RISING TIDE
BOSTON — In the booming Seaport District, General Electric is building its new world headquarters, Amazon is bringing in thousands of new workers and Reebok’s red delta symbol sits atop the new office it opened last year. Three tech companies are testing self-driving cars, and restaurants and apartments have gone up what seems to be overnight.
But after bad flooding this past winter, some wonder whether it was a bright idea to invest so much in this Boston manmade peninsula that sits barely above sea level.
“That was the first winter where we really saw waves splashing onto the boardwalk and water in the streets,” said Greg Hoffmeister, who watched the brief deluge from the third-floor Seaport office of his real-estate firm. “You start to think: Is that A worker in Boston’s Seaport District steps down stairs that divide an elevated section from a parking lot. Developers have raised the level of the ground before constructing some buildings to protect them from flooding as the sea level rises. what we’re in for as sea levels rise?”
Officials in Boston insist they’re making the proper preparations for a city that was less than 500 acres when the Puritans settled it in 1630, and now includes more than 5,000 acres of man-made landfill — onesixth of its entire area.
“We know the water is going to be coming in through South Boston, pretty much from every direction, by 2070,” said Richard McGuinness, a city planning deputy, referring to the neighborhood that includes the Seaport.
A 2016 city report projected that Boston could see 8 inches of sea level rise by 2030, with the Seaport District the most vulnerable area. By 2070, seas could rise 36 inches higher than in 2000 levels, affecting some 90,000 residents and 12,000 buildings and potentially causing economic losses of more than $14 billion, the report said.
Some Seaport developers are building with climate change in mind. Still, many office towers and highrise condos erected earlier simply didn’t — even after 2012’s storm Sandy slammed New York and showed what a bad storm could do on the East Coast. Environmental activists and some researchers complain the city isn’t moving quickly or aggressively enough to change development patterns.
Boston officials say they’re looking at ways to revise the city’s zoning code, moving ahead