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The San Antonio Festival
The inaugural San Antonio Festival takes places today from 10am to 5pm on Paseo de San Antonio between 1st and 2nd Street in Downtown San Jose. This is a key corridor that connects San Jose State ...
Santa Clara County Republican Party
Listed under: Elections & Politics
By 2100, as sea levels potentially rise 3 to 7 feet in the Bay Area, the low-lying town of Alviso will struggle to stay above water.
Sundry Photography Shutterstock.com
Recently, the California State Legislative Analyst offered a nightmare prediction of Bay Area sea levels in 2100: they may rise 3 to 7 feet. Metroactive’s Katie Lauer researches the effect this rise would have on tiny Alviso (population 2,000), where San Jose’s First Street hits San Francisco Bay. Thanks to groundwater pumping, this waterfront town has already sunk to -15 feet below sea level.
Repairing the currently unsafe levees will cost more than $500 million, and the price of shipping the necessary dirt out to fix these barricades makes for dismaying math: “an estimated 477 million cubic yards of mud and dirt are needed for the South Bay’s levees to stay above rising water levels within the next century. That’s the equivalent load of up to 48 million dump trucks loaded with dirt.”
Federal and local funds are paying for the beginning of this work. But meanwhile, Google, Cisco, and other high-tech businesses are building on the banks of the Guadalupe Creek, which drains into the Bay. Lauer quotes Anne Guerry of Stanford’s Natural Capital Project: “I just feel like there’s a train wreck coming ... I think that we have to show less hubris about where we develop and how much control we have over the environment around us.”
Read more on SanJoseInside.com: “A Large Gulp to Swallow.”
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