Sea-level rise is emerging as a high-profile topic related to climate change. Renee Collini shares the science behind rising seas, some surprising impacts right at the coast and inland, as well as some adaptation options to mitigate the impacts of this hazard.

‍

Transcript:

00;00;00;01 - 00;00;02;07
Hal Needham
Coming up next on the GeoTrek podcast.

00;00;02;19 - 00;00;23;20
Renee Collini
Keep in mind that that storm water, especially in the northern Gulf Coast, our rainwater, our storm water not draining is our big problem right now. That is our canary in the coal mine, if you will, for storm for a sea level rise. And so even things like rain gardens and rain barrels and the little bit you can help to reduce the amount of water going into the system.

00;00;23;28 - 00;00;39;15
Renee Collini
And, you know, everyone thinks like, oh, what's the one rain garden I have going to do? But that's what we said about what's my one driveway going to do? And now all the driveways are helping to funnel water right into the system. So it's sort of like if we're death by a thousand cuts with development, how about a thousand Band-Aids?

00;00;40;29 - 00;01;02;21
Hal Needham
Sea level rise is one of the highest profile hazards associated with climate change. Images of melting ice sheets are shocking and scary when combined with observations of increased floods along populated coastlines. What does the latest science say about sea level rise? And how can we take actions to prepare ourselves So our future on the coast is filled with hope instead of paralysis?

00;01;02;27 - 00;01;30;28
Hal Needham
Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Halle, host of the GeoTrek podcast. This is episode 41 titled Sea Level Rise with Renee Collini. This podcast explores the science behind rising seas, discusses climate model projections, and gives us all kinds of practical advice to make adaptations which will make us more resilient from coastal floods in the future. Our guest this week is Renee Collini, a coastal climate resilience specialist with Mississippi State University and Sea Grant.

00;01;31;13 - 00;01;54;06
Hal Needham
Renee is an expert on sea level rise and coastal hazards. You're going to love this podcast if you have an interest in climate change. Coastal hazards or the field of adaptation. But first, a bit about the podcast GeoTrek travels the world to find stories about the relationship between people and nature. Our stories investigate the impact of extreme weather, disasters and hazards on individuals and communities.

00;01;54;20 - 00;02;13;24
Hal Needham
Our goal is to help you better understand how the world works so you can take actions to make yourself, your family and your community more resilient from all the extremes Mother Nature can throw at us. Hey, before we get into this exciting episode, we have a favor to ask of you. We'd really appreciate it if you'd subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

00;02;14;04 - 00;02;32;02
Hal Needham
Your subscription helps us mark progress, which enables us to make more professional partnerships moving forward and ensures many more episodes of the GeoTrek podcast in the future. Well, hey, let's meet up with Renee down on the beach. The seas are rising, but not that fast. So you can lay down a towel and all stay dry through this episode.

00;02;32;25 - 00;02;56;17
Hal Needham
Well, let's do a more formal introduction of this week's guest. Renee Colleen has a dual appointment as a coastal climate resilience specialist with Mississippi State University and Sea Grant focused on sea level rise. She facilitates the flow of information between researchers and decision makers to improve science application. The lead of the program for local adaptation to climate affects sea level rise.

00;02;56;26 - 00;03;21;25
Hal Needham
Colleen integrates a multi-state network of stakeholders, researchers, NGOs and state and federal agencies to build tools, programs and projects to address gaps in sea level rise, observing research and decision making in the northern Gulf of Mexico. She is a recognized leader in resilience across the Gulf of Mexico and is serving as an author on the fifth National Climate Assessment Coastal Effects Chapter.

00;03;22;01 - 00;03;36;13
Hal Needham
Renee, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Well, everyone, this is an exciting Geo Trek podcast. We have Renee Collini with us, an expert in sea level rise and coastal science. Renee, really excited to have you on the podcast today.

00;03;37;03 - 00;03;38;17
Renee Collini
I'm excited to be here. This will be fun.

00;03;39;03 - 00;03;51;03
Hal Needham
Rene you're really interesting person to talk to you about coastal science because you spend a lot of time on the coast. Could you kind of walk us through your background? I know you and your family have spent a lot of time, especially on the Gulf Coast.

00;03;51;24 - 00;04;12;17
Renee Collini
Yeah. So I got the ridiculous notion to be a marine scientist, and that led me to a tiny island off the coast of Alabama called Dauphin Island. And while I was there, in addition to falling in love with the Gulf Coast in general, because I grew up I mean, it was in Texas, which technically has a coast, as you're well familiar with, but I'm from the DFW area where we don't even realize there's a coast.

00;04;13;03 - 00;04;30;23
Renee Collini
So I ended up on the northern Gulf Coast and I fell madly in love with it. But I also ended up falling in love with a guy. And so I met my husband and so we ended up getting married and starting our family there. And I got jobs on Dauphin Island, working in marine science, which was exciting after grad school.

00;04;31;12 - 00;04;58;12
Renee Collini
And slowly that sort of led me into this place of applied science. And I worked with observing data like real time weather and water quality. But ultimately I started working on changing sea levels and their impacts and living on a barrier island. Obviously that was relevant to me personally. But also, you know, I learned a lot about living and the culture in those spaces because my husband's family has been there since right after the Civil War.

00;04;58;21 - 00;05;18;12
Renee Collini
So they lived there before there was power, they lived there before there was a lot of things and, you know, the saltwater is in their blood and their family and it shaped everything about them. And so I got a chance to really see what it meant to be a coastal person while also learning a lot about the science and what it tells us about where we're headed next.

00;05;18;21 - 00;05;33;19
Renee Collini
And so it made for a really exciting opportunity to help people like my husband's family, like myself, who either are from here or fell in love with the area and decided to stay on how to make sure that we're considering those changes as we move forward.

00;05;34;03 - 00;05;38;10
Hal Needham
So, Rene, your husband's family has been on Dauphin Island since like the mid 1800s.

00;05;38;21 - 00;05;39;01
Renee Collini
Yeah.

00;05;39;17 - 00;05;51;00
Hal Needham
Well, that's a really long time. I mean, we know about the population explosion right in this part of the country. A lot of people have only been here two years or five years. You don't meet that many people that have been there since the mid 1800s.

00;05;51;11 - 00;06;12;20
Renee Collini
Oh, yeah, for sure. His actually in that the island wasn't connected to the mainland by any road until the mid to late 1950s. So I think 53 or 54 is when the bridge finally opened for people to drive across it for the first time. And so his grandmother, like not that many generations ago, called everybody who wasn't from the island, the strangers.

00;06;13;08 - 00;06;28;17
Hal Needham
Well, yeah, you get those islands and those places that have kind of a cut off geography, right? I mean, eventually, if you go long enough people in those kind of places get different accents and different cultures and stuff. But yeah, that's a long time to be really separated from the mainland.

00;06;29;00 - 00;06;30;03
Renee Collini
Oh, yeah, for sure.

00;06;30;18 - 00;06;43;19
Hal Needham
That's really fascinating. So for you just, you know, marrying into a family like that and then spending so much time along the Gulf Coast, how did that start changing your perspective of coastal hazards, coastal flooding or just even the coastal climate?

00;06;44;22 - 00;07;12;11
Renee Collini
I think the first thing I realized is that these people are resilient. And if you're going to live on the coast, you need to be resilient right? You need to understand nature and respect it, but also work with it. And then the other thing I think is how complex the stories really are. I think now, you know, it's really easy to tell stories about flooding and you see things about sea level rise in the media where it's about rich people and their third and fourth homes being subsidized by the government.

00;07;12;11 - 00;07;34;11
Renee Collini
But there are so many real folks who live in these spaces and their stories aren't being told and why they're there and how they ended up there and how long they've been there get washed over by the few very rich folks who are dominating that sort of story. But it also means there's lots of complexity around resource cities and what resilience means moving forward.

00;07;34;11 - 00;07;55;20
Renee Collini
And so my programing, which I'm an extension specialist and my whole role as an extension person is devoted to helping science get into application is really foundationally shaped by the recognition and firsthand experience of just how complex and how unique each person's life and experience on the coast really is.

00;07;56;09 - 00;08;15;08
Hal Needham
Yeah, that's a really good perspective. And like you said, that's kind of grounded in with some of these communities where people have been there for a really long time. You know, you pointed out and that's a that's a good observation, that a lot of times we think of these McMansions that were built recently, but, you know, every now and then I'll be in a coastal community and someone will be like, you got to come to my grandma's house.

00;08;15;08 - 00;08;32;04
Hal Needham
And it's like, wait, it's a little brick house built in 1941 like this. This is different than I pictured. But you're right, These people are so, so resilient. They've been through decades and even generations of all these storms. And I'm I have to imagine there are times where you just probably sit back and listen and take it all in, right?

00;08;32;11 - 00;08;50;03
Renee Collini
Oh, 100%. You have to understand and also honor the experience of these people who've been living here. And, you know, the funny thing is, when you see a lot of these homes that take on damage, the newer builds and I think newer meaning even like in the past 20 years, it was folks who weren't listening to the people who've been there for generations.

00;08;50;10 - 00;08;52;13
Renee Collini
There's a reason why they didn't want to build out there.

00;08;53;12 - 00;08;57;12
Hal Needham
Oh, so this is not only the building type, but even the building location.

00;08;57;25 - 00;09;22;23
Renee Collini
Yeah. So the village, as they call it, that was there before, which we still call it the village on Dauphin Island, for example, was in a specific location. It's kind of the one higher ridge and sort of into behind the dunes on Dauphin Island, but none of them built out down the West End or, you know, on the other side of the dunes, anything they wanted to last, they'd have like temporary lean tos out on the beaches so they could get fish and stuff.

00;09;22;23 - 00;09;27;18
Renee Collini
But anything that they wanted to last was in this one specific location on the island.

00;09;28;01 - 00;09;47;08
Hal Needham
You know, I've been to Dauphin Island, only once during Hurricane Sally. I remember in 2020 driving, I think I was the last car in. And at first I was like, wow, there's surprisingly no coastal flooding. I didn't realize I was up on that high part. And then I drove to the West End and I couldn't believe how how quickly all of a sudden the water is just racing across the road.

00;09;47;08 - 00;09;52;00
Hal Needham
I mean, there are it had a lot of varied elevation more than I expected.

00;09;52;18 - 00;10;16;26
Renee Collini
Oh, yeah. And those dunes play such a critical role to some people don't realize that actually when we flood on these barrier islands, the flooding comes from the north side or the sound side. It doesn't come from the ocean side because we've got these big dunes that are protecting big portions of the island. So the dunes stop the surge from the south side and then it pushes up into the bays and into the sounds and comes around from the back side.

00;10;16;26 - 00;10;18;24
Renee Collini
And that's where our coastal flooding really starts.

00;10;19;01 - 00;10;24;14
Hal Needham
Oh, that's interesting and a bit counterintuitive for a lot of people that probably just expect it's coming from the open Gulf.

00;10;24;25 - 00;10;28;18
Renee Collini
Yeah. Now, granted, if you're on the other side of the dunes, you're going to get it firsthand.

00;10;30;04 - 00;10;43;21
Hal Needham
Rene, could you explain a little bit about your position as an extension specialist? I know a lot of people in extension are basically connecting academia to the public or connecting a university to the public. Could you share with us a little bit about your position and really what you do?

00;10;44;05 - 00;11;04;15
Renee Collini
Yeah. So extension, really just a quick note for those who haven't heard of it before. It came from land grant originally back in the 1800s when a lot of research was going into agriculture, but they noticed that the agriculture industry, farmers and those types of folks weren't uptake ing this new information, which is unfortunate, right, because a lot of money was going into the research.

00;11;04;15 - 00;11;26;10
Renee Collini
And so from that a group of folks called the extension service were born with the idea of taking science and translating it and repackaging it and connecting it to people who could make decisions using that science. In this case, farmers and so then from that spring up, something called C Grant, which did essentially the same thing, but for fishermen and other types of fishing folk in the fishing industry.

00;11;26;16 - 00;11;56;26
Renee Collini
And over time that has expanded the mission has expanded beyond the fishing community into spaces like resilience. So my work, the science I focus on is not just how much seas are changing, but how that changes our coastal hazards like storm surge and rainfall flooding, and then further taking it the next step and making sure that our natural resource managers, our city planners, our state officials, all of them understand that science, but also have it in a form that they can use it in whatever it is that they're working on.

00;11;57;10 - 00;12;29;16
Renee Collini
But in my role, because there's not a lot of us who work on sea level rise all the time because I'm a specialist, which means I get to specialize in this one area of flood risk. I actually get information from people on the ground trying to make decisions, residents, individual homeowners, all the way up to state officials and communicate back to researchers and funders and other folks who make some of the higher level decisions about where money goes or where research is directed so they understand what needs we still have and what kind of questions we're still trying to pursue so we can be more resilient in the coast.

00;12;30;08 - 00;12;38;25
Hal Needham
Rene So sea grant breaks down by geographies, right? There's Florida Sea Grant, Texas Sea grant. I think in your region it's Mississippi Alabama Sea grant. Is that correct?

00;12;39;04 - 00;13;02;06
Renee Collini
Yeah, but I'm actually special. I work with Florida Sea Grant and Mississippi Alabama Sea Grant because I work across Mississippi, Alabama and the Panhandle of Florida, because in that region, not only is the sea level rise rate similar, but the landscape is similar. You know, lots of rural areas with pockets of cities like Biloxi or Pensacola, Mobile, and then it's flat and there's some barrier islands and a lot of marsh.

00;13;02;06 - 00;13;08;07
Renee Collini
So if I'm going to specialize in sea level rise, it might as well be that region where it's lots of transferable information.

00;13;08;07 - 00;13;14;07
Hal Needham
That makes sense. Maybe what you're seeing in Biloxi or Dauphin Island may translate over to Pensacola, for example.

00;13;14;14 - 00;13;15;05
Renee Collini
100%.

00;13;15;15 - 00;13;32;05
Hal Needham
Yeah, Very interesting and great work you're doing. And let's talk a little bit now about sea level rise. It's such a high profile topic. It's in the news a lot. I think some people sometimes get confused about it. Could you share a little bit just your overview of kind of that topic and why it's so important for sure?

00;13;32;05 - 00;13;53;06
Renee Collini
So sea level rise feels like a big topic because it's often talked about, about the whole world and the global changes. And there's sort of two things happening here. One, if you think all the way back to high school chemistry, remember that molecules that are cold tend to be slow and hang out closer together and then molecules that are hot tend to move around more and they take up more space.

00;13;53;11 - 00;14;09;16
Renee Collini
So as our planet gets warmer, the oceans themselves are taking up more heat. So then those water molecules are moving around a whole bunch and they're taking up more space, which brings the level of the ocean higher. We have a great activity that I can give you a link so you can put it in the in the show notes.

00;14;09;16 - 00;14;30;06
Renee Collini
But there's actually a way you can see that with just a little heating lamp and a water bottle and see the water level rise. But the other thing is land ice. So glaciers, ice sheets, things on land that are melting because it's getting warmer and they travel down. You know, again, think back to those graphics in high school about the water cycle and then that water enters the ocean.

00;14;30;06 - 00;14;50;29
Renee Collini
So there's more water entering the ocean because it's getting warmer and melting. Then there are, you know, coming out of it. So we're putting more water into the oceans and the water itself is taking up more space. And so that's raising sea levels everywhere. But there's other things that influence what sea level looks like for you. We've got tides that happen every day, right?

00;14;50;29 - 00;15;15;11
Renee Collini
We've got storm surge. We've got all kinds of things that we circle through. And we also have the land itself moving at different location. So your Gulf listeners will know, for example, in Louisiana, it's pretty famous for the fact that the land is settling and so that land is sinking fast and the water's rising. And so that makes the sea level rise at that spot much faster than in most places in the world.

00;15;15;11 - 00;15;16;25
Renee Collini
And that matter. Oh, go ahead.

00;15;16;26 - 00;15;18;25
Hal Needham
Oh, no, no. We keep going. This is fantastic.

00;15;19;04 - 00;15;42;18
Renee Collini
Well, it's going say and so it matters because when that water comes up, even small increases, particularly in the Gulf where we're really flat, a little bit up goes a long way inland. And so now we have that same high tide, those same waves interacting with our shorelines and new places. And so it reshapes our shorelines. It lets flood waters get closer in or go farther inland or deeper.

00;15;43;06 - 00;16;03;09
Renee Collini
It also means our rainfall, which we have designed all these gravity systems to drain into the Gulf don't drain as efficiently. So now we have inland rainfall flooding because that water level at the coast is higher. All these things sort of cascade and work together. We're coastal folks, we're used to hazards, but it just exacerbates those hazards we're accustomed to.

00;16;03;15 - 00;16;06;12
Renee Collini
And so we've got to reframe what what those hazards look like.

00;16;06;27 - 00;16;22;20
Hal Needham
So it sounds like you're saying someone might be 15 miles inland and feel like, okay, I'm not right at the coast. Coastal flooding sea level rise isn't going to influence me. But then in a torrential rain, maybe they don't drain as fast as they would have when sea levels were lower.

00;16;23;06 - 00;16;47;18
Renee Collini
Yeah, And so there's that is an example. But also, again, we're low and flat and we have lots of bayous and deltas and rivers and marshes on our coast and the waterways are the easiest way for surge to push up. So if sea level is higher, that means that everything else is higher. And that means that those deltas and those rivers real far inland actually become flooded with storm surge, too.

00;16;47;25 - 00;16;54;05
Renee Collini
And we've already started to see some signs of that. And like people, septic tanks and just in general, some of the surge push.

00;16;54;05 - 00;17;12;28
Hal Needham
I remember when I was brand new to the Gulf Coast, it was the fall of 2008. Hurricane Ike came. And I remember asking people in Louisiana, I was living in Baton Rouge. I said, could Ike flood all the way to I-10? And people said, I don't think so. That's like 25 miles. Sure enough, it did. And people were shocked.

00;17;12;28 - 00;17;22;04
Hal Needham
But it sounds like you're saying as the land continues to sink and sea levels rise, that next storm surge from a similar storm is going to flood even more, possibly far inland.

00;17;22;17 - 00;17;42;10
Renee Collini
Yes, absolutely. And you also have to think, too, a lot of our hurricanes lately have had so much rainfall. So even if your surge isn't going, you know, 50 or more or whatever, miles inland, they are stopping those rivers from draining as effectively because they're pushing in. So then you get all this extra rainfall and then the rivers aren't draining.

00;17;42;10 - 00;17;47;06
Renee Collini
So they start to overflow their banks because all our is connected, all of our systems are connected.

00;17;47;18 - 00;17;53;20
Hal Needham
So storm surge can almost be like a dam or sea level rise, damming some of those fresh waters that are trying to run out to sea.

00;17;54;03 - 00;18;13;12
Renee Collini
Yep, absolutely. And we're actually already seeing that in places in Mississippi. I'm part of the secretary of state in Mississippi, formed a conservation task force and one of the guys who who works with agriculture told me that when he was a kid, his dad woke him up in the middle of the night and took him out to see this river flood because he said it's never going to be this high again in your lifetime.

00;18;13;12 - 00;18;22;09
Renee Collini
It's the only chance you'll ever see this. And he said it was that way for a while, but now it happens every few years. So we're seeing those changes across the landscape.

00;18;22;17 - 00;18;41;14
Hal Needham
Yeah, that's tremendous. We are seeing more and more extremes. These levels that we'd never thought we'd see again in our life. People are seeing them more much more frequently. Renee Let's revisit this concept of sea level rise not being uniform. I know that really shocks a lot of people. They just think it should be the same everywhere. And it's not.

00;18;41;20 - 00;18;56;29
Hal Needham
You explain a little bit about why that is. In some places, land is sinking faster than others. How can people find out how fast the sea level is rising and their location relative to the land compared to, say, a neighboring location up or down the coast?

00;18;57;20 - 00;19;15;01
Renee Collini
So there's two great things that you can look at The first is a website called Sea Level Trends that Noah has. And again, I'll send the links. You can put it in the show notes, but that shows historic for as long as you've had a tide gauge there. What the trend has been historically of sea levels increasing at that spot.

00;19;15;01 - 00;19;35;29
Renee Collini
And as soon as you open it right, there's all these arrows pointing up or even in some places pointing down, because the relative sea level, that's what it's called when you're standing at a specific spot, the relative sea level in some places actually is going down. And what happens like this is in Alaska for example, the Alaska coast is rebounding from that last ice age when there was glaciers on it.

00;19;36;07 - 00;19;57;23
Renee Collini
So the land itself is moving up really fast. And even though the water, the sea level there is also rising, the land is rising faster. So they're both going up. But relative to each other, it looks like the water level is going down. But in our area, you can see even across the Gulf, there's a difference in how fast the seas have been rising in in different places.

00;19;57;23 - 00;20;20;06
Renee Collini
So you could go there and look and get a great visual. Another one is if you go to local SLR talk, you can and again, the link will be in the show notes. You can go there and click on a Tide station and turn on your observed projections and it will show you where we're trending based on what we have been doing for the next 30 years, which is really neat.

00;20;20;15 - 00;20;39;26
Hal Needham
That's really helpful because obviously people want to know about their location, right? What's going on in my city, Renay, a lot of times people ask me, why is the land sinking? Why? You know, you explain why in places like Alaska, it's rising. My understanding is that there can be numerous reasons why. Could you touch on a few of those reasons why the land might be thinking?

00;20;39;26 - 00;20;43;23
Hal Needham
And also, is this a natural thing, manmade or some combination of both?

00;20;44;10 - 00;21;01;08
Renee Collini
It's a combination of both. So in some places it's sinking because sediments were deposited and then they're not getting more sediment, so they start to compact. Right. And get closer together. In some places, especially like on the northern Gulf Coast, that isn't like a delta system like Louisiana. So a little bit more in my neck of the woods.

00;21;01;08 - 00;21;19;15
Renee Collini
What happened is if you think about when you sit on a mattress, right, and where your butt is, the mattress goes down. But on either side of you, you get a bulge up. And so when the glaciers and those ice sheets were over the North Atlantic continent while there was sinking in the middle, we were on that bulge of the edge.

00;21;19;15 - 00;21;29;10
Renee Collini
We were pushed up. And so now that the ice has retreated, we're still coming back down from being on that bulge. So that's another reason why you might see land sinking.

00;21;29;22 - 00;21;39;03
Hal Needham
Yeah, the mattress example, when you stand up, the bottom of the bulge goes up, but the surrounding areas to the side go a little bit down. It's all trying to find, I guess, some kind of equilibrium perhaps.

00;21;39;21 - 00;21;58;26
Renee Collini
Yeah. After all that pressure from those giant ice sheets, but the glaciers. But so then the other thing that sort of is more on the manmade side is if we take stuff out of the ground. Right. The ground is full of water, natural gas, oil, all kinds of things are in our land. It's not like it's just solid dirt.

00;21;59;05 - 00;22;17;06
Renee Collini
And when you take out fluids and gas, that leaves open space, which will then compact and compress. And they found again, Louisiana has had some trouble with this as they pull out for agriculture, for oil and gas processes. When they pull stuff out, it causes that subsidence.

00;22;17;06 - 00;22;30;29
Hal Needham
So basically extracting that fluid, whether it's for an industry, drinking water, whatever it is you say like is leaving some space, the ground is basically compacting and sinking and that that accelerates the relative sea level rise basically.

00;22;31;12 - 00;22;32;05
Renee Collini
100%.

00;22;32;15 - 00;22;48;29
Hal Needham
Yeah. Very interesting. Thank you for sharing that. And I think our listeners will be really interested in that and checking out what the relative sea level rise is in their area. So and this is really interesting too, because you talked about how tide gauges have measured this. A lot of these things on NOAA's sea level, trends are really observed.

00;22;48;29 - 00;23;01;03
Hal Needham
And I think sometimes people are surprised to hear as well, this isn't just some gas. A lot of times we do have decades or even more of data showing what's happened leading up to now.

00;23;02;01 - 00;23;29;24
Renee Collini
Yeah, And one of the things that we've seen in recent years is not just that seas are rising. That's been happening and we have clear records that show that, but it's been rising faster recently. And we actually have seen that since the year 2000 to now. There has been about six inches of sea level rise here, like on Dauphin Island and in other parts of the northern Gulf, which is pretty high when you think about how there was almost not quite that much in the past hundred years.

00;23;29;24 - 00;23;40;18
Renee Collini
Right. So in less than 30 years, we've seen almost as much in the past hundred. And so that's what's projected to keep happening, that that continual speeding up of the amount that seas are rising.

00;23;41;00 - 00;23;58;15
Hal Needham
Yeah, And that really is a concern, obviously, as we move to the future. And let's talk a little bit about that. I mean, we know that there are sea level rise projections out there that we've seen the graphs where we have different rates of sea level rise over time. I mean, how do we even wrap our mind around that?

00;23;58;15 - 00;24;04;14
Hal Needham
What do you see when you look at those long term models? How do you interpret them and what should people know about them?

00;24;04;14 - 00;24;25;01
Renee Collini
Yeah, So it's important to keep in mind that even though there's a range, because that's the first thing people notice, they're like, why isn't there just a single number for how much seas are going to rise? Which is a fair question. And so when you look at that range as how much seas will rise as we get farther out in time, that range is wider because the farther out we go in the future, there's more uncertainties and things at play.

00;24;25;01 - 00;24;47;07
Renee Collini
But the way I look at it is that is showcasing the range of what's scientifically possible. So we do know that how much seas rise depends on how much carbon's emitted, but that depends on people's choices. So we've got to account for the range of a reasonable amount of different carbon futures. Right. And we also know that there's natural processes that cause wiggle.

00;24;47;07 - 00;25;04;04
Renee Collini
Nature is not static. And so when you look at that range, you know, like, okay, well, that also includes some of that wiggle in nature. And then we're still learning about how much and how fast some of those glaciers and the ice sheets might melt. And so some of those things could be kind of dramatic and so that's included as well.

00;25;04;04 - 00;25;32;14
Renee Collini
So when I look at it, I see, okay, here's the full range of what could happen from a science perspective. We got this. But I also know that not all of those are equally as likely. You know, there's numbers associated with each of those about how likely they are to be exceeded. And that gives us a good understanding when you combine that with extrapolating or pushing out forward, you know, the observations we've seen and you combine those, it's just different lines of evidence that show roughly where we're headed.

00;25;32;14 - 00;25;44;21
Renee Collini
And we can do a lot with that information, even if we don't know, down to the centimeter or the inch exactly how much these are going to rise. We have a good sense of where we're headed and that gives us some power in terms of how we decide to do things moving forward.

00;25;44;28 - 00;26;06;14
Hal Needham
Yeah, thank you. That's a really good perspective. Like you said, nothing's guaranteed. These are all likely likelihoods moving out into the future. Some things are more certain than others, and maybe that's why we have this range moving out. Rene, I wanted to ask you, as I've travel around, talk to people about coastal flooding, climate change, these different issues, I kind of notice polarizing reactions.

00;26;06;14 - 00;26;21;22
Hal Needham
So I definitely get my one person who's kind of like in panic, We need to retreat from the coast. There's no way I would buy a house in a coastal county or parish. This is our kids are going to have no future kind of thing. And then I've seen people on the other side just say, this is ridiculous.

00;26;21;22 - 00;26;41;25
Hal Needham
It's all propaganda, it's all political. There's I've lived here my whole life and this is this is just all nonsense. Is there a sweet spot in between? Like, how do you think about this? Is there some combination where there is a sense of urgency, there is a sense of danger, but at the same time not panic or total fear or retreat from the coast?

00;26;41;25 - 00;27;01;22
Renee Collini
Yeah, absolutely. There's we need a healthy dose of urgency because we don't do anything fast, like communities and cities and governments are not speedy entities. So you got to think about the reality of it. If you're going to make a change that takes a little bit of time. And also, like I said, we know the seas are rising faster.

00;27;01;22 - 00;27;20;00
Renee Collini
And so that perspective of the person who's lived there forever and they're like, well, yes, it's come up some I don't see those low, low tides as much anymore. You can acknowledge that. Like, yes, you're right. It hasn't been so much a problem in the past, but we're seeing the speed up and come more of a problem. So there's some urgency there to change where we live in how we live.

00;27;20;00 - 00;27;45;09
Renee Collini
But the sky is not falling tomorrow. You know, we we are not going to be at six feet of sea level rise in five years. That's not what we're talking about. And so finding a reasonable way to think about strategically relocating infrastructure that's critical for community service is thinking about building codes and also acknowledging that we're going to have to accommodate the seas being higher.

00;27;45;09 - 00;28;03;24
Renee Collini
And some places that aren't underwater now will just permanently be underwater in the future. We can't build our way out of everything. There's just simply not enough money, dirt or time to make the entire coast higher. I mean, Galveston took a great shot at it in 1900 and that was awesome. But we can't do that to the whole Gulf Coast.

00;28;04;04 - 00;28;34;01
Renee Collini
So we do need to be thinking about it because and this is the point I try and make, is deciding not to do something is a decision. And every day that we wait to decide to do something different, we lose a little bit less agency. We have time now to figure things out. If we get go in and get planning and start taking actions now, then we've got time to make shifts and changes in our communities so that we can preserve our cultures and our way of life and we can do it on our own terms.

00;28;34;09 - 00;28;59;11
Renee Collini
But the longer we wait, the more that Mother Nature is not going to give us a choice. The floods will come, the shoreline will be reshaped, and then we're going to be doing it with a lot more pressure and a lot less time, which usually means you're going to miss things and know really my big thing is if we think about what we want our communities to be, we can start to address historic injustices, you know, inequities within our communities.

00;28;59;11 - 00;29;08;29
Renee Collini
If we really take a big picture as a way of reshaping and rolling back and reframing, we can fix problems of the past as we move into a safer, more resilient future.

00;29;09;09 - 00;29;27;15
Hal Needham
Yeah, that's true. And Rene, how many communities do we see post disaster, right where they end up doing all of these things anyway? But they say, Man, if we had just done this a year or two before, how many billions of dollars could we have saved? Because in the end we're going to have to adapt anyway, right?

00;29;27;15 - 00;30;02;18
Renee Collini
Well, yeah. And then even to to have a plan in place, because we do know we're going to get hurricanes. So if you have a plan in place for what happens after a hurricane, for how you do the rebuilding smarter or in a different place or in a different way, that alone would be a huge step forward. And I will give credit to over in the panhandle, Florida, Mexico City Beach or Mexico Beach, the town, the tiny town that was the very center of Hurricane Michael, they got rocked, but they like a true coastal, resilient community, took that information and saw the damage that occurred and they changed their building codes.

00;30;02;18 - 00;30;20;21
Renee Collini
By February of the next year before most people had even gotten the funding to start rebuilding their homes, they had changed requirements across critical infrastructure, across residential buildings, across where they could build. They made a lot of really smart changes. So that town is building back more resiliently, for sure.

00;30;20;26 - 00;30;34;18
Hal Needham
I see. So if in the future, if another huge hurricane hits, they'll be better prepared. But also just on the sunny day with a 30 to 30 mile an hour onshore wind, they're also going to be more prepared for sea level rise, say, a decade from now.

00;30;35;01 - 00;30;52;08
Renee Collini
Absolute. And that's the thing, too, is we expect homes and businesses to last for a while. So why would you build it to only be resilient for what we're experiencing today? You should be thinking about what does high tide look like 30 years from now? What does storm surge look like 30 years from now and build to those standards?

00;30;52;20 - 00;31;10;05
Hal Needham
Yeah, and Renee, that's one of the things I really wanted to touch with you on this podcast. I just did a two year project in Biloxi, and you and I have had some conversations about sea level rise. I was really impressed by how you really seemed to have a customized perspective depending on who you're talking to. I was very impressed by that.

00;31;10;13 - 00;31;28;05
Hal Needham
A lot of people, it's just one size fits all. Everybody needs to do this thing. You seem to have a conversation with the stakeholder and approach it differently. If you're talking about someone's home versus maybe a wastewater treatment plant, could you walk us through how do you work with a community and customize that approach to coastal flooding and sea level rise?

00;31;28;25 - 00;31;52;18
Renee Collini
Yeah, there's a couple things at play there. One is right off the bat, if we're talking about a wastewater treatment plant, it has to work, you know, And if you think like, oh, allowances will be made if there's a big hurricane, absolutely not. After Katrina, the one of the wastewater treatment authorities had somebody three days later from the state, even though three of their plants had been completely shut down.

00;31;52;24 - 00;32;09;23
Renee Collini
I been they had nothing. They don't have trucks. They didn't have tools. They didn't have chemicals and told them you had better not put wastewater into people's homes, people that are still be able to flush their toilets. So it has to work, which means you don't plan for that the same way you would plan for, say, somebody's house.

00;32;09;23 - 00;32;29;00
Renee Collini
Right. In the worst case scenario, you still need that plant to function, which means and they last longer. Right. So you need to be thinking about we talked about how on those those different projections of how high seas could get, some of those are less likely. The higher ones are less likely to happen. You still want to look at those, even though they're higher because they could happen.

00;32;29;00 - 00;32;44;21
Renee Collini
And if they did, you would not want your plant to be shut down because you're not going to you know, it's 50 years that you want these things to last, right? You don't have an opportunity to go back and change it. So when that case, you really come out thinking about, Right, what is the worst case? What do I need this to work under?

00;32;44;21 - 00;33;01;11
Renee Collini
But if we're talking about somebody's house or about how a community is laid out and designed, you have more space to think about how they live, how they want to live with water, how long you know, what they want their community to look like. And the important thing about extension is it's not up to me to tell you how to live with water.

00;33;01;13 - 00;33;22;06
Renee Collini
There's a community in Biloxi where there's a river community, not even a coastal community, and they know on high water days, their yards and their driveways are going to flood. So everybody knows to watch those gauges. When they see them coming up, they go park their cars on the same high road and then they have these little John boats and they'll just all tie off to the same stop sign.

00;33;22;13 - 00;33;40;27
Renee Collini
So they can go to work. And then when you come back from work, you just walk down the boats to your boat, untie out of the line, tie the person behind you back into the line, and then you john boat on home. And that's totally fine. They they're comfortable. They've got all their stuff is protected. You know, their infrastructure is designed to handle that and they're okay with that extra level of effort.

00;33;41;04 - 00;34;04;09
Renee Collini
Personally, I wouldn't want to do that because I'm very lazy. I, I just want to walk on a dry road. And so the thing there is they took the information. They understand how to live in that space and they made those decisions. And so when you're talking about somebody's house and how long they want to live there and what kind of sea level conditions they want to plan for, it's also important to ask what their values are, why they live in a space, what's important to them.

00;34;04;09 - 00;34;25;09
Renee Collini
So you can know if a conversation is maybe you should think about moving somewhere else. Maybe you should think about elevating. Maybe you're fine and you just want to make sure your house is built out of material you can muck out. There are people like that on Dauphin Island. They have all cinder block house, concrete floor. They hang their furniture up on the hooks when the water is high, muck it out and move on with their life.

00;34;25;09 - 00;34;33;29
Renee Collini
So, you know, really you everybody's relationship with the coast is different. And you need to think about that when you start thinking about how you want to plan for the future.

00;34;34;04 - 00;34;51;06
Hal Needham
Yeah. So it sounds like you're saying some people are very comfortable living with the water. It's their personal choice. They don't mind walking with rubber boots on or taking a john boat out to where their car is parked. So it's like as long as they're making an informed decision and realize that's what life looks like, if that's their personal choice, so be it.

00;34;51;06 - 00;35;11;26
Hal Needham
But it sounds like when you're talking about a wastewater treatment plant, that's something altogether different. You're talking about public health issue for maybe tens of thousands of people in in a neighborhood or a community. So our risk for that, we have to build in an extra buffer like we really can't fail on that as much compared to like someone's camp down the river or something like that.

00;35;11;26 - 00;35;20;06
Hal Needham
That's that's more of their personal choice. Or maybe they're fine living with the water compared to the wastewater treatment plant where we say, no, we need a buffer that cannot flood.

00;35;20;24 - 00;35;44;00
Renee Collini
Yeah, 100%. And I think that that that is absolutely right. But then the other part of the coin is that the thing you said about informed decision is people have an informed decision and they build in a way that is safe, I think is sort of my big push, my big caveat because like if some buildings, if they flood, they have electrical infrastructure that's at risk and that's jeopardizing those people's health.

00;35;44;00 - 00;35;51;20
Renee Collini
That's, you know, that's not building in an informed way. So we need to make sure when we say informed, it really is an informed decision about the risks over time.

00;35;52;17 - 00;36;10;04
Hal Needham
Yeah, for sure. I know. I always think if people are informed, they're usually going to make the best choice for themselves. Their family community. For some reason when we were talking, I got this picture in my head. Sometimes I think of traffic because like we see traffic every day, floods we don't see every day. I had this picture in my head.

00;36;10;11 - 00;36;28;09
Hal Needham
If you were go into your friend's house for a barbecue, you might you to be there 5 minutes early, right? If you get caught in 10 minutes of traffic and you're few minutes late, no big deal. What if you were going to your dream job interview? You've waited decades to have this moment. You're probably not going to aim to get there 5 minutes early, right?

00;36;28;09 - 00;36;45;05
Hal Needham
You're going to like, be like, well, I'm going to get there 45 minutes early or something, just in case everything goes wrong. Right. You're you're saying, I know it's really low probability that I'm going to be 15, 20 minutes late. There'd have to be a car wreck or a tree over the road. But if that does happen, this you know, this is my dream job.

00;36;45;06 - 00;37;01;26
Hal Needham
I've been waiting 20 years for this moment. You're probably going to build in more buffer, right? Because it's so important. Like you cannot be late for that interview, but for your friend's barbecue, not a big deal. For some reason. I have that picture in my head when we were talking about a treatment plant versus a house. It's like that treatment plant.

00;37;01;26 - 00;37;05;16
Hal Needham
Maybe we do build in a bigger buffer because it cannot flood, right?

00;37;05;26 - 00;37;26;19
Renee Collini
Yeah. And I think that's a great analogy and it makes me laugh that you say that because the other day I got stuck on I-10, which isn't uncommon, but this part was I actually up parked, did not move for 3 hours on I-10. I was unlucky enough that I was between two exits, the requisite the exit in front of me.

00;37;26;19 - 00;37;33;15
Renee Collini
I passed the exit behind me and they're doing construction there. So there were concrete barriers lining both sides.

00;37;33;17 - 00;37;34;20
Hal Needham
You couldn't go anywhere.

00;37;34;23 - 00;37;46;28
Renee Collini
There was nowhere to go. There was no using a median to turn around. There was no traveling that no, there was nothing because the wreck in front of me was something like 20 plus cars. So I literally just had to park on the interstate.

00;37;46;28 - 00;37;56;02
Hal Needham
And this is a super rare this might be, what, a ten year traffic jam for you. I mean, how often in your decades of driving in this area have you encountered something like that.

00;37;56;09 - 00;38;11;16
Renee Collini
One other time more than ten years ago, and it was Halloween night, the same thing, right? It was it was like two in the morning. And I had parked my truck and took a nap until the semis next to me turn back on. I was like, okay, it's time for us to go. But you're right. It's it's really rare.

00;38;11;23 - 00;38;15;07
Renee Collini
It's unlikely to happen. But it did happen.

00;38;15;07 - 00;38;24;23
Hal Needham
You know, Rene, the the only silver lining I see in that story is that you are not going to your dream job interview because you're working your dream job already.

00;38;24;23 - 00;38;26;20
Renee Collini
It's true. I do love this job.

00;38;27;20 - 00;38;44;22
Hal Needham
No, I think you're in a perfect position. You do such a good job interacting with such a wide range of people. You know, and you really know the science well, but then you communicate it so well with I mean, with professionals, with the public. It's just. I'm so glad that you're in that position, in that place or now.

00;38;44;22 - 00;39;05;12
Hal Needham
I wanted to ask you also, just when we think about adaptations, a lot of people think about raising houses, getting things up higher. What are other creative adaptations? I mean, are there things we should think about with drainage, with floating houses, with barriers? I mean, how do people even wrap their head around this if they're new to the Golf Coast and they're like, What can I do?

00;39;05;12 - 00;39;08;24
Hal Needham
Or what can my community do to better prepare and adapt to sea level rise?

00;39;09;05 - 00;39;29;00
Renee Collini
Yeah, there's a couple things for adapting. One is, again, if you're inland or even not if you're inland, but you know, if you're in a coastal neighborhood, keep in mind that that storm water, especially in the northern Gulf Coast, are rainwater. Our storm water not draining is our big problem right now. That is our canary in the coal mine, if you will, for storm for a sea level rise.

00;39;29;00 - 00;39;48;25
Renee Collini
And so even things like rain gardens, rain barrels and little bit, you can help to reduce the amount of water going into the system. And you know, everyone thinks like, oh, what's the one rain garden I have going to do? But that's what we said about what's my one driveway going to do? And now all the driveways are helping to funnel water right into the system.

00;39;48;25 - 00;40;10;15
Renee Collini
So it's sort of like if we're death by a thousand cuts with development, how about a thousand Band-Aids with using those rain garden? So I know it sounds simplistic, but thinking about ways to keep rainwater, that's a that's a big one for the short term for sure. Another thing to think about is, like I said, we're going to have to get creative with rolling some things back.

00;40;10;21 - 00;40;30;07
Renee Collini
Some areas will have become underwater or part of this sort of tidal frame. But that doesn't mean that it's going to be underwater tomorrow. And it also doesn't mean it will be underwater 100% of the time, even the next 5 to 10 years. So we can take spaces like that that are more vulnerable and so vulnerable. It doesn't make sense to put homes or critical infrastructure there.

00;40;30;07 - 00;40;48;26
Renee Collini
But we could put parks there, we could put parking garages. We can make it so that it's designed to not just hold water that would come up there, but also maybe hold some rainwater. Right. Or we can use those bay pieces with green infrastructure or other types of things to help bring that water in. So that's something to think about.

00;40;48;26 - 00;41;11;16
Renee Collini
Elevating is good, but keep in mind, elevating might keep your house safe. But if your roads and your power and your sewer aren't safe, there's some disconnect there. So elevating is definitely a great strategy in the near term to keeping your personal damages down. But you also got to think about your whole community and the services being provided and how we're rolling things back or changing things up to keep them safe.

00;41;12;25 - 00;41;30;02
Renee Collini
One big thing is if you're in the coastal area and you're on septic, you might look to see if there's an opportunity to move on to public sewer. That's another big one, because as the groundwater comes up, as sea levels push on it, that is actually one of our big things in our rural areas across the Gulf Coast is.

00;41;30;02 - 00;41;50;02
Renee Collini
There are a lot of septic tanks that are now vulnerable and not working very well. And so there are opportunities, grants and just general more infrastructure that you can tap into your public wastewater. So that way you're not contributing to poor health or poor water quality as sees rise. It's a complex issue, Renee.

00;41;50;09 - 00;41;59;15
Hal Needham
These rural homes that are having septic problems, is it saltwater coming into the water or just is it a pollution cleanliness issue? What's the issue?

00;41;59;26 - 00;42;23;09
Renee Collini
It's twofold. In some cases, it actually is the saltwater itself. So either high tide flooding coming over the land, but also if you think about your groundwater table, it's being pushed on all the time by the saltwater lens. And so as that saltwater lens pushes inland, that pushes your groundwater table higher and septic tanks work if they have good dry land to absorb the wastewater and process it.

00;42;23;09 - 00;42;37;04
Renee Collini
But if that groundwater table is in your septic field, then it's not going to process. It'll stay soggy. It it actually will leach those those things from the wastewater into the groundwater, and then it starts to spread and cause problems.

00;42;37;12 - 00;42;43;00
Hal Needham
I would imagine this could also reduce the capacity of a septic thing if it's filling up that field with fluid.

00;42;43;07 - 00;42;43;19
Renee Collini
Yes.

00;42;44;03 - 00;42;48;27
Hal Needham
What about a have you come across people with wells and drinking water as well?

00;42;48;27 - 00;43;08;14
Renee Collini
Yeah, They've shown, for example, the south water, the South Florida Water Management District has demonstrated increasingly over time their drinking water are becoming more and more saline. And so that we don't have data necessarily for everywhere. We are seeing that trend across the Gulf where we have data.

00;43;08;26 - 00;43;27;04
Hal Needham
Yeah, really interesting, Renee, something that I'm really getting from this podcast. When people think sea level rise, they may just be thinking about literally like, okay, I'm looking at the Gulf of Mexico. All of a sudden it's going up higher and inundating the beach and eventually homes. There are all of these complex, I would say complex and hidden issues, right?

00;43;27;04 - 00;43;43;13
Hal Needham
People may not be thinking, I live three miles from the saltwater, but when it rains, it doesn't drain as much. Or this could affect my septic, my well, my all these different things or you even mentioned someone may be high and dry, but all of a sudden they're a transportation route to work or to the hospital is underwater.

00;43;43;13 - 00;43;47;17
Hal Needham
So it's quite a bit more complex than people may realize.

00;43;47;17 - 00;43;48;24
Renee Collini
Yeah, definitely.

00;43;48;28 - 00;43;54;06
Hal Needham
Renee, any last thoughts or any last perspectives you'd want to share with listeners that are interested in this topic?

00;43;55;14 - 00;44;16;28
Renee Collini
I think the important thing keep in mind, I'll just reiterate, is that we know in the Gulf Coast in particular, well, we expect to see another foot, at least on top of the half a foot We've already in the next 30 years, we expect seas to be somewhere between a foot and a half to two feet higher here in the northern Gulf by 2050, which sounds like it's far away.

00;44;16;28 - 00;44;41;08
Renee Collini
It's not. Your 1990 is farther away than 2015, which always blows my mind. But talking about sea level rise, helping your community know that you're on board, communicating with your municipal officials so that they know that you're interested, that is one of the best things you can do for these topics, right? It's it's not a surprise hurricane. It's not something coming out of the blue.

00;44;41;08 - 00;44;56;21
Renee Collini
This is something we're observing, we know is coming, which means we have the unique opportunity be prepared. We can prepare for hurricanes in three days. We can prepare for this coming, too. It's just a matter of working together, having the tough conversations and moving.

00;44;56;21 - 00;45;16;22
Hal Needham
Yeah, Renee, awesome perspective there. That's a message of hope, too, that people can do something in their community. A lot of these I think a lot of community leaders are of this. They're seeing the sunny day flooding. They're seeing a lot of drainage and infrastructure issues. I've been surprised. Virtually every community I go to, the leaders are aware of it, want to do something about it.

00;45;17;00 - 00;45;34;25
Hal Needham
It sounds like you're saying that people in that community can can reach out to the community leaders or just start to talk about these things, start meet and share what they're seeing and maybe come together, can maybe give us some action points that people can take and maybe have a little more hope as they move forward.

00;45;35;26 - 00;45;50;27
Renee Collini
Absolutely. Hal. And one thing to you all, there's there's always going to be priorities. So if you're not speaking up and telling those municipal officials that this is a priority for you, they're going to focus on the other things that people are saying or a priority. So there you go. Picking up is one of them.

00;45;51;01 - 00;46;11;09
Hal Needham
Yeah, that's true. I mean, a elected official, right? They're worried about crime, education. There are so many different things. If we're not vocal, it won't get attention. Renee, one last thing I wanted to bring up. Just as we're talking about it, you mentioned a foot of sea level rise by mid-century. Sometimes people go to the beach. And if you think about a foot of water rising, it may not seem like that big of a deal.

00;46;11;18 - 00;46;33;19
Hal Needham
But also and I'm curious for your perspective on this, I've come to see people need to be thinking on that storm day that happens every three months, every six months. They think of those high water days in your community from a heavy rain or from a heavy rain with an onshore wind. Those days where you see ponding of water in your community, you're adding a foot or even more.

00;46;33;19 - 00;46;50;21
Hal Needham
Right? Because all of a sudden, even more of that fresh water will be damned from draining. So it's I think sometimes when people just see a sunny day, the water seems far away, the beach seems a foot doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But think of adding those inches and feet to our storm days. It starts to look a little different.

00;46;51;29 - 00;47;10;03
Renee Collini
It absolutely does. And one of the things, too, is not just like what those storms that happen that frequently how they look different, but how much more frequent that sort of minor flooding will become. It starts to erode. I mean, saltwater is a corrosive. It impacts our infrastructure, it gets in places and does things we don't want it to do.

00;47;10;03 - 00;47;35;16
Renee Collini
And so not only will we see the storms that happen, the flooding, the ponding that happens every three months look a lot worse. We'll have that kind of ponding and that sort of irritating nuisance flooding happening sometimes monthly. We expect to see with that one foot, one and a half feet of sea level rise, we expect that what is today just a moderate flood and how often we get moderate floods to actually be the same as a I'm sorry, a minor flooding.

00;47;35;16 - 00;47;45;24
Renee Collini
How often we get minor floods, We expect that to be the level of a moderate flood where it's starting to really cause damage, whereas right now it's just irritating. It will be fully causing damage by 2050.

00;47;45;28 - 00;48;02;17
Hal Needham
That's true. And that's not only damage to infrastructure and buildings, but think of all these cars driving through saltwater. I mean, you could do that once and it's maybe not a big deal, but if you're driving through salt water several days a month, that's going to really affect the life of your vehicle. So there's a lot of impacts that people may not be thinking about.

00;48;03;02 - 00;48;18;07
Renee Collini
Residents of Monroe County, which are the keys, actually, they were having a county commission meeting and they talked about that explicitly, that they're having to replace cars, you know, on an order of every few years instead of I mean, my truck's 15 years old. They could not do that there.

00;48;19;06 - 00;48;34;26
Hal Needham
Yeah, for sure. I know we have residents here in that are saying, wow, we're driving through saltwater at least every month and they're concerned about it as well. I also heard of this crazy storm chasing guy. I don't know what his name was. It might have been Hurricane something. And he drove through so much saltwater that one time his car actually just fell apart.

00;48;34;26 - 00;48;56;18
Hal Needham
But we won't talk too much about that guy. Renee. I haven't admitted this to many people for a couple of years. My storm chasing plan and I shouldn't admit this because it's terrible. My storm chasing plan was to drive through enough freshwater to wash off all the saltwater, and I would highly advise our younger scientists and listeners not to do that because eventually your car will disintegrate and fall to pieces like minded.

00;48;56;18 - 00;49;14;20
Hal Needham
So, Renee, I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast and I'm excited for people to follow up with you afterwards. You're so good at engaging with folks, but thank you for helping us think correctly about sea level rise. It's a topic that many people think is in the distant future, but sounds like you're saying it's here and now, and there are some things that we can do right now to prepare for it.

00;49;15;08 - 00;49;33;11
Renee Collini
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. How this has been a lot of fun and and my contact information will be in the show notes. So if y'all have questions, please reach out. We have everything from resilience specialist, education specialist for teachers and teacher in the classroom, and also for people working on Habitat. We have that, too.

00;49;33;11 - 00;49;51;05
Hal Needham
So thanks, Renee. I really appreciate it. Your expertise is helping so many people. And I know I reached out to you a couple of times a year, just like what's the sea level rise rate for this place? So you're always very, very gracious and always provide whatever we need. So just appreciate working with you and I'm excited to hear this podcast episode.

00;49;52;01 - 00;49;55;08
Renee Collini
Thanks. Thanks y'all.

00;49;55;08 - 00;50;20;15
Hal Needham
While we covered a lot of topics on this week's podcast, we want to maximize our time and definitely seize the day. Just a little sea level rise Pun there for you. Renee covered a lot of information in this podcast. Here are a few of the major points that stood out to me. She explained that sea levels are rising in a warmer climate from both thermal expansion of warmer water and increased water volume from melting land based ice.

00;50;20;25 - 00;50;46;07
Hal Needham
She also mentioned that localized land motion creates different rates of sea level rise depending where you are. Sometimes climate experts refer to this as relative sea level rise. And number two, Renee mentioned that sea level rise can impact you even if you're not living right on the coast. Rising seas, bays and harbors reduce the efficiency of gravity powered rainfall, drainage, backing up water even many miles from the coast during heavy rain events.

00;50;46;16 - 00;51;13;10
Hal Needham
We're already seeing this along the Gulf Coast. Number three, Renee uses a customized message depending on what project working on. She said she'll take a different approach when helping a stakeholder plan for protecting a large facility like a wastewater treatment plant compared to a homeowner. In the case of infrastructure, we need to build a larger buffer to account for those those low probability, higher magnitude events that are very rare but catastrophic.

00;51;13;10 - 00;51;35;29
Hal Needham
Number four, Renee, left us with a message of hope. We still have time to adapt to sea level rise, and many options are out there for things that we can do to mitigate against rising seas. These range from community infrastructure projects to personal projects like elevating homes and even installing rain gardens that collect rainwater and reduce the amount of rain that needs to drain through the system during heavy downpours.

00;51;35;29 - 00;51;57;06
Hal Needham
I realize this, I think it was about two years ago. I was walking through downtown Galveston during a very heavy rain and all these gutters were just pushing all this drainage out into the streets. And I realized, wait, you know, we could capture these on the rooftops, for example, a rooftop garden or a cistern and release that 12 hours later or use it for a rooftop garden.

00;51;57;12 - 00;52;17;29
Hal Needham
You're really reducing the amount of runoff that's going into the system. So that's what Renee talked about. And I think that could really help us, especially in the southeastern states and along the Gulf Coast. Renee shared several resources with us. She mentioned that we can search for NOAA. That's NOAA sea level trends to see the history of sea level changes in our community.

00;52;18;08 - 00;52;40;11
Hal Needham
Noah also has many Web tools that provide perspectives into the future, like Noah's Sea level Rise viewer that you can find on a Web search. Thank you, Renee, for coming on the podcast. We're excited to follow your career as you continue to help people for rising seas and coastal hazards in the future. I like that you're finding the sweet spot where there is some sense of urgency in your message, but also not panic.

00;52;40;16 - 00;53;02;04
Hal Needham
You're helping people realize that there is time if they take action now. Special thanks to the Go Track production and marketing team. I wanted to give a special shout out this year, this week to Jeremiah along video producer with CMT Catastrophe and National Claims. Jeremiah brings together the audio magic in this podcast, editing clips, adding music and making the show sound very professional.

00;53;02;04 - 00;53;21;07
Hal Needham
We really appreciate your work, Jeremiah. It just keeps getting better and better each week. Special thanks to our listeners for everyone for following and supporting the show. We love to hear from you. Give us a shout out. You can go to our Facebook group on social media called Go Track the Community. We'd love to hear your perspective on these shows and maybe some suggestions for future topics.

00;53;21;16 - 00;53;28;01
Hal Needham
This is Dr. House signing off until the next episode of the GEO Track podcast.

‍