Sea Level Rise Impacts Viewer.

Herbst was given this competitive award for having raised the bar of local management of coastal hazards. Throughout Hull’s participation in the StormSmart Coasts program Herbst has worked to help the town manage its coastal development in a way that protects life and property from coastal hazards.

Specifically, she informed the development of a tool to visualize inundation scenarios due to flood events and sea-level rise and utilized the images to raise public awareness. She was also able to foster the creation of an innovative incentive program that encourages builders and homeowners to elevate new and renovated structures above predicted floodwaters.

The Walter B. Jones Memorial Awards are given to individuals who exhibit innovation, resourcefulness, leadership and a commitment to balancing the human use of America’s coastal and ocean resources with the needs of the resources themselves. For more information on the award see the page on NOAA’s website.

Congratulations, Anne.

We think you’ll like the results, but in the meantime, we’re going to pull the site down for a few hours Sunday evening (Feb. 21st) and put our robots to work. If you visit then, there’s no telling what you might find. Rest assured, we should be up and running at full force by Monday morning.

Thanks,

—The StormSmart Coasts Team

Image YoMostro

In their press release, the Hurricane Center explained that the decoupling of predicted winds and surge was necessary because storm surge values are dependent on many factors in addition to windspeed, including the storm’s size, motion and barometric pressure, the depth of the near-shore waters, and local topographical features.

For example, they point out that Hurricane Ike (2008) made landfall on the upper Texas coast as a Category 2 hurricane with a peak storm surge of 15 to 20 feet, while Hurricane Charley (2004) struck Southwest Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, but produced a peak storm surge of just 6 to 7 feet.

Want more information? Read the press release, the webpage on the new Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, or for a primer, there’s always wikipedia.

“The challenge of living with water is one shared by cities and communities around the world. Nowhere is this more true than in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region, where people live with a daily awareness of the threat, and opportunity, of water. Please join us at the Building Resilience Workshop, to be held February 25-27, 2010, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to explore innovative, sustainable ways of increasing community resilience in the face of global climate change.”

Sounds promising. For more information, see the event’s site. Be sure to check out the StormSmart Calendar for other relevant events.

“EPA has released a first-of-its-kind water quality scorecard designed to help communities in rural, suburban and urban settings incorporate green infrastructure practices to protect local water quality and improve both the built and natural environment. The Water Quality Scorecard was developed to help local governments identify opportunities to remove barriers and revise and create codes, ordinances, and incentives to better protect water quality. The scorecard guides municipal staff, stormwater managers, planners, and other stakeholders through a review of relevant local codes and ordinances to ensure that these codes work together to support a green infrastructure approach. The scorecard also provides policy options, resources, and case studies.”

The readable report features, you guessed it, a straight-forward scorecard where municipalities can score themselves to see how well they’re addressing their water resources and find ideas for how to improve their efforts.

You can read more about the report (or download it as a 4.6 MB PDF) on the EPA’s website.

“Hurricane Ike was not the “Big One” for the Houston area, but it gave us a much clearer picture of what we might expect should a large hurricane make landfall to our southwest.

How well would we be able to recover? Much of the new growth in the Houston region will be in low-lying areas most in danger should a hurricane hit our “sweet spot”.

What should we do before the “big one” strikes? Is a massive Ike Dike the answer? What role should non-structural practices, such as planning and insurance reform, play?

This symposium gathers regional, national, and international experts to help us begin an important dialogue on how to build a more resilient Houston region.”

You can download the agenda here. (.doc)

We’ve added this event to the in-development StormSmart Coasts Calendar.

“A Texas appellate court struck down a challenge from several beachfront property owners to the Texas Open Beaches Act. The homeowners filed the action seeking a declaratory judgment for their right to repair, maintain, and access their houses, as well as for damages for the loss of use of the property following Tropical Storm Frances. The appellate court held that evidence conclusively showed an easement by implied dedication on these properties, due to historic public use. The court noted that the Act requires the removal of obstructions, barriers, and encroachments whether or not they existed when the easement first applied. The court concluded that the enforcement of the easement was not a taking, because acts of nature, not the government, moved the line of vegetation landward of where the houses were located.”

You can read the opinion here. To subscribe to the Ocean and Coastal Case Alert Newsletter, send an email to waurene@olemiss.edu with “Case Alert” on the subject line.

(click on picture to watch video on NECN’s site).

Erosion Concerns on Cape Cod (via NECN)

California struggles with bigger waves and falling homes. Click on the picture to head over to their site for the video.

“Debate Emerges on How to Fight Coastal Erosion” via KGO-TV.