Marina Bay in Winter

It was a warm winter evening in December when I was driving home on the Southeast Expressway in Boston. The thermometer was close to sixty degrees. Strangely enough, so was the indicator on my speedometer. In was the middle of rush hour. But for no good reason, the traffic was ripping, flying past the windmill, accelerating past the yacht club and the gas tank, with not a brake light in sight. To celebrate my good fortune, I decided to take a little detour and stop at Marina Bay. I pulled of the expressway, crossed the Neponset River, and drove into the parking lot.

The place was largely deserted. Unlike the typical throngs visiting in summer, the boardwalk was empty. Most of the boats had been pulled from their slips in the water. Some were up on cement blocks in the parking lots. Others had been placed in their winter berths inside the large nearby hangers.

The quiet of the warm winter night was punctuated only by the occasional roar of the jets approaching Logan Airport on the southern glide way. Otherwise, everything was still. The WaterWorks outdoor music nightclub was shuttered. The palm trees had been uprooted and moved inside. Because the winter was so warm this year, the trees could have stayed out. But the unusual warm streak couldn’t be relied upon for palm tree health in the Boston winter.

For a moment, I imagined that the WaterWorks was open and alive. The people were back on the boardwalk. The bars were overflowing, and guests sipped colorful drinks with little umbrellas. A band was playing—waves of music bounced off the unfrozen water. It was Don Henley singing “The Boys of Summer.” Thoughts of summer faded. There was nobody on the road, nobody on the beach.

I walked slowly down the lonely boardwalk, past the gazebo to restaurant row. The restaurants were open but mostly empty. The outdoor seating areas have long since been closed, and the chairs stacked. Marina Bay was really a summer destination. People didn’t think of eating there in December, even on that peculiar, summer-like night.

With the air temperature a good thirty or forty degrees above what it should have been, thoughts around Boston turned to global warming. Beyond dark, misty Spectacle Island looming in the distance, you could imagine porpoises and manatees frolicking in the strangely warm bay. A tropical breeze gently massaged the waters of Stellhagen Bank, and further out over the Atlantic, the warm air ruffled the site of the Titanic’s underwater grave. Now all of Greenland and the Arctic could be melting, and sheets of ice would crack, pull off, and float in the water surface in a last gasp of Arctic frigidity. Like ice cubes in a warm soft drink, they would bob and weave until they too melted–the final vestiges of a colder time.

As much as these things are possible, a consensus has formed that the earth is rapidly getting warmer. Although one freakishly warm December night in Boston provides emotional evidence for the warming, it doesn’t provide concrete data. You can’t conclude that the earth is warming after one night. In fact, a few months later, the weather turned, as it often does in New England. Then, a freakishly cold February provided the contrary evidence that a new Ice Age was about to begin.

But putting aside the emotional debate about cause, effect, and human impact to the environment, and assuming that (for whatever reason) the climate is getting warmer, the implications are dire and the future responsibilities for civil engineers are significant. In the same period of time that the climate has warmed, the number of people living and building along the coasts has greatly increased. The development of Marina Bay itself is based on an unspoken assumption that sea level will stay at its current elevation, more or less, and not increase by ten feet. Even a rise of a few inches would place Marina Bay at risk for more severe flooding from coastal storms. Today, the bay forms a pleasant backdrop in its current location. But if the boats start to end up in peoples’ living rooms, it would be less pleasant.

One of New England’s benchmark natural disasters, the unnamed hurricane of 1938, was a category 4 storm that threaded a needle to land and crossed the Long Island and Connecticut shore lines. As we now understand it, it is not easy for a category 4 hurricane to make landfall in New England. The factors for such a storm include a limited window of opportunity in September, warm water up the Atlantic coast, and a unusual storm path and size that had to hit the New England and move in just such a way to cause maximum destruction. The storm surge led to massive flooding, including the inundation of downtown Providence, Rhode Island. The flooding resulted in hundreds of deaths, and massive harbor floodgates were built in both Providence and New Bedford in response.

Many who study global warming are concerned that severe coastal storms will be more frequent and more intense. What will we do, then, if hurricanes as strong as the one in 1938 regularly pummel the New England coast?

Part of the debate about global warming focuses on whether the climatic change is manmade. So discussion has focused on steps to be taken to cool things down. Activities such as conservation and alternate sources of energy besides fossil fuels make sense anyway, regardless of warming trends. The problem with the debate is that it is often emotional and political, veering away from science and engineering.

If sea level is going up, whether caused by man or climatic cycles or both, and more people choose to live at the coast, then engineering may be the only defense. Civil engineers have successfully protected most of the entire nation of Holland, which is largely below sea level. Following catastrophic floods in 1953, Dutch engineers developed a sophisticated system of dykes and flood control devices that have successfully kept the North Sea out. That entire nation’s existence is dependent upon good civil engineering, and to date the engineers have come through.

The U.S. experience is less impressive. After years of warnings, most of New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina. The dykes held except at a few locations where they didn’t, and that was enough to lead to the destruction of wide swaths of the city. New Orleans was reported by many to be a disaster waiting to happen. An article in National Geographic featured an eerily prescient, blow-by-blow accounting of the Katrina disaster a year before it occurred. If most of New Orleans could be submerged, what would happen to the rest of the country if the ocean rose? Downtown Boston is only about ten feet or so above sea level. Many parts of New York City are likewise susceptible to flooding. The area surrounding the Sacramento River in California is thought to be susceptible to a Katrina-like disaster.

Civil engineers will be responsible for dealing with many of the impacts of global warming: higher sea level, more flooding, changes in rainfall patterns, and water supply to cities. During a warm December night, I enjoyed the breeze at Marina Bay. It may have been the calm before a much bigger storm. The bay was serene, the empty docks gently bobbed. There was a hint of a breeze to the west—a cold front was approaching, and tomorrow, the temperatures would be a little bit closer what is today considered normal for the winter.