Even as rising water leaves low-lying areas of Dorchester County inundated, many residents still blame tides or erosion — not climate change
This is the fifth in a series of articles — produced by the Bay Journal and Chesapeake Quarterly, the magazine of Maryland Sea Grant — that explore the impacts of, and policies related to, sea level rise around the Bay.
All over low-lying Dorchester County, MD, residents are living on the edge. One skid off the road puts a car in a marsh. Parking in the wrong place during the wrong arc of a tide cycle can lead to a flooded car. Water that used to just graze residents’ yards now comes up to the porches. It’s just a matter of time, they know, before it comes into the houses.
Here, in the land of narrow marshes and proud, working waterfront towns, the high water isn’t just coming. It’s already here.
School buses can’t get down the road like they once did, and those roads need constant repair. Land at the edge of banks is fast disappearing, swept away during tides and storms. Forests are dying, inundated by rising saltwater. New homes are being built at least a foot higher than in the past. And storms, particularly tropical systems and hurricanes with their attendant storm surges, push water ever higher along these shores.
But many longtime county residents don’t connect the problems to the two underlying phenomena that scientists say lie at the root of rising waters on the lower Delmarva Peninsula — sinking land and climate change, which raises sea level.
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DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
5 comments:
How ironic because FEMA reduced Dorchester's flood plain significantly while increasing Somerset County's. Same body of water, how can this be? Turns out government mapping aka modeling results are predetermined to guarantee an outcome that supports the governments agenda. Garbage in Garbage out!
Funny that the people blame it on tides and erosion, and the article says it's tides and erosion. But it also says that it's climate change.
The climate is constantly changing. The earth was much warmer than it is now. It was also a lot colder. We even had an ice age with 10x the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere vs. today.
Think about this semantically. In the 70's, they were trying to scare us with global cooling and an ice age. In the 90's, it became global warming. We're supposed to be in Al Gore's crazy "hockey stick graph right now, and since that story turned out to be untrue they had to make it climate change. Because nobody can deny that the climate is different hour to hour even.
Regardless of the climate cycle, there's always been a bunch of people "smarter" than us who want control to "fix" things. This has led to higher energy prices and inflation everywhere since energy is needed to produce everything.
dittos 10:49
Wish this was happening in OC.
Yes the climate is changing. There has been a ten year long cooling of the climate.
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