CT - With Connecticut shoreline flooding rising, officials turn to natural mitigation
High water, high anxiety This summer has made it clear that flooding is one of the greatest risks the Northeast faces from climate change. Warm air and oceans, along with sea level rise, mean more intense storms and floods — this summer, the summer of 2021 and likely summers in the future.
Climate scientists say this, as do Connecticut officials and others around the state who have been doing more to deal with flooding than may be apparent.
This is the second of a four-part CT Mirror series examining the impact of flooding on communities. In the first story, we looked at how regulations are changing to deal with more water. Today, how flooding affects the shoreline. In upcoming stories, we will look at ways as inland areas are coping with floodwaters and resources for communities that can’t do it on their own.
It’s fitting that Paul Woodworth is tramping through rain and wind on a stormy September morning. That’s because what he wants to point out has everything to do with the effects of the weather on an otherwise scenic strip of beach in Guilford where the West River empties into Long Island Sound.
And indeed, as a lone great white heron stands guard — feet in the muck — it’s clear that water from the Sound has overrun marsh grass, sand and anything else in its way.
Woodworth points to a chunk of salt marsh that has broken off and is just lying at the edge of the shoreline.
“It’s just displaced and thrown up on the beach,” said Woodworth, who is the new ecological restoration senior project manager at Save the Sound, a New Haven-based environmental nonprofit.
Salt marsh is nature’s sponge. It soaks up water however it arrives. A marsh, left to its own devices, moves landward as water becomes too much of a constant for the marsh to survive where it is. That’s if there’s actually someplace it can move. Houses, roads and other kinds of infrastructure can block that movement and wind up flooded as a result.
This piece of land, known as the Chittenden area, has been taking a beating for more than a century. The salt marsh and land have eroded as rising sea levels, waves and storms pummel it from the Long Island Sound side and precipitation-fed floods overrun it from the other direction. The area does have roads and homes and other amenities of human habitation, so the marsh has gotten smaller, and flooding is worse.
