Boston Harbor Flood Protection Projects

[tysmith95]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

That's what a tsunami from a 9.5 earthquake in Boston Harbor would look like, a very unlikely scenario.

Boston is protected in some ways by Cape Cod. Any hurricane would have to pass over cape cod in order to hit Boston.

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

That's what a tsunami from a 9.5 earthquake in Boston Harbor would look like, a very unlikely scenario.

Boston is protected in some ways by Cape Cod. Any hurricane would have to pass over cape cod in order to hit Boston.

Yup. The Harbor Islands help temper storm swells as well. The hyperbole is frustrating because, as stated, a 5 foot flood would be plenty damaging to our infrastructure as is.

 

[Tombstoner]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

In fairness, though, hyperbole is often needed to get people's attention. As crazy as that photoshopped picture is, it probably got some people to read the article that wouldn't otherwise. In a way, that's the message of the article: until people in the South End and Kendall Square are ankle-deep in water, ain't nothing gonna happen.

 

[stellarfun]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

More than a bit of artistic license, but not without a basis.

Cohasset (Minot's is almost 90 feet high)

Lynn

Winthrop

The artistic license is in transferring these waves into the Inner Harbor, which ain't gonna happen. Methinks a storm surge in Boston is generated by a slow-moving storm, with an east to northeast wave fetch that keeps piling the water up over several tide cycles. The Inner Harbor is like a cup on its side, --if the water can't drain away, it will be pushed higher and higher in the cup.

The 'big' waves would be broken up by the Harbor Islands and Logan Airport before ever reaching Rowes Wharf.

 

[CSTH]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

Yeah agreed. And it's most likely gonna be a winter storm, which means there's going to be a lot of very cold people here when it goes down, and probably quite a few structure fires the night after.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

Why didn't they just transpose some images of Sandy on Boston? That's way more accurate as to what it's going to look like: water comes in, water doesn't go back out. The kinetic energy of the waves and rip currents is gone in the Inner Harbor by the time the Harbor Islands, seawalls, and sea-facing parkland buffers have done their thing. You're left with standing water that rises slowly in most places and only has hazardous currents at man-made structures that are creating isolated bathtub drain effect for feet at a time. For the most part an able-bodied adult could stand in the storm surge in a wetsuit like they're imitating a Jim Cantore liveshot and just walk up the street if the water level starts inching closer to the waist. It's not like Scituate during the Blizzard of '78 unless you're facing the Outer Harbor or open ocean. Call it news producer bias: media figures who are in the income bracket that affords them weekends on Plum Island are inclined to overstate their endless Plum Island live reports as representative of the whole shoreline. When in fact PI and Scituate aren't even representative of majority of the adjacent North and South Shores.


The defining characteristic of a Sandy-like intrusion in this region is that once the water comes in it never goes down, because of all those poorly-draining ancestral tidal marshes start behaving like tidal marshes underneath all that landfilled development. As we know all too well from looking at the terrifying flood map of the CBD. Days upon days of standing water that doesn't recede, and all the secondary impacts--long-duration structural inundation, fire, cold, disease, and extra time it takes to complete a rescue of someone in distress--causing the injuries and loss of life. Then many billions more in structures being condemned because of the duration of the inundation rather than the force of the initial inundation. In NYC the Sandy effect didn't hurt Manhattan--where majority of the region's wealth and capital reside--too bad because that's where the bedrock is; it hurt the outer boroughs and residential Jersey and LI coasts which disproportionately feature their poorest-drainage fill and overpopulated barrier islands. Ours is the inverse. We not only have great casualties and greatest disruption from the worst impacts being in the CBD areas of highest overall density (but thankfully not a particularly high % of the city's residential density)...but we also lose our shirts financially from the areas of most concentrated capital suffering the most concentrated and longest-term damage.

I believe we mentioned before in another one of these threads that not all places on the flood depth map will have to deal with the same inundation. Marine Terminal, Black Falcon, Day Blvd., the Logan terminals, and the outskirts of Jeffries Point all take a pretty superficial bath of incoming water that's quick in-and-out. To the extent that those areas are landfilled it's landfilling glommed onto pre-existing Harbor Island or peninsula terra firma that acts as stopper so the inundation doesn't hang around any longer than the active storm surge. Damage there can be calculated pretty straightforwardly by strength of storm at the height of the surge vs. strength of structures. It's all those filled tidal marshes that still have to conform to their tidal marsh drainage patterns where the Sandy effect rots the infrastructure to its core in duration: the CBD. The functioning of the entire state of Massachusetts and all of Eastern New England will be economically paralyzed by a long-term outage and extensive emergency rebuild of Boston's CBD. At regional level that might even be scarier than what Sandy did to NYC, because 3 other states that saw little of the same storm damage could get plunged into immediate recession in that aftermath.

 

[tysmith95]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

^I'm sure that all of the large buildings in downtown and the seaport have flood insurance. Once the flood insurance becomes more expensive than some type of flood barrier by the harbor islands then hopefully something will be done.

 

[West]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

^I'm sure that all of the large buildings in downtown and the seaport have flood insurance. Once the flood insurance becomes more expensive than some type of flood barrier by the harbor islands then hopefully something will be done.

Flood insurance is paid for by property owners, albeit with some implicit back-door underwriting support from the federal government. A flood barrier would be paid for explicitly by taxpayers, and not just the ones who own at-risk real estate. So the cost-benefit conversation would not work so smoothly as "the price of flood insurance is now > flood barrier, thus we commence building now". It's a pretty severe understatement to say it wouldn't happen that smoothly. Given how fucked up Massachusetts is on vastly more "present danger" type infrastructure problems, it is highly unlikely that any flood barrier will even get seriously planned prior to a major flood surge event. Even if someone could prove that the collective cost of flood insurance in the area was 5,000,000 times greater than the cost of a flood barrier. This state is too fucking stupid to even get so far as to ask the feds for help.

Whether buildings have flood insurance is driven by FEMA flood-zone maps and lender requirements. Very few property owners will get flood insurance of their own accord if not driven to it by a lender requirement. FEMA maps are increasingly unrealistic and getting more so every year. So if we could see a list of properties with flood insurance, I bet you'd be shocked at how many do NOT have it. Recall the IndyCar debacle, and that it fell apart at eh very end because of a slight tweak to flood zones? Prior to that, the entire race (i.e., a huge swath of the Seaport district) was not in a flood zone.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

^I'm sure that all of the large buildings in downtown and the seaport have flood insurance. Once the flood insurance becomes more expensive than some type of flood barrier by the harbor islands then hopefully something will be done.

But all of those large buildings collecting flood insurance at once? You'll take down the economy of Connecticut with that when every insurance titan in Hartford declares bankruptcy at once.

It's not their ability to eventually rebuild; that isn't in doubt. It's the singular economic shock of the long-term outage of the CBD and all those biggest-of-the-big policies being collected at once that are going to cascade through all of New England. It's an instantly acute region-wide recession, which severely complicates planning the rebuild and forces more total reliance on federal aid than Sandy--which did not rock the foundation of the Tri-State's area CBD--required. Shutting off the flow of capital from Boston's CBD for a period of months is unprecedented. There's only so much productivity you can re-route through satellite offices to keep the flow of resources running; one's own capital resources are inevitably going to be tied up by fully self-serving business survival needs of dealing with one's own storm disaster. Deals will be put on hold en masse, and flow of capital outside of self-rebuilding will slow to a trickle until self-capacity is restored. That's a pretty unprecedented economic disruption radiating far, far outside of Boston. We're not prepared for that, because no major U.S. city has ever had a disaster capable of so singularly disabling the CBD of a major regional hub to the exclusion of all the areas that are dependent on that CBD. Not even the earthquake potential for L.A. and San Fran skews so one-sidedly to the regional centers of commerce above all else. Economic resiliency is going to be more of a problem with that flood map when the shock hits all the unscathed/still-functioning suburbs, satellite cities, then neighboring states in the weeks and months that Downtown Boston is disabled.

 

[CSTH]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

Everything f line said is spot on like usual. The disruption would be an enormous shock. And this is more likely than not to occur within our lifetimes.

There are a lot of precedents for insurers participating in the financing of big improvement like this. They have tons of long-term capital, and they're happy to buy down the risk of a catastrophic event.

Also - I know worst-casism can be counterproductive - but the prospect of uncontained fire spreading through the dense wooden neighborhoods around maverick on a cold windy night when the hydrants are submerged or frozen, the power is out and the tunnels are flooded is utterly terrifying.

The energy infrastructure on the mystic and Chelsea rivers is another huge risk - in terms of disruption and of pollution.

I still think a harbor surge barrier is an obviously wise investment to make, like, today.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

Also - I know worst-casism can be counterproductive - but the prospect of uncontained fire spreading through the dense wooden neighborhoods around maverick on a cold windy night when the hydrants are submerged or frozen, the power is out and the tunnels are flooded is utterly terrifying.

Kind of like Breezy Point during Hurricane Sandy!

 

[CSTH]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

^ Yes, and with as many people per meter as fenway park on a gameday

 

[West]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

There are a lot of precedents for insurers participating in the financing of big improvement like this. They have tons of long-term capital, and they're happy to buy down the risk of a catastrophic event.

Can you provide examples? I'm curious to know the structure of such participation in financing. Do you mean insurance companies buying government-issued bonds? If that's what you mean, I hardly count it: big companies buy all sorts of government bonds, but that doesn't happen until some entity of government develops the backbone to tax the citizenry for whatever the project is. This would be a mega-billion dollar project (which I agree needs to be at least considered very seriously). I'm sure the insurers would be a bit more eager to buy such bonds, but not to the point of it being a subsidy. The taxpayers would still be on the hook over the long run.

But perhaps you're referring to something else.

 

[CSTH]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

Ok, thanks for the prompt to do some homework.

A little google-work showed that maybe I overstated things - the field is less mature than I thought. This is an emerging area of insurance finance, and there are few up-and-running examples - mostly small-scale projects in developing countries.

The concept i had in mind is called a resilience bond - essentially a very long term cat bond that triggers a rebate (usually in the form of a lower premium/coupon payment) when specific loss-reduction / risk mitigation measures are complete - e.g. a storm surge barrier.

The way it (would) work is:

- Entities (both public and private) with a lot of risk exposure form an SPV to issue the bond (e.g. MassDOT, Massport, utility companies, FEMA or NFIP, and maybe some major private landowners ... or even something like a BID created to collect premium from all affected propertyowners)

- The Cat bond includes a specific rebate that lowers the annual payment (effectively the premium) once the protection project is complete

- The SPV then can secure financing for the project in part by promising the net savings in risk premium as future interest payments on the debt financing

- Insurers / reinsurers will often find that it makes sense to participate on either or both sides of the transaction, and count the value against both their risk exposure, premium income, and investment income.

TLDR: A complicated mechanism allows property owners to get financing based on the expected future reduction in their risk exposure. So it's not so much all taxpayers on the hook, its the people who own the assets at risk

(...but given that a catastrophic flood would have indirect negative impacts on the whole state, then yes it is possible that the state or feds would kick in some tax-derived equity as well. The concept of 'uninsured risk' gets pretty expansive with something like this - for example the commonwealth might see a large drop in tax revenue during the year of a future catastrophe, and so the commonwealth's contribution to the project could be framed as insuring against that possibility rather than as 'conventional 'spending'...)

Here's some good sources on it.

Boston wouldn't be a terrible place to pioneer this model on a large scale project like this. And Massport (among others) might make a very good 'anchor tenant'....

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-...cing-infrastructure-through-resilience-bonds/

http://www.refocuspartners.com/reports/RE.bound-Program-Report-December-2015.pdf

http://www.canadianunderwriter.ca/i...sed-products-to-support-resilient-1003557674/

 

[West]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

CSTH, very interesting, thanks for the links. One of them actually triggered a faint memory, I think I have seen some of these proposals a while back, had semi-forgotten them.

I worry whether companies and other entities are pricing their risk accurately enough to get the math to work. By that I mean, if the current cost of the flood insurance isn't sufficiently unpleasant, there isn't enough potential improvement in NOI to leverage, even if spread across many entities and property owners. The few times I've dealt with flood insurance professionally, I've felt that the cost of the flood insurance was shockingly low. Not much to leverage there. However, I admit I'm speaking from a sample size that is way too small to serve as a base. At least in the cases involving new construction, flood-mitigating design elements were a pre-requisite for getting the flood insurance, and the flood insurance was a pre-req for getting a mortgage. So that mechanism worked, at least.

I can see how it'd make sense to spread the burden across a wider set of property owners than just the first order impacted properties. My home in Newton Highlands as above the worst-case scenarios (I hope!) but my job in DTC isn't, so there's some fairness to roping me and many other sin.

Setting something like this up all gets back to the political problem. Perhaps it's not a straight up taxpayer burden, but it's indirectly something pretty similar. And the complexity would require some nimble forward thinking. Shit, around here, we can't work up the consensus to fix things on the MBTA that ought to have been done in the 80s or 90s.

But thanks again for the links, much appreciated

 

[CSTH]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

Right on. Yeah agreed that ultimately the dynamics are:

- We are all currently bearing a risk that we're not paying the cost of, and that cost is going to increase every year
- investing in a flood barrier is going to feel like an increase in expense, even if it provides dramatic net savings on a risk-inclusive basis

(Almost) everything else is just the details of how to spread the cost of the protection around and get the money cheaply.

(The reason i say almost is that there are conceivably other value drivers from building a barrier - e.g. newly developable land, potential transportation benefits, pollution control, power, etc....that MIGHT be avaialble to mitigate the cost of building it.

And fwiw hopefully the CLF's suit against exxon and potentially others like it in the future will help to drive some 'cost discovery' with regard to the true risk of catastrophic flooding events in the harbor.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/busines...tt-terminal/N0YoUgUZx8LlI08Jl0oXZP/story.html

 

[whighlander]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

Right on. Yeah agreed that ultimately the dynamics are:

- We are all currently bearing a risk that we're not paying the cost of, and that cost is going to increase every year
- investing in a flood barrier is going to feel like an increase in expense, even if it provides dramatic net savings on a risk-inclusive basis

(Almost) everything else is just the details of how to spread the cost of the protection around and get the money cheaply.

(The reason i say almost is that there are conceivably other value drivers from building a barrier - e.g. newly developable land, potential transportation benefits, pollution control, power, etc....that MIGHT be avaialble to mitigate the cost of building it.

And fwiw hopefully the CLF's suit against exxon and potentially others like it in the future will help to drive some 'cost discovery' with regard to the true risk of catastrophic flooding events in the harbor.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/busines...tt-terminal/N0YoUgUZx8LlI08Jl0oXZP/story.html

CSTH -- there is no evidence that storms are any more intense now than in any period with reliable data

All we need to do is look back 78 years to the Great Hurricane of 1938 -- if that storm had taken the track of Sandy -- New York City would still be pumping out the Bronx Zoo

As it was it provided a good fraction of the lumber that was needed during WWII -- early form of Flood Insurance -- the Fed's bought up all the fallen timber -- gave a lot of employment to out of work folks who rough sawed it, stacked it -- where it was ready and waiting until 1941 - 42 when it was like manna from heaven -- used for building critical facilities such as the late and lamented Building 20

 

[stellarfun]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

The analogy between the 1938 hurricane and Sandy is badly misplaced.

The 1938 hurricane was moving at about 50 mph when it reached Long Island. In hurricanes in the northern Hemisphere you had the forward speed to the wind component on the right side of the storm, and subtract it on the storm's left side.

Thus the 1938 hurricane could not produce a Biblical flood at the Bronx Zoo (without the ark), as that hurricane would have had to travel west of NYC to generate the highest wind speed in NYC, and over land, which degrades the wind profile of a cyclone.

See also:
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/weather_history_38.html

 

[CSTH]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

CSTH -- there is no evidence that storms are any more intense now than in any period with reliable data

"There's no evidence that baseball players are using steroids - after all, people have been hitting home runs since the beginning of the game, and babe Ruth hit 60 in 1928!"

 

[bakgwailo]

Re: Storm surge in Boston

"There's no evidence that baseball players are using steroids - after all, people have been hitting home runs since the beginning of the game, and babe Ruth hit 60 in 1928!"

You know, I always figured Ruth must have been doping (only after he left the Sox, of course).