sea Level Rise and Humboldt Bay, check out the Humboldt Sea Level Rise Institute website, humboldtslri.org. This has been another episode of the EcoNews Report. Join us again at this time on this channel next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California. This episode was produced with funding provided by the California Coastal Commission Whale Tail Grant Program. Thanks for joining us.