* Rising Seas, raising questions

* Officials weigh impact of sea-level rise on low-lying locales

When a state agency named the lower Skagit Valley as one of two areas in Puget Sound that will feel the impact of rising seas first, it caught the attention of two local planners.

John Doyle, La Conner town planning director, and Ed Knight, a senior planner for the Swinomish tribal community, realized their communities were at ground zero of climate change.

They are among the few officials in Skagit County who are taking a closer look at what impacts a sea-level rise of between 8 and 24 inches by 2100 will mean for the 900 people living in town and the 2,600 people on the 12-square-mile reservation.

Residents of the two Swinomish Channel communities depend to varying degrees on the sea for their livelihoods. Fishing and tourism — either at the Swinomish Northern Lights Casino or the boutiques and restaurants of First and Morris streets — are how many families pay their bills.

The tribe plans to build a marine resort near its casino, and the town hopes to revitalize the site of a condemned cannery building and docks through a partnership with the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe.

For low-lying areas such as La Conner or the Swinomish Reservation, the problems caused by sea-level rise will begin as a slow seep of water that could worsen over time, especially as extreme storms hit the Northwest with greater frequency, experts say.

La Conner’s close call

Communities around Skagit County got an inkling of what that might mean on Feb. 4, 2006, when a low-pressure system blasted 80 mph winds through the region. Hundreds of trees were knocked over. Sea swells of up to 35 feet high stormed marinas and saltwater dikes, which around La Conner needed sandbagging. At the time, county emergency management officials said the storm hit the Swinomish Snee-Ooish area the hardest.

“La Conner came within a few inches from being flooded,” Knight said.

For some it was a wake-up call, but for other communities it was an unusual natural event.

A difference of inches

Some public agencies have started to talk about sea-level rise. The Skagit County Marine Resources Committee has just begun to include the issue during discussions about long-term plans. But so far, it has not sought funding for a study or added it to its list of projects.

La Conner sought a state grant to study flooding issues, including an assessment of the impact of sea-level rise, Doyle said. Town officials want to close the gap in the dikes that surround the community, protecting it from both Skagit River floods and high seas.

“It’s like the casting of dice if a low-pressure system passes directly over town with high winds and significant rainfall,” he said. “It won’t take much rise — 5 or 6 inches will make a big difference for us.”

The Swinomish Tribe is seeking funding for a similar study, Knight said.

“We’ve started looking at it, like a lot of jurisdictions and people up and down the West Coast,” Knight said. “We certainly are looking at what the potential impacts could be. We’re a long ways off from having a lot of hard definitive information at hand.”

But other local officials say they have their hands full trying to plan responses to river flooding, which strikes Skagit County with regularity, and they don’t have the time or resources to worry about a problem slowly arriving over the next 50 years.

“We have a problem getting from day to day — all the river studies,” said Commissioner Stan Nelson, secretary of Dike District No. 22, which drains water from Fir Island. “Sea-level rise is something that is out there, perhaps.”

A system of roughly 147 miles of levies and dikes and nearly 380 miles of drainage ditches protects approximately 55,000 acres of land from flooding and high tides. The system is overseen by 12 dike districts and 11 drainage districts. And the commissioners who run them don’t have to report to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“No one has comprehensive mapping,” said Douglas Canning, an expert in sea-level rise, who is retired from the University of Washington Climate Impact Group and Ecology. “The system we have here is local diking districts. Some are pretty sophisticated, and some are pretty poor.”

The real issue for Skagit’s dike system may not be whether they will hold.

“The dikes are pretty easy to beef up,” Nelson said.

When gravity won’t do

Instead, there are concerns that the gravity-driven drainage system won’t work efficiently if the low tides are much higher than the present levels, Nelson said. If the gravity system fails, the districts would have to pump their water, he said.

Another option would be moving the dikes farther inland, but that would affect private property owners and could mean losses of agricultural land.

Ian Munce, planning director of the seaside community of Anacortes, said he expects that the Washington Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington will issue guidance for local governments to help city and town councils and county commissions make decisions about their responses to sea-level rise. Because the scientific community’s sea-level predictions for 2100 range from half a foot to 3 feet, Munce said it’s hard for local municipalities to know how to plan.

“In my mind, there is no way to estimate,” Munce said. “I don’t think the science is there yet.”

Still, public works and planning department employees who do mapping have the tools to create maps of sea-level elevations.

The Puget Sound Lidar Consortium has arranged for the cooperative sharing of digital elevation models that can be used with mapping software, Canning said. That information, along with the methods published by climate scientists, can be used to develop local maps to show the potential impact, he said.

Planning for climate-change impacts requires more than good maps. It also means policymakers and the public must change their mind-set about risk management, Canning said.

Generally, planners in the United States consider 100-year events, or an event that has a 1 percent chance each year of happening. In Holland, planners looking at coastal defenses think in terms of 4,000- to 10,000-year storms, a 0.03 percent to 0.01 percent annual probability, depending on what structures are at risk, Canning said.

“It requires that so many people adopt new ways of thinking,” he said. “It’s not something you can just sit down at a council meeting and decide we’re going to do.”

Skagit Warming Series:
Skagit Warming Page
Climate change and the Skagit Valley
Temperatures rising, glaciers melting in Northwest
Nature’s Laboratory
Researchers explore effects of climate change on health
Warming’s impact on Skagit water
Climate change poses threat to regional icons
Warming shifts odds away from salmon survival
Climate change could have dramatic impact on local agricultural scene
Cashing in on global warming
Warming: A rising tide
Green Power
Nuclear power unlikely alternative
Skagit Warming: Government action
Climate and You
What You Can Do
Why turn off the lights?
Skagit Warming: Tell us what you think

* Marta Murvosh can be reached at 360-416-2149 or .