EnviroLink Forum

http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/administrati ... eachfi.pdf

It appears Fire Island of New York may be just abandoned. How many billion is it worth before you throw in the towel?


http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/administrati ... ussslr.pdf


What will we try to keep and what will we let go of. A lot like triage. New York will make these decisions this century with two feet of sea level rise.

From looking at Google earth there appears to be 7 houses there on the 2 islands combined.

If these 7 owners of (I guess) 7 holiday homes cannot afford or be bothered to pay for the work needed to protect their holiday homes from the shifting of the sands in the dynamic changing bay behind Long beach then the houses will be lost. I don't care.

It seems your research abilities are on par with your cost estimating abilities. This view of Ocean Beach New York shows hundreds of houses and other buildings in the 2'-3' (largest portion) elevation border of the map.

http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/administrati ... eachfi.pdf

The other "island" is not one island, but a large area of the suburbs of New York city.

http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/administrati ... ussslr.pdf

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How could anyone not afford the "miniscule" cost to protect the homes you seem to have seen somewhere on a map?

Maybe if you looked at the east edge of the map in the East Massapequa you would see a few more impacts.

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The computer I use for this sort of thing doesn't do pdf's so I have to work around.

The map has Fire island as a point between 2 small islands in the lagoon behind Long Beach. Can you give the latitude and lonmgitude of the location if it's different from this.

How can these houses be threatened by GW induced sea level rise when we have not had any of significance so far?

Ocean Beach NY
40.65°N 73.15°W

http://www.mapquest.com/?le=t&q=Ocean+B ... &flv=1&vs=

The 2' - 3' line is s semi-circle from about where the marker is extending most of the way to the opposite shore of the island.

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http://www.islandbeachrealty.com/sales.html

This is the address of the realter for the local area.

The prices of these house seem to be what I expected.

The sort of people who can pay $1.6 millon for a 4 bed house will be the sort to get the local government to do the coastal protection work which they have heard is needed by using the press to do the campaigning for them rather than just have a collection and hire a digger.

I don't care if some rich prople have to sort out a bit of work on some sea defences.

How does this in any way mean there will be no cities flooded with a 2 foot rise in sea level this is the New York city metro area?

You make one claim and when it is refuted you jump to another, which is also refuted, so you throw out some diversion about rich people. You claims are bogus because you do not know of which you speak.

Just how much will the "digger" cost in the case of Ocean Beach? What will that "digger" dig to prevent the flooding you claim will not happen? Where will that "digger" dig since the highest point seems to be about 4 feet and that is on the seaward side?

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“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
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OK, for those who have never been to the sea side;

The sea ward side of the sand bar on which these houses have been built is higher than the rest because it is being built up by the action of waves lifting sand from the beach into the air which is then deposited higher up the beach forming dunes. The process has resulted in the creation of the sand bar and enclosed the lagoon behind it.

The land is very close to sea level as you say 4 foot is about the highest point.

That is 4 foot above the tide line.

So if you took a digger and dug sand from the low tide point and piled it up at the back of the beach above the high tide point you would hasten the process of beach and dune creation.

This would leave the place vunerable to the ocean having a storm which blew the wrong way and washed out lots of the beach.

To avoid this problem installing groynes perpendicular to the beach to trap the sand and possibly having a rock or concrete or metal wall within the newly created coastal defense may well be worth wile especially considering the high value of the properties on this exclusive location.

However I don't think that the public purse would need to be opened since the rich owners of these houses can sort this out themselves or at least pay the premium for living there, (oops sorry they don't live there these are second homes) or at least owning such high status beachfront prperty.

For those of you who draw extrapolations from very limited experiences there needs to be some corrections to this view.

In the case of Ocean Beach, it is on the sound, which is a large area of water connected to the Atlantic Ocean. There is no enclosed lagoon involved. The buildings are all on the sound side which is where Tim suggests they dig to get material to build up the other side of the shore. An island is surrounded by water, thus the name Fire Island, and as such has no area from which to dig material to protect the shore without threatening another shore.



So there might be significant costs involved but you would merely have the individuals suffer them and not the public? There are people who live on these islands year round and have no second homes. What is the solution for them?

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“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
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Argh!!

When you dig up material to form a sea dense you generally use the stuff from the low tide mark and take uip the beach to the high tide mark. The same beach!!!!

Fire island is of course an island. The lagoon behind is connected to the open ocean. Japan's Inland sea is also connected to the open ocean at many points.

If you wanted to get advanced about bringing in material to build big sea defenses then the use of dregers which currently drop their load out at sea could be one solution if they dumped their loads as close to the site as possible at high tide which would allow the diggers to shift it up the beach at low tide.

You could use large rocks or concrete blocks fot the delux version.

The perminent residents of these houses will have to find other maid's jobs if they are abandoned. Although I cannot imagine why the would be given the very high demand for them.

beach front property is expensive because of the view. No protection beyond insurance will be enacted and they will be washed away eventually during storms. The area will lose their tax base and insurance rates for beach-front property will go up. It may not look like a cost but the insurance industry will recover the costs from everyone that buys insurance which is a direct hit to the GDP. The tax base hit will be replaced with higher taxes for everyone else... again hitting the GDP. It does not matter how rich the land owners are, it is going to hurt the economy even if indirectly. We will get over it OR the economy will collapse. Chances are that the total hit to the GDP will be greater then the cost of the property that will no longer be used.

Ah, so you are saying they can dig enough material to build a defense for an additional two feet of sea level by digging the material from the beach between the high and low tide levels without destruction of the beach? Since the tide differential is less than a foot between haigh and low tide here the beach may be rather short for such removal. It would be an interesting proposition to see since the "moat" created in front of the wall would tend to fill in as the tide moved in and out most likely from material used to create the wall. The dunes do not remain stable without vegetation to help them do so.

http://www.tides.info/?command=view&loc ... New%20York



The costs would be what a few tens of millions of dollars per mile of shore?



With a more deluxe price tag as well.



I was speaking of their homes as you were claiming the second home situation would make the situation a non-issue ... except the year round inhabitants only have one home.

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With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

I am suprised that the tidal range for the open Atlantic is so low. However the the open ocean does have greater tides than the protected lagoon stats you quoted.

Since the tidal range is low you could use a floating dreger/digger to supply the sand or many other methods.

If you think it takes a million dollars to build a 2 foot high reinforced concrete wall a mile long then I will do it for half the price.

If you want some numbers;

Concrete is about $100 a cubic meter, bulk buy price.

1m heigh x 0.1m width x 1.6km (1mile ish) = 160 cubic metre ----> $16k

The price of digging the foundations and shuttering will probably treble the overall cost.

You will need a bit of re-bar as well.

My quote fot the max-delux job of building a reinforced concrete sea wall is thus $60,000 a mile.

You were not talking about a reinforced concrete wall, but that is ok. I know you often get what you pay for.



Odd I found discussions indicating that quote would be an expected price for a residential seawall on a canal in Florida for about a 90 foot frontage.

And we see from the seawall data that you are way off from even the lowest ranges of actual costs.

http://climatetechwiki.org/content/seawalls

A study by Linham et al. (2010) indicates that the unit cost of constructing 1 km of vertical seawall is in the range of US$0.4 to 27.5 million. The study found seawall costs for around ten countries. Most were developed country examples, although a number of newly developed and developing countries, such as Egypt, Singapore and South Africa were also found. Problems arise in the reporting of unit costs for vertical seawalls as the effect of height on unit costs is rarely considered. As such, these costs are likely to relate to seawalls of various heights; this explains some of the significant variation in costs between projects.

Some of the best unit cost information is given by the English Environment Agency (2007), for unit costs relevant to the UK. This source gives an average construction cost for seawalls of US$2.65 million (at 2009 price levels). This cost includes direct construction costs, direct overheads, costs of associated construction works, minor associated work, temporary works, compensation events and delay costs. This does not include Value Added Tax (VAT) or external costs such as consultants, land and compensation payments.

Variation in costs between projects is a result of numerous factors, such as:

Design height is a major factor affecting costs per unit length of seawall. Height affects the volume of materials required for construction and the build time
Anticipated wave loadings will affect how resilient the structure needs to be; deeper waters and exposed coasts cause higher wave loadings which will mean the structure needs to be more robust, thus higher costs
Single or multi stage construction; costs are lower for single stage (Nicholls & Leatherman, 1995)
Selected seawall design and the standard of protection desired. Certain design features will increase costs and more robust seawalls will be more costly
Construction materials (e.g. rubble blocks, pre-cast concrete elements, metal, soil, etc.)
Proximity to and availability of raw construction materials
Availability and cost of human resources including expertise

Maintenance costs are another significant and ongoing expense when a hard defence is selected. These costs are ongoing for the life of the structure and are therefore likely to result in significant levels of investment through a project’s lifetime. Continued investment in maintenance is highly recommended to ensure defences continue to provide design levels of protection (Linham et al., 2010).

It has been noted that construction and maintenance costs are likely to increase into the future in response to SLR (Burgess & Townend, 2004; Townend & Burgess, 2004). This is caused by increases in water depth in front of the structure which, in turn cause increased wave heights and wave loadings on the structure.

Maintenance costs are also likely to be higher when seawalls are poorly designed or constructed of inappropriate materials. In many cases, design can be of secondary importance to the availability of raw materials, especially in locations where appropriate construction materials are scare. This was found to be the case in a study of shoreline protection in rural Fiji by Mimura and Nunn (1998). Their study highlights the problem that inappropriate design often leads to unfavourable effects, such as wave reflection and toe scour. In the absence of improper design, it is not unusual for designs from one location to be blindly copied at another. Such an approach is likely to result in exaggerated socio-economic and environmental costs (UNFCCC, 1999). The provision of even, basic design guidance would improve project performance in many cases.

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With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein