 We have two speakers, my partners from Rhode Island Sea Grant and the Coastal Resources Center. So I'm going to introduce both of them, then they'll each go for about 45 minutes, and then we are going to have time for Q&A at the end of that. And we'll set them up here as a panel, we'll bring Grover back up, so please feel free to start jotting your questions down for all three of those speakers. So our first speaker, who we'll be talking to you about the storm tools, is Theresa Creen. She is a coastal community planner at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography's Coastal Resources Center and Rhode Island Sea Grant. Theresa facilitates municipal-scale projects and addresses coastal adaptation to climate change and sea level rise. Her work involves evaluating spatial data to identify challenges and opportunities with municipal stakeholders, while collaboratively considering policies and projects that may increase coastal resiliency. Prior to joining URI, Theresa worked for non-profit regional planning commissions and in the private sector for planning and design firms. She earned her Master of Landscape Architecture from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse and has a BS in Environmental Policy and Natural Resource Management from the University of Michigan. After Theresa, we'll hear from Pam Rubinoff. She is a Coastal Management Extension Specialist at the University of Rhode Island's Coastal Resources Center and Rhode Island Sea Grant. Since she joined URI in 1996, she's worked with both U.S.-based Rhode Island initiatives and international development programs. Her focus has been on building resilient coastal communities through technical assistance, vision support tools, policy creation, interdisciplinary collaboration, training, and outreach. Her work contributes to climate change impacts and adaptations to both the built and the natural environments. Her current efforts in Rhode Island focus on developing green infrastructure options for communities, assessing risks for waterfront businesses, and sharing good practices for adaptation action. Her work builds upon her degrees in civil engineering and marine policy, and her broad experience working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management Program, and the Peace Corps in Thailand. So Theresa Creen, I'll hand it over to you. I just wanted to, before I get into the meat of storm tools, I wanted just to share with everybody the BeachSamp website. This is the Shoreline Change Special Area Management Plan website that kind of captures everything that Grover talked about this morning into one place online. And what we've been doing is really working with CRMC and other partners to compile tools for use for different types of audiences, whether they are municipal government staffers, waterfront businesses, coastal property owners, and we've been working to provide these tools on the BeachSamp website and also other resources from like the U.S. Climate Change Toolkit, Climate Central, there are some other really good climate adaptation-related websites nationally that we're making sure that we're again bringing the best available science and resources to the people of Rhode Island, the cities and towns, and the residents of Rhode Island. So this is running live right now, and so I just wanted to show you all just a quick overview of where to find some of these resources and tools. But before we do have a stakeholder meeting, so if you're not on the BeachSamp stakeholder listserv, we encourage you to, if you're willing, we can use the sign-in sheet from today and add you all to the BeachSamp listserv so you can stay up on what's going on with the BeachSamp statewide. We do have videos from past events on the website so you can get on and see what we've talked about. We had a whole session on seawalls. We had a coastal engineer from the south come up and talk to us. We screened the movie short up. You haven't seen that film. It's a really good film that captures what happened with the Carolinas and with New Jersey during Sandy. So we're trying to sort of do these events, these stakeholder meetings every few months to engage the public, continue to communicate this complex issue with different stakeholders. What I'm going to focus on in this talk is storm tools. And I'm going to go to some canned slides in a minute with some screen shots and we can have the opportunity to run it live and do a live drive if you want at the end of the talk, of the presentation. You guys can yell out addresses. We can zoom in to different addresses from around the state and just show you how the tool works. I also want to encourage you, if you have a laptop, if you have a tablet, if you have a smartphone, feel free to get it out and use it. I will not be offended. We want people to learn how to use this tool. I'm also available during lunch if anybody has any questions about actually using it. So before I get into the slides, real quick, just to get into storm tools, we have resources and tools button here on the screen. And if you just go to understand risk, it takes you to the understand risk page and we have storm tools. We have the SLAM maps that Grover talked about and we also have a link to the shoreline change maps that are on CRMC's website. Under that same resources and tools, we have a category called plan and act. And here we have tools that have been developed for municipalities. We have the model process that Grover talked about for municipalities. We recorded a webinar. Chelsea Seaford is here from statewide planning and I recorded a webinar. We had about 40 people on the webinar. Some of you I know are in the room that participated. And so the video of that webinar is available online for anybody to take a look at. We have the North King's Town pilot project report and we also have a link to the US climate resilience toolkit. So again, thinking about resources for municipalities. And then we also have some resources for waterfront and coastal businesses that Grover mentioned. We have a proceedings document from a conference that happened last year at Salve Regina focusing on waterfront business resilience. We have a catalog of adaptation strategies for waterfront businesses. And then a summary of what we call the NRAT, the New Port Resilience Assessment Tour, that looked at a couple of waterfront, water dependent businesses in the city of Newport and worked closely with those businesses to figure out what types of strategies would be feasible for them as they develop their capital improvement programs. Pam's going to talk to you about the Rhode Island coastal property guide. So the third category is for residents and coastal property owners. Pam will talk about the coastal property guide. And then we have a fact sheet on here as well. So I just wanted to acquaint you guys with the website. We're continually updating this. We have news feeds. And so this is sort of our go-to. If you click over here on the management plan, this is where Grover mentioned you are bringing all of this together into a traditional SAMP document. So as chapters or sections of that SAMP are available, they'll be posted under the management plan link. OK, so that's a quick overview of the website. Let me shoot over to my slide deck. OK, so I'm going to introduce you all to storm tools. And this is a set of maps, an online map viewer, that have been developed for use at the local level, the state level, is specific to Rhode Island. It uses the latest and greatest LiDAR digital elevation models that we acquired from the Army Corps of Engineers to provide the most accurate depiction of future flooding risk that we have access to for the state of Rhode Island. This is meant to help our decision makers local and state with day-to-day operations, and also think about long-term planning and financing for future capital investment. Grover already showed you this slide. We've been really working to figure out how to package this stuff and deliver it to municipalities to get different departments to start talking about what understanding risk and also what's feasible in terms of implementation, how to get the ball rolling on some implementation projects. So we've captured a lot of these tool and what these memos that we've put out to municipalities, and are constantly trying to get feedback from the municipalities on what types of resources they need to better keep up with this complex topic. So I already showed you the website. On the storm tools site, let me get my green laser printer here, if you click on understand risk and then storm tools, it takes you to this site, and there's a link here for storm tools for beginners, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And there's also a step-by-step quick guide for accessing storm tools mapping. So there's a 16-slide presentation embedded in this site. I also have a couple of handbooks left over here on using storm tools. If you want to pick up a copy of this, I'll leave them up here on the table, and you're welcome to take this if you want to play with it at home or later today. All right. OK. There's also a link on the site of the science behind storm tools. If you want to get into all the detailed engineering, modeling, science behind how all of these maps were created, we have that information available for you too. But I'm not going to focus on that level of detail today. I'm going to focus more on the applications and the outputs of the tool. So this is what storm tools looks like. It does use ArcGIS.com, which is a cloud-based platform. And the decision to use ArcGIS.com was made by the Environmental Data Center at the University of Rhode Island, because it's a way for us to use technology that's already in place and allow us to import coverages or shapefiles from RIGIS and also be able to allow the flexibility to bring in whatever kind of data that we have out there that is specific to what your needs are to answer a certain question. ArcGIS.com allows us to tailor it to our own needs. So I'm going to show you how the beach-samp team has started to tailor storm tools to answer some of the questions that we've come up with or we've been hearing for understanding risk. And then I'll show you also how you can do that on your own. It's free. There's no, you don't have to have a login setup, login and password. But if you do a free login password, it allows you to save your work. So you can go back in with your own account. And if you pulled in different data sets and pulled them all together, you won't lose that work. So you can go back and use that. You can share it with your planning boards. You can share it with other people that you're talking to about this topic. So what we're showing here is a screenshot of Warwick. And this is, again, what the interface looks like for storm tools in ArcGIS.com. And what we've done here is we've looked at a 25 year return storm event. And that is similar to what we saw in westerly during Sandy. But I'm showing a 25 year, if we got the westerly version of Sandy up in Warwick, this is what the water levels would look like. So breaking them down, the colors, we have this lightest blue represents storm surge. And then sea level rise on top of that is represented by the yellow and then the darker blues that go to lighter blues here. So there's a separation between the base flood level and then the sea level rise scenarios. We've also pulled in Rhode Island critical infrastructure. So we have police, fire, emergency medical service, law enforcement, that's police, schools, state facilities. There's also a layer for dams if you want to look at dams. But this tool really focuses on coastal flooding. We do have the FEMA flood maps on here as well that you can turn on and off to that actually covers the whole state if you want to look at inland flooding. But the storm tools right now is really focused on the coastal environment. So what we've learned from this in looking at some of these maps is there are some areas that really have emerged as areas of concern. One is Warwick Neck and we saw here that during a 25 year return event, there is a potential barrier of stormwater across this area separating Warwick Neck from the mainland. And so this is a concern or a flag and grover went and met with the public works guys early on when storm tools was first on the street just to kind of get their sense of what they would use this for. And so this could possibly be flagged. This could be used to say, OK, we need to stage emergency response equipment on Warwick Neck during when a hurricane is coming up the coast because this emergency service facility here may not be able to cross this swath of water onto Warwick Neck during a storm event. Storm tools also allows you to get full attribute information when you pull in these layers. So this emergency service, the critical infrastructure layer, if you click on that ambulance, you get the details of that. You get the whole attribute table associated with that point. So this is work fire station number four. It has a phone number, the address. And that information is available for all of these points schools and police stations as well. Storm tools also allows you to look at water depth. And this is probably one of the most powerful features of the tool that if you turn on, in this case I turned on, the 100 year storm event water depth and the Rhode Island critical infrastructure layer, we look at that same ambulance and the depth of water is estimated to be 1.19 feet at that point. So again, it's being able to model these different scenarios and think about operationally how a municipality might have to deal with providing service to the municipality under these storm conditions. This is zooming in to that fire station in Warwick Neck and I turned on the 10 year nuisance flood. We learned from talking to the Rhode Island EMA that nuisance, the 10 year storm return is what emergency responders plan for with nuisance flooding. So we also have a 10 year storm layer and when I turned that on in this same area, I can see that that 10 year storm, which is what Sandy was about roughly up in the bay, comes right up to these roadways here. Under a 100 year storm return event, which would be a similar to a 1938 hurricane, this road is completely flooded out as same with the 25 year that I just showed you. So again, what happens with this, with the emergency services from that facility can be, you can consider that with this new information. So this is available for the entire state of Rhode Island. This is just showing another example from Narragansett. So they have an emergency service facility and fire station near Narragansett Pier in the beach. And it's interesting to see the patterns of how water is behaving across the landscape. In this case, we have the surge envelope under a 100 year storm. This is the boundary of that light blue. But where water is getting into that fire station is actually through a roadway here inland. And then the yellow is the one foot of sea level rise. So if you have a moon tide or a lunar high tide, spring tide, king tide, whatever you choose to call it, this one foot sea level rise scenario matches up pretty well with what we see during a moon tide. If we have a 100 year storm event at that same time, you're going to have water in this area. When the maps were originally created, it was actually right before Sandy hit. So we were able to go out and look at the rack line in some areas of the state to see how it matched up with these coverages. And it actually matches up pretty well. So it was fortunate that Sandy hit what it did for the purposes of looking at this tool and field verifying that the coverages match up. There's a project going on at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management to look at the 19 wastewater treatment facilities in the state. And so storm tools is also being used to look at the vulnerability or exposure of these wastewater treatment facilities to storm surge. So here we have the 100 year storm event. And this is hot off the press. We just added seven feet of sea level rise. As Grover mentioned, the NOAA projection of 2100 is about six and a half to 6.8 feet of sea level rise. So we added, the mappers added seven feet of sea level rise to show what that looks like across the landscape. So this is the water depth layer at the Scarborough Beach or Narragansett wastewater treatment facility. We're also able to use storm tools. One of the cool things about it is you can actually change your base map. So there's a little button up here that says base map. And you can change it. You can see in the last slide, I used the aerial photograph. And in this one, I changed it to the street map. So you can tailor it to however you like to look at this information. We wanted to look at the Barrington-Warren Bristol area. It has a lot of blue around it in these different sea level and storm scenarios. So we wanted to look at the evacuation routes through here. And we turn on the water depth layer and the end of this bridge is about 12 feet under a worst case scenario, a 100 year storm event plus five feet of sea level rise. We have 12 feet of storm water at the end of that bridge in this area here. And we are able to pull in, like I said, other state data layers. So RIGIS has our emergency 911 data set and we pulled in the statewide roads layer for E911. I'll also show you the point, E911 address structures layer as well. So we're able to pull that in to storm tools and what's really great is again, you can click on these features and you get a pop-up box that tells you what it is. So we click on that road, this is Wampanoag Trail and then we can also click on that same, it's actually, if you click on that road, you can see this is screen one of three. If you click on this little arrow here, it'll just scroll through all the layers underneath that point you clicked on. So this is sheet number one that tells you Wampanoag Trail. Sheet number three, I can't remember what two was, tells you the depth of water at that point is estimated to be over six feet under a 25-year storm event plus five feet of sea level rise. This is actually, this is plus one foot of sea level rise. So when we started road testing this, we launched it about a year ago and since then we've definitely, this beach-tamp team has, we wanted to focus on getting input and feedback from the municipalities and understanding how we can do continuous improvement with this tool to make sure that it's usable, user-friendly, usable and also tailorable to the needs of the municipality. But we also road tested it at a couple of public events, one being the Volvo Ocean Race and most people who stopped by the Volvo Ocean Race wanted to know where's my property, is it gonna be wet, what does sea level rise look like and just let's just keep it simple. So we created storm tools for beginners as a quick link that people can go on and do two things, enter your address and then answer one of four questions that then you can just get your quick answer. Are you in the flood zone or are you out of the flood zone? Is sea level rise gonna affect you in the future or not? So I'm gonna walk through quickly what that looks like. So I chose, since we have been doing so much work in North Kingstown, 55 Brown Street is the location of the Town Hall Annex in North Kingstown and so the first question is, is my property vulnerable to storm surge during a 100 year coastal storm, a 38 hurricane and Wickford has a historical marker on Brown Street right downtown Wickford so it's a nice way to sort of compare this information to that historical marker on the ground. So 55 Brown Street is going to be wet during a 100 year storm. How deep will the water be during a 100 year coastal storm on my property? 55 Brown Street looks like about 4.9 feet at that point. The historical marker showing the 1938 hurricane is right here and it's about waist, yeah, it's about waist high if you're standing next to that building. So it matches up pretty well with that 4.9 foot number relative to where you're standing on Brown Street. And this is will future sea level rise affect my property with two tides a day every day and when we've been messaging this we've been very careful to clarify between storm surge events which come in with a lot of energy churn out the landscape and then retreat versus sea level rise two tides a day every day at a higher level than we're seeing now. So the new normal in the future. And Grover showed you the graphs and the projections from NOAA on that. So under that two tides a day every day the five foot, this goes from one foot in yellow up to five feet in that lightest blue. 55 Brown Street is right on the edge of that five foot, two tides a day every day marker. But you can see some of the areas around Wickford Village across West Main Street here, across Phillips Street here. There are two potential future barriers from state roads both are evacuation routes into and out of Wickford Village. So that's something that the town is gonna have to and state DOT is gonna have to come to terms with in the future. So these are the kinds of issues and questions that storm tools is helping us identify and initiate conversations in the municipalities and around the state. So I pulled these screenshots last night just to come a little more local to Bristol where we are now, I clicked on, we have the E911 address structures database, the emergency 911 database. And actually it's really nice because it's laid out with a nice key that tells you if it's residential, commercial, utility, public service, industrial, et cetera. So I just clicked on this commercial site. It tells me that it's East Bay News, it's on one Bradford Street in Bristol. And under a, this is the 100, how deep will the water be during a 100 year coastal storm? It'll be about 1.3 feet standing at the East Bay News building. So again, you're able to use different types of data sets and overlay it on the storm surge envelopes, sea level rise coverages and answer questions about current risk and then future risk. So I just showed you the beach stamp website and what I just went through was storm tools for beginners. We've also been trying to, in our discussions with municipalities, tailor another sort of quick link for municipalities to go to and get a little more detailed information to answer some more sophisticated planning related questions for municipalities. So you can just click on this hot link for storm tools for municipalities and just to point out to view even more maps, click here. It takes you to a ArcGIS.com site with a laundry list of maps. The map that Grover showed you with the wave heights is on there. There are different storm return scenarios. We can click on one map and just see one storm return. So that'll all stay up. If you're really into it and you wanna dive in but I encourage you as you're getting started to stick with storm tools for beginners and storm tools for municipalities. And then also the link for the science behind storm tools is on here as well. So when you get on storm tools for municipalities, this is what shows up. And you can see we've added many more layers that you can turn on and off. And just to point out how to do that, there's a little link here called Details and a little link here called Basemap. I already told you about Basemap. You can change the Basemap of your map. Details is this page that comes up on this table of contents, they call it. And in the middle here, there's a content button. Content is where you can turn the layers on and off. Legend is, gives you the details of the legend of the layers you have turned on. So in this we have the Rhode Island address structures, the E911 and then the sea level scenarios. And then you can zoom in and out and I'll show you that in a minute. These are all of the layers that we've imported into storm tools for municipalities. As you guys are going through this and you wanna see more layers added or if it's missing something, please tell us. We are continuously adding and improving to this tool. So we have everything from the critical infrastructure I already showed you address structures. We actually have all the sea level rise scenarios, one through seven imported as a water depth layers. You can click on any point on that coverage on the map and get the water depth at that location under the sea level scenario. We have the nuisance storm and then we have a 100 year storm plus the different sea level scenarios based on whatever question you're trying to answer. Theme of flood zones. And one of the coolest and actually most useful layers that we've been playing with lately is population density. So what our mapping wizards did was they took the E911 database with all of these different emergency 911 sites. And this is a site near Quonset and this is post road in North Kingstown. Camp Ave is here. This is the Mill Creek complex, residential complex. Our mapping wizards overlaid that with population density map from the census. And the highest population density are these red areas, lowest or the yellow or sorry, lowest or the green areas. And then we're able to look at how storm water interacts with those high density areas. Where do people live and where is the water gonna come? So I pulled on the 100 year storm. If we get a 1938 hurricane this year that development is gonna be wet. But it's far enough away from Wakeford Harbor where you wouldn't think that if you were standing on that site and the depth of water will be over three feet under a 1938 hurricane scenario. So again, this is the potential for us to, the power of this tool to communicate exposure, risk and vulnerability to a variety of audiences. We're also using storm tools for other projects. Grover mentioned the green and resilient infrastructure program. We call it get a grip on Rhode Island's coasts. This is a Department of Interior grant that Pam Rubinoff is leading to look at green infrastructure and the convergence of storm water and coastal surge and coastal hazards in different areas. And we're looking at Oakland Beach and Warwick, Marine Avenue in Newport and then Wickford in North Kingstown. And what we did here was we created maps in ArcGIS.com. And if you just Google grip, Warwick, grip North Kingstown, you'll get a link to these maps. And we were able to pull in the different storm scenarios. And we worked with the city of Warwick and their public works guys to give us their storm water infrastructure. And what's really nice about ArcGIS.com, just the normal license that anybody can use without paying for it, is that you can pull in your own for all those GIS users in the audience. If you're a GIS user, you can pull in shape files if they're not more than a thousand features. You can pull those in and it stores on the cloud. So we pulled in the storm water infrastructure, we clipped it just for Oakland Beach, pulled it into storm tools to this map on ArcGIS.com. And then we have all the storm water infrastructure, catch basins, we identify, we have E-9-1, so there's Iggy's, Doe Boy's, Chowder House. We have wetland areas. So we were, and we pulled in Pervious Cover and all kinds of different layers that are available on the cloud to start to evaluate these sites. So you can, again, click on this catch basin, it tells you what's a catch basin, and some of the issues it needs cleaning, suggested sampling, so we have that information from the city that is tailored to the GRIP project underway. Grover already mentioned the coastal environmental risk index, this is kind of the next phase of where storm tools is going to assign a risk index to different parts of Rhode Island's coastline. So it's a way that storm tools expected to evolve, I'm not gonna go through that again, and more to come on this, I guess, is my message here. And then we're also looking at evolving storm tools to have a real-time flood forecasting utilization, utility for Rhode Islanders, to be able to understand the path of a potential hurricane and where you're standing, what the risk could be. So that's, again, a longer term, next phase of where storm tools is headed. So I'll pause for a minute, and just, that's my quick overview of what storm tools is about, and what it can do. Are there any questions on storm tools? Gary? So you're, these layers of storm and so forth, they take into account surge and, you know, their velocity zone, or is there an extra layer to have that on storm tools? So, yeah, so the 100 year storm surge envelope, the science behind how that was created is explained in the white paper on the website. So there were different factors and different models that were used. I can't remember which ones were pulled together, but there's also an amplification factor that the scientists used to look at how that surge envelope interacts with Portsmouth versus Narragansett. So all of that, the detailed science on how that 100 year storm envelope interacts with the landscape is based on the digital elevation model and then all the inputs of the model that the scientists used to create that layer. Does that answer your question kind of? I can put you in touch with the scientists to answer those detailed questions. Other questions? Yeah, sir? Is this? Currently, yes. So this phase of storm tools is focused only on the coastal environment. There is an effort underway to model the inland riverine systems and the convergence of those systems with the coastal environment. Does anybody wanna mention, Jim? Do you wanna talk about that? Yeah, so we just got started this fall to look at the flooding in the Potoxic River or Washington. And so that modeling effort will sort of set the stage, if you will, for extending that modeling effort throughout the inland watershed system and then look at that interaction of downstream flooding where it needs coastal waters. Think Potoxic River at Cranstead. And so we get wet hurricane, for example, with inches of rainfall, concomitant winds strong surge will obviously have ample life flooding where the river hits the coastal environment so that will exacerbate flooding if it were independent of just coastal surge or just down the flooding. So eventually, we will have that capability in storm tools. Again, just to give you an example, Hurricane Sandy, they measured the storm surge in the Hudson in five, three miles up. But it's signal went all the way up to five, three miles. One of the questions that we've been getting often when we've been doing this road show is sort of how does storm tools differ from the other viewers that are out there? We know Army Corps has one, NOAA has one, Climate Central has one. And the answer is this is specific to the state of Rhode Island and has the ability to geolocate specific properties. And when you zoom in, it's based on the 2014 aerial photo that was taken of Rhode Island landscape. And you can look at individual driveways and your backyard. And it has that level of detail and the terrain and the elevation model that is specific to the state with a six inch vertical accuracy and a vertical resolution and a one meter horizontal resolution. So it's much more detailed in resolution than other viewers on the street. Anybody wanna go to an address? I have it up live. Coastal, it has to be coastal and it has to be in the state of Rhode Island. I've had Massachusetts people ask me, like, why isn't it working for Massachusetts? That's right. Anybody? 19 Elm Street. Okay, so I'll do here. I don't think I went through this, but there's the find address or place so you just type in your address. Is that your house guy? All right, 19 Elm Street. Yeah, yeah. Newport, all right. So then you can click on, here you go. 19 Elm Street, Newport. Zoom's us in. Okay, so what we have turned on here, and again, I'll go to the content button. That's that middle button. Shows contents of the map. I have the Rhode Island address structures and I have the sea level rise scenarios turned on. So what this, and then if you go to legend, the legend shows you what's turned on. So, and those blues are a little hard to differentiate. So if you go back and let's turn on, guy, is there a sea level scenario you're concerned about in particular? Well, let's turn on. All right, so here's what a moon tide looks like in your neighborhood. All right, so you're okay with that. Here's two feet of sea level rise. All right, here's three. Here's five. So five is your tipping point. And... Truly so. Yeah, just zoom that map, just a little bit. Sure. And have context for where this is. Oh, sure. Yep. You got it. So we're in the point neighborhood of the city of Newport. Okay. If you just hold the shift key and the mouse and zoom in, you can do a quick zoom here. So if we hit 19 Elm Street again, there we are. Okay. And let's see. So we can click on, let's see, one of these. The no depth of water. Oh, for three, but for five. Okay, so is that you? Where did you go? All right, so this is again, you can see this is page 105. I just clicked on that point. If you scroll, do this little arrow and scroll through. So this is the five foot. You're about 2.2 feet of water at your property. That has your, are you a white cape with black shutters and a white staircase? I might be on the wrong house. But this is the attribute data for the E911. Three feet of sea level rise, no data. That means you're good with three feet. And then, what else we got here? Two feet of sea level rise, no data here. So you're good with that. And then one feet, one foot, you're good. But yeah, it looks like five feet of sea level rise is your tipping point. Okay. Other, other addresses? Anybody? Yes. Yes. All right, let's go up to Barrington. Getting your boat on me. Zoom in. So I turned on, I'm just gonna zoom this out a little bit. You can move that over. All right, so we have right here, but Jared, in this area. Okay, so I'll zoom in. The end of that bridge. So it looks like, where do you wanna go here? So your water depth at five feet is just under a foot. Yep, every day, that's, yep. Two high tides. So you can see with this bridge in particular, if you turn off the five feet and just even look at three feet, have to look at the span of the bridge, but the landscape around the base of this over here is showing an endation. So that's just a concern or something that needs to be paid attention to for, this is the most recently constructed bridge, right? Okay. So if we look at five feet and seven feet for that area, those roadways are in trouble with. Find us when that is, five feet is about, could be projected for. So we are having every, it's gonna be changing constantly. So, what was that? It's about 2065. 2065 for five feet is the current high level projection from NOAA. So we're encouraging everybody and CRMC, maybe you wanna mention this Grover and Jim, because the science is constantly being updated, because there's a lot of uncertainty with this information, we wanna make sure everybody is using the most, if you're looking at a project today, that you wanna get on the Army Corps sea level change curve calculator, which is gonna be referenced in CRMC's policy to look at the most updated numbers, cause those numbers are constantly going to be changing. We can't just say here in 2015 that it's gonna be five feet of sea level rise by 2065, based on new science, it could be six feet by 2065 or four feet, we don't know, but that information, as it's being updated, we wanna make sure we're referencing the most accurate stuff. Yeah. Okay. Any more coffee? And if we could just go south, so what's the word that we raised right where that you, yes right there? Right there, that's a good one. Okay, let's zoom in a little bit. Okay, and you can also just to note, you guys can also, you can adjust the transparency of these layers to make it more opaque. And so that's something to play with too, if you're having trouble seeing stuff as things are layering up. So the water level, 1.92, two out two feet. So what's interesting at this particular location, so that's route 136 right there. And many people coming off of route 95 grow right by that exact spot today. And that's Belcher Cove coming off of the Palma River. And then to the right hand side or to the east is a big farm field that floods now in most high dives. And this is an area where when we did our SLAM analysis for sea level pecking marshes modeling, it showed a very high potential for marsh migration under every sea level rise scenario that we ran, which was only one, three, and five feet when we did that analysis two years ago. So that area to the right, and you can see the farmland now with the orthophobe underneath. That's just the one foot scenario. That's one part, so there's huge potential there for marsh migration, but there's also huge potential for extensive flooding under every sea level rise scenario. The other thing is, is that we typically think of our coastal areas, you know, the South Shore as being getting hammered all the time. Really, the area that Barrington, Bristol, and Warren are a good issue. And there was a recent website that was launched. You may have come across it called mycoast.org. That website, we did some promotion to invite the public to go out and take photographs during the Supermoon tides that happened at the end of September and October. So if you get on mycoast.org, click on Rhode Island, you can see a bunch of awesome photos that citizen science or citizen photographers went out and took and uploaded onto that site to see what it looked like during those high tide events two months, a month and two ago. Question in the back. Hey, can you go back to the ward? Yep. Senator, is it even moving? Sure. Can we play with those numbers on the ward? I don't know though, the 10-year event that you were showing earlier, the earliest, the last time I went out. Okay, I can turn on 10-year here. So, Teresa, so we're here at Warwick and I think Chris would be particularly interested in having on an old area. That's right. Okay, there we go, we can do that? Sure. Right in there, particularly Arnold's neck drive. So, there's the railroad track. Railroad track is the crossing from here. Yep, it's coming in, it's coming in. We do have the mycoast pictures of that. Yeah, we do have mycoast, okay. And then, yep, just up a bit there. Okay, there you go, perfect. So, that's the Amtrak train track there, going up through the center. And Arnold's neck drive runs along Apenot Cove there, which is shown flooded, right at along the edge there. Comes out to Post Road, which is that major artery there on the left side into Apenot Cove corners. And Arnold's neck drive is one of these roadways now that is being flooded on almost every major high, at least once a month, Arnold's neck drive is being flooded by the high tide of the day. And during the King Tide, you're up to your axles, going through it to get into Apenot Cove. This is a roadway that needs to be seriously considered to be abandoned, because in the future it will be impassable twice a day, every day. And there's gonna have to be alternatives to gain access in depth and on roadway. So, every day is, what you're seeing there is coming every day conditions, right? There's no scenario. This, that's a ten year. Yep, so a nuisance storm. So, if you, what's the next scenario in ten years? Can you cycle through that? Sure. Do you wanna go storm event or sea level rise? Let's do sea level rise. Okay. And then I'm gonna pan out, because it seemed like it took virtually all of the water to be with me. All right, so we'll go one, there's one foot, two, three, five? Five is similar to the ten year event. Yeah, right, and there's seven. We'll look at a hundred year storm, we'll do that as well. A hundred year storm event plus sea level rise, but I can't do water depth on this layer. So we have, this is if a 1938 event came up. So, Teresa, just to put it in context, then five minutes, yeah, five minutes. Goes now, it's gonna go from where you see the road on the left side, no, on the left side coming in. Oh, right, the new bypass, yeah. And then it backs up to route one. So it was right through that color just right here. So the storm, the light color is just the base level of the ship, and then the banding is with sea level rise and air level rise. Right. Right, so, but they're building the bypass to go right through that. So hopefully it's okay. Hopefully DOT might have. But the news of the storm is okay. Incorporated banding to the right side. Right on. Since we're talking about physical liability at this workshop, I want to just point out one of my favorite examples, and I apologize to North Kingstown. I apologize if anybody here has property on, as a long tree point, in North Kingstown. But, so if we zoom in, here's Wickford, here. Here's the popular point, town beaches here, and this peninsula, just pay attention to this peninsula here. This is Bissell and Duck Cove's. One of the things that we learned from the North Kingstown pilot is that, yeah, there is a single road, a single ingress egress to this neighborhood. Same is true for the Wickford Historic District, just north of Wickford Commercial. But if we turn on the, this is one, a little bit too, so you can see Earl Drive through here. Okay. So this is a roadway connecting to post road here, and here's the roadway. So that's one feet of sea level rise. So we went out during the moon tide and have some pictures of Earl Drive. There's three, or two, oops, three, five. We'll just stay at three for now, and I'm gonna zoom back out and show you that, turn on the address structures. Might take a minute to load. But this peninsula is serviced by just this roadway, and there are about, I think, 40 to 50 helms out here. So one of the questions that came up during the project is, okay, who pays for the maintenance of that road long-term? It's a municipal road. So can the municipality walk on the maintenance of that road? Does the road have to become sort of a special tax district where if you choose to live there, fine, but you have to pay for your own road long-term as these conditions change. It's a really touchy, sticky subject that we haven't gotten into, or the town hasn't gotten into in detail, but again, that's the kind of question that is being raised from looking at these maps and these scenarios long-term. And the same is true for the Wickford, like I said, the Wickford Historic District here. We zoom in to this area. The commercial district is here. The Wickford Historic and Wickford Yacht Club is out here. If you're looking at the three-foot-of-sea level rise, it crosses this evacuation route in the corner of Brown Street and Main Street. This will be impassable, potentially impassable, under five feet of sea level rise. So this is the only way in and out of that neighborhood. So coordination with the transportation folks, figuring out how to put this in your capital improvement program. All of this is on the table for discussion to try to figure out what the trade-offs are and storm tools can help municipalities communicate that amongst different departments. Yes, Paul. One more? Yeah, ready. This has got multi-purpose with it. One, three, five, one, South Broadway, East Broadway. What I'm concerned about is watching all the coal in Parkway because they're building. So we have the sea-level scenarios on, up to five feet. Okay. One, three, five, one, South Broadway? Yes. And where is the development going? It's South Broadway. Here? It's on the, you know, one-road trail. And I'm sorry, I'm the, that's more on Parkway. Okay. So right here, right here? Down here? Yeah. Okay. So this shows the five foot of sea-level rise is good. Two, seven, two, seven. Seven. Oops, seven. So most of the flooding will be over here at Medi-Comet. But it's the access. It's that roadway. But it's the access. Right. It's the cross. That would be anything. Yep. It is. Right. Yep. And that's a major rivalry to get people on the river side. Yeah. Yeah. There's still a pump station, though, that's not motivated. They're going to elevate it. That's another example. Where you can bring in your GIS wizards in East Providence can bring in that data into storm tools and look at if they have the attribute data that says the elevation of the mechanics is at this level to see what the water depth is and be able to say how much design life you can get out of that structure under these scenarios and see if they match up in terms of the probability of a storm happening. The time frame of when sea-level rise might be at those higher levels. And if your infrastructure, how many years you can get out of that before a major upgrade is needed? There'll be 1,000 units that cause me in the next four or five years. Yeah. Kettle going in directly across, but a couple of other conversations that I've seen are a bit involved. There's been something talking about the rise and how it's going to affect the parkway between what's coming and so forth. So then the other thing that you would want to potentially think about, that this is twice a day every day, but then also the evacuation. So for the larger storms, right? Thinking about evacuation routes and what they have to evacuate and if so, how? So a seven feet of sea-level rise is showing about three and a half feet along that stretch of roadway. And then under a, let's see, 10 year nuisance storm that crosses it as well. Does that flood now across there? Under a, did Sandy flood that stretch of roadway? Sometimes. I've gone old enough to remember Hurricane Carol. Okay. About a foot, about a foot and a half of water. It shows under a 10 year nuisance storm. Okay. And then under a 100 year storm, we're looking at. We, so in storm tools, there are, there is also the ability to look at historic storm events and the flood, inundation, and extent for these historic events like Gerald, and 38, and the same day, and Hurricane Bob as well. Has there a reference point? Yeah, we have that set up on a different viewer. So I'm going to wrap up, one question and then we're going to move on. In some cases, in addition to the storm surge you're going to have, since they have barrier islands. So the situation would be worse with that, but it's hard to predict. How is, is that not handled? Not currently, but that, I told everybody to sort of keep your eyes peeled for the next few years. We have a coastal environmental risk index that's being developed to look at the kind of, the cumulative effects of erosion, surge, sea level rise, salt marsh migration, all those coastal factors that we've been compiling as part of the beach stamp to assign, potentially assign a value to different segments of shoreline to say, you're a high risk area and here's why. But a high risk area in South County might not be the same reason that we have in Barrington, Warren. But having some sort of ranking system for different segments of shoreline, I think the social factors also feed into that of how much human development is there, how many, how much population is in harm's way. So all of that is being developed with this, with the Siri, the coastal environmental risk index. Coming down the pike. Yeah, within about a year, there should be maps that are online, at least in South County, looking at both current erosion and projected erosion. So that is starting to factor into this. As I said, the research that we're looking at right now indicates that our historic rates are probably good predictor up to about 2050. Beyond that, there's some evidence to indicate that these erosion rates will start to double at that point. Okay, thank you very much. I'm happy to keep this up during the lunch hour. If you guys wanna come up and play with it, but play on your tablets and your laptops and I'm around to answer questions if you have them. Thank you. I'm gonna turn it over to Pam Rubinoff. When you registered and came in, there were a pile of these guides and there's more if you didn't get one. Grab one on the way out. But as we've been discussing this morning, we have lots of different tools and activities going on modeling. And one of the things that we've very much wanted to do is engage the public throughout this. And through, as Grover had showed you before, this is kind of our overarching program for the BeechSamp, the Special Area Management Plan. And it incorporates new data, tools and best practices, public education and outreach and policy. And so with a lot of the outreach that we've been doing, many people, it's not only for the municipalities that we've been working with and other state agencies, but citizens. This has been very much a process, as you could see, a public process that helps develop innovative and practical policies and tools for managing development along shorelines vulnerable to erosion and flooding. So to be true to that goal really of bringing the BeechSamp out to the communities, we very much recognize that individual homeowners were asking the question about, well what is this gonna do to me and why should I care? So this was really the genesis of this guide. And so one of the things that we, okay, so we basically worked as a large team, the BeechSamp team, the university and many of our different stakeholders. And in this instance, we worked with some of the builders and the real estate community to be able to say, well what are the questions that you need to know as professionals? And then we asked citizens, what are the questions that you need to know there too? And what came out of this was our 30 page booklet as a reference tool. It has 10 sections, which I'll talk about a little bit more. And it gives a description of when you're asking what are some of the key questions that I need to know as a homeowner or potentially for a home buyer? How will coastal storms and flooding affect the property and structures? So I would like to know that as a homeowner. I also would like to know if I'm living along the shore, can I install structures along the shore to protect my property? So we put this into 10 questions. This is not a regulatory document itself, but it refers to relevant regulation. This does not bring out new policies or new regulations. It really builds upon what CRMC, the Building Code Commission, REMA, have already in place. The important part was in these questions, why does it matter? So that we explain in common language why it matters if you're in 100 year flood zone. It's a tool for the public. It really works for property owners, residences and businesses. We don't want to just say homeowners, but it could be a business owner in Newport and Bristol in Warwick. Buyers, looking to buy or build along the coast. And this has been really important because we would like to make sure that buyers that are, it's buyer beware. Really, so that you know what you're getting into. And especially if you're building on the coast and you want to have your house last more than 30 years. And because that's the standard mortgage, but many of most of our houses are lasting much more than 30 years, thank goodness. So what's gonna be in 50? Am I gonna be, is Paul's house gonna be able to be accessed if he moves to that new development? So those are things. And then really for current residents and if they want to repair, if they want to build on, this is information that they need to know. They could find this out at their building inspector's office. They could find this out online. However, this is a little bit more digestible. And as I started out with at the beginning, this has been a valuable tool to the realtors. The Rhode Island Realtors Association worked with us very strongly on this. And to date, how many thousands have they? Yeah, several thousands of these have gone to real estate agents in Rhode Island that are part of the Realtor Association. And we did this on purpose to make it a physical copy. Nowadays, with everything online, and this is online as well, people really felt that a document like this is useful to have in the real estate office to be able to hand to people. So what does this have? This has 10 questions focusing on different elements and many of you that are familiar with the coastal program or with your flood insurance program, many familiar things. Coastal features, CRMC water type classifications, FEMA flood zones and flood insurance. And then really getting to what are the hazards? Coastal storms and flooding, erosion, how do I build my home, how do I retrofit? And as I pointed out before, this really references these kinds of materials here that are in the regulations. And it also uses several of the tools that we've already heard about this morning. So here are the questions and I'm not gonna go through them all there right at the beginning of the book, but it starts with what kind of coastal features are on or near the property. Many of you solicitors that are representing either the municipalities or a planning board or a project proponent, these questions are quite relevant to you and you know them and your engineers know them. However, a lot of times the homeowner doesn't really quite understand why it costs more money to do your permitting because you have to go through CRMC and what's the difference between a dune and a bluff and what's the difference between a highly developed barrier and not. So these are some of the questions there. Let's go through one of them. How will erosion and sea level rise impact the property surrounding? So here what we do is we reference in the document why does it matter? I think we talked a little bit about this earlier. Why does it matter if erosion, if there's erosion at my property? Oh, well in many years you may not have as much a front yard or a back yard that really affects your setback. So we talk about where do you get the most up to date erosion maps and we talk about the risks. This one right here after Superstorm Sandy. And we also give some tips. Please note that coastal erosion does not occur slowly and steadily over time at a constant rate which is put in the maps because we did put an average in the past, an average annual erosion rate but instead it's the result of abrupt changes due to storms. For that reason the rates provided on the CRMC shoreline change maps should be used with caution. So throughout the document we have tips like this to be able to help the reader understand a little bit more about why this is important and how to use this information to benefit them. And then the second part of that question about sea level rise. So it refers to some of the storm tools maps and so it also gives a little bit of a history. Why does this matter? Well since 1930 sea level on Rhode Island has increased an average of one inch per decade. However the rate of sea level rise has quickened and sea level along the coast has risen six inches over the last 40. So it shows what we're talking about today that we're accelerating. So again to try to provide the reader with some context and some reason to then make wise decisions. And as a reminder, I think Grover mentioned this before but in the book it also says that what the state sea level rise policy is. It talks about three to five feet by 2100. And this is something that while the policy right now or we're looking at higher elevations as Grover pointed out in seven feet because this is online, we will be able to change some of this online. However, as things change we might have to do another version of this. So we do have as more information comes out and changes are made. We'll be making them online for sure. But in the printed copy, not quite as easily. Question 10, can I make the existing, how can I make the existing building more resilient? So here we talk about FEMA's Coastal Construction Manual. We show this house, picture of this house in Westerly and very much talking about elevation. Well we all know that elevation in FEMA flood zones if you're building new or renovating that's required up to the base flood elevation. But here it talks about maybe you can increase it higher so that your insurance is lower in fact as well as your risk being lowered. And so we provide references to that. And we also provide references as Grover pointed out to Fortified on a Code Plus program. How might we be able to adapt differently? How can we be more prepared? So these kinds of references and resources are provided in the guide. As I pointed out it's online and you can get that right where Teresa was talking about the beachsamp.org and the Coastal Property Guide and it goes question by question and it has all the same information as it does in the guidebook. And this just as a reminder is really just one of the many types of outreach that the BeachSamp through the Coastal Resources Center and our colleagues are doing. And it really is working with the stakeholders and engaging them in terms of, here we point out that we worked with the realtors. So the feeling for the BeachSamp really is at the state agency level as well as at the municipal level and at the different private sector level that we really need to work together as an effort so that we can move ahead together. And that's one of the reasons why we're having this session today really is to start to get more input from the solicitors, do some outreach, but also get your questions in so that we could help address those as we continue on the BeachSamp. So you can get a bunch more guides out there. If you really would like a volume of them please let us know. We could certainly get those to you for your town halls. We would love to provide them to building officials, to planners, if you're gonna be using them and to the solicitors. It really would help to provide these to some of your clients so that they understand a little bit more of what's going on here now and what to expect in the future. So I'm gonna end here. Are there any quick questions or we could all come on up for a panel and you could ask the rest of us. Okay, great, thank you. No one has required a warning. That's gross. So we do have microphones in the room that you can have questions, but we really, even though this looks formal, the idea is for this to be an informal conversation where you guys can ask questions of this group before we move on to more of our legal team in the afternoon and we also are looking to get some feedback from you. So I will take moderator's privilege and start with a question that I had while listening to the speakers today. So I know that you guys, all three of you have been really going out into the communities and meeting with the municipalities throughout this whole process. I feel like you're constantly on the road. And Teresa, you mentioned that one of the common questions that you've got is how does this differ from other sites that are addressing similar issues? But what are some of the other questions that you guys have seen as sort of the everyone is asking that started more conversations? One of the issues that many of the coastal communities are dealing with is we've got these changing baselines that are occurring on us right now. And as you can see, the high tide events are now coming in and in the dating areas that we never used to flood before. Municipalities, many of them are for instance under MS-4 guidelines through EPA to basically deal with stormwater. And they've been going back and trying to retrofit areas and put stormwater back in. But now the stormwater detention facilities, for instance, are no longer functioning because of sea level rise. So the municipalities are caught, particularly the DPW departments are caught in this quandary of how do we deal with stormwater when we can't get water to run uphill? So it's one that we have broached with EPA now to look at trying to develop techniques that would work within coastal areas to help municipalities meet that because EPA is gonna be putting a full court press on municipalities to start to deal with this and they're gonna be caught in that crossfire. So that's one of the issues that's come up and on discussions. Yeah, for me, I have been out in the municipalities quite a bit, mostly in North King's town, but we just finished a five municipality road show of South County of the Washington County coastal communities. We still have to get into South King's town, but we're almost nailed down on a date. Just been scheduling conflicts. But one of the early on in the North King's town pilot, it was the, why do we need to care about this now? Why do we need to deal with this in our 20 year comprehensive plan? And this was probably a year and a half ago, actually two years ago, I went to three consecutive planning commission meetings just to educate them, get some feedback from them on how to structure adaptation strategies, which ended up being a menu of strategies that the town could choose from as they updated their comprehensive plan. And it just kept coming up, like how do we know when this is gonna happen? There's so much uncertainty. They took major issue with me using the word impact. Don't tell me that my road's gonna be impacted. I can still drive through it. So we changed our language to use the word exposure instead of impact because we found that impact was a little incendiary when we were talking to different audiences. And I think just really the, I think it's such a huge issue and so complex with uncertainty is also what do you want us to do about this? So it's been kind of all over the place, but trying to get sort of hone in on getting the planning commission in this case and the planning department, not so much of a learning curve there, but just to embrace the, why we need to start thinking about this now and just starting to tease out the questions that they need to get their heads around to be able to go to DOT, get their public works guys in DOT working together. Because I think the roadway stuff is one of the biggest short term challenges that needs to be addressed sooner than later. To just to come up with a plan for what's gonna happen with some of these roadways is a huge nut to crack. And I think learning from those conversations of how to hone in on an asset that the boards and commissions can have some control over, and if the planning staff can then go bird dog it and figure out what needs, what ducts need to be in a row to initiate action is really, that's been one of the iterative things that's been going on with the municipal work. I think with the road situation, one of the interesting questions for municipalities is we had, well, we have a couple of situations. One, the cost of trying to maintain short Pella roads is gonna become astronomical. I mean, if we look at the Matunik area to protect the entire road system there, for instance, that provides access to those 500 homes, that could be, if you go to a full revetment system, over $60 million just for that chunk of road. Probably more than that, but that's obviously a significant cost. The other one that we ran into after Sandy is in South Kingstown again, they have a road system there that was taken out by Sandy and it's been taken out several times and the town had considered abandoning the road, which obviously the residents were happy with. So then they looked at, because these are very long lots that are facing the shore, the possibility of flipping the road on the other side of the houses. But then they missed about a question whether now that the road bifurcated the lot, whether they've created new building lots in an area that wouldn't be suitable for building and facing takings questions. So there's many of these issues that start to have legal ramifications as they start to go forward, so. Since we haven't talked a lot about this morning, we also did a road show with our, when we were doing the wetlands mapping. And then we worked with the South Kingstown Land Trust on a project and so what kept on coming up was, well why should I protect that land now if it's gonna be inundated in the future? And so everything from why should we buy that, try to get people out of harm's way now or try to buy a piece of property on a barrier beach, whatever the options are, or to be able to have something a lot so that a wetland could migrate over it, you're like, well why should I buy land that's gonna not exist in the future? And so trying to understand, and it's a really good question, it's a really, you know, because you think that you're gonna be buying property so that it lasts in perpetuity. And so that's a challenge because it's the uses that will last in perpetuity, you know, let it be as a salt marsh or let it be as a beach that will erode and provide sand and recreation. So from the natural side, that was a question that we kept on getting. Yeah. Here's a, based on Teresa's presentation, here's a fun one that's out there that we've been dealing with. We have the capability through the models now and through other data sources to essentially get down to the individual house level. And from a given storm event, we can predict what the damage will be to that structure from that storm. How does that impact the market value and is that gonna be a problem? And from the other side, if I was a buyer, I would certainly wanna know that information before. But again, these are models that are developed for planning purposes, not for those types of things. And how might they be misused and what legal situations do those create through that misuse of those tools? So. So we have lots more. Yes, we could turn to a group there. Was there anything that came out that was really surprising that you weren't necessarily expecting at any of those meetings that really made you stop and say, ooh, we should kind of go back and think about this one? I think it's been more about how do we message this to not be fear-based and be more proactive and informative? The one that always gets that jars me a little bit is your maps are ruining my property value. And my house has been on the market now for six months and other people's houses are on the market and we can't sell anything here because of you guys. So that's been a tough one, because it's, you know, we're laying out the best available science. Well, on the other side of that, I take that now to my talks as I sort of say, my house not as much too high for a book. Yeah. In 10 years, it's gonna be a reward. Yeah. Why don't you reduce mine? Yeah, I'll talk to you. Well, we haven't cracked that nut yet. We, you know, this is, this actually is a good forum for us to be thinking about starting to reach out to different sectors of, you know, so the legal sector and looking at legal issues, but we've talked about that of, you know, can we be meeting with some of the tax assessors to really have that discussion to ask what are some of the key questions. And on our side, the maps are getting into place now that we might be able to start asking some of the economic questions, but those databases are not, that could be done at the municipal level. So, Teresa and North Kingstown, with the support of statewide planning program, we worked on how do you put your tax rate, your assessment data on top of this and start to look at some of the ramifications. But because a lot of that information is town per town or municipality per municipality, we haven't been able to do it on a large scale. And, you know, so then there's some people that say, well, there's always going to be a first row. So, it's a challenge. I think one of the most frustrating things for us on this side of the discussion at times when talking with municipalities is that we're getting damn good at problem identification, but very poor right now on solutions. And municipalities, as everybody else does, want to jump to what do I do? How do I either prevent or stop this? And unfortunately, we don't have a lot on that side. Nobody does. We've been looking around, not only the U.S., but the world and everybody's just starting to come to grips with this problem. And there's not a lot of solutions out there right now. And I think that's one of the most frustrating aspects of this. For the statement over earlier, you were talking about, you were showing that dynamic about how the property line actually moved and how the benefits have to be affected. And you were sort of equivocal when you said, not likely to be allowed to rebuild. And I think that is something that we're all very concerned about. It goes to the state that you just said. What have you seen in terms of, if we can only do this, is there anything that you could put your hands on or you could describe that might get us to that solution that you presented earlier? Okay, in terms of the Charleston Beach area, we're having a narrowing of the land that they've got available to build on. There's not much that they can really do with that because the beach system wants to roll back and actually jump across the road, which it may do in a major storm event, which is why I said they will probably not be able to rebuild because they will not have property in our regulatory realm, at least, that they can build on. A lot of other structures, however, one of the key recommendations that I think that's coming out of this is elevation. Elevation is your friend. And for municipalities, they want to allow as much elevation as they can within reasonable limits in terms of homeowners. As I told you in the beginning of this discussion, one foot of sea level rise, 20 years. We only provide for a foot of free board within our building code, so that foot of free board, you're assuming, one, that FEMA nailed that calculation and many cases they didn't, but two, even if they did, that foot of free board will be eaten up within that 20 years. Now you're below BFE, meaning that your insurance rates really start to skyrocket at that point. For municipalities wanting to protect tax base, you don't want to see those structures devalue and go down as a result of the flood insurance premiums that they're going to get hit with. You want to see them continue to maintain market value. So providing elevation, you're protecting your tax base by doing that, and we're recommending at least three feet of free board. We're also suggesting that municipalities should give an individual, if they want to go to five feet, that's not unreasonable given the sea level rise scenarios we're looking at. Can we begin in how municipalities go about requiring something the state government doesn't, and pay restrictions, and I think we're still, in terms of the elevation, I think we're still up against that, and I guess the other point, there's not a fillable area that is left to search, so we'd be looking at, I hope, yes, regulations that are unsuitable for development. We've been talking about that as well. How would things sort of end to all of this discussion, but there are new regulations in the works for onsite wastewater treatment systems, setbacks, et cetera? Have you calculated any setbacks in what you're doing? Anything at all that you've been created into? Where, what we're trying to do is build out what the projections look like for the erosion. As, there's already existing regulations within the system right now, as storms occur, we have an agreement with DM on how we approach those systems in post storm environments, and forcing, essentially, people where they can't be setbacks anymore to go to holding systems. However, one of the things that hasn't been really factored in that we're still trying to get a handle on is one of our future sort of requirements. As sea level rise rises, it pushes a groundwater bulge up, and so you're narrowing the separation distance between the leach field and groundwater, and they've seen this in the Cape, and the groundwater bulge in the Cape's been proportional to sea level rise, so you can estimate then that if you've got a two foot separation or three foot separation that that's going to decrease as sea level rise goes up, and it gives you some idea of what the longevity of that leach field might be given those scenarios. We haven't done any validation of that in Rhode Island to see how that works, but it not only affects subsidy systems, it also affects drinking water supplies. There's a tremendous amount of drinking water in South County that comes from groundwater supplies, and there's the potential to impact that through saltwater intrusion or through a storm event, having noticed groundwater recharges inundated with surge, and getting salt contamination, or worse, as they take out structures and bring chemicals, contaminants, and all the rest of it into those recharge areas to contaminate those groundwater supplies with those types of events. Newport, we also look at a different issue because one of the reservoirs with the Newport almost became breached with insanity by about a foot, just missed it by a foot. If that system breaches, it's likely to potentially cause a failure that structure and the loss of that. But in addition, the treatment facility is in the surge envelope itself, which could be taken out. So these are the storm tools that we develop, gives the municipalities the capability to look at these scenarios now and start to think about them and plan for them. What we're urging them to do is look at these scenarios and take this into account in your long-term capital budgets. We're not gonna solve this problem overnight. It has occurred over 150 years. It's gonna take us a while to dig out of it, but you can start thinking about it now and build that in. Our regulations are starting to, I think we're going to encourage people to look at design life of facilities and those scenarios that will be likely within that design life and how are they going to start to deal with those through the development process? I think that's where we're probably headed at this point as we go forward. Groundwater. How far down the road is that? Well, you can take the sea level-wise scenarios and basically say, okay, if we're at a foot within 20 years, you can expect it pretty much if what's happening on the Cape is similar to here, we can expect that type of range of loss of groundwater separation. We're expecting two to three feet by 2050 and upwards of seven feet by 2100. Nancy, you bring up a couple of good points that I just, one of the things we talk a lot about is our incentives for property owners to do the right thing or do something and then barriers to implementation. You brought up the height variance issue and if a property owner wants to do the right thing and elevate even beyond to a Code Plus level, if they are limited by a Historic District Commission or HTC or some sort of local zoning limit, that could be a disincentive. The other thing we've talked about is if you elevate your home and your property is now at a higher assessed value, are you then penalized with a higher tax rate or higher taxes, is there a way for the town to incentivize elevation by offsetting, whether it's a time-limited tax break or whatever to allow people to do that? But then it also raises the question, this always just gets more complicated. Do you even want people to stay there? And then we talk about the dreaded arbor retreat and relocating properties in a high hazard area and that's a whole other conversation to have. So just to get those incremental changes is gonna do the character of that area. And that's why it's so, it's really hard work to sell. I have a neighborhood in my town that stands to a little under the 40s, there's no mortgage, they're in the flood zone. So all of this really sort of doesn't matter to and from a planning perspective, I have to, I'm sort of planning for a different character of home. So, and all the regulations about the, you know, BFB and building up and septics, if these houses, you know, can get a hundred-year storm and they're all off, rebuilding that neighborhood will be a different character, rebuild their property. Well, we're starting to see, it's a very good point and I think just now, communities are starting to ask the questions about rebuilding. Several years ago, and I'm gonna look at Westfield, we tried to talk about that before Superstorm Sandy and say, okay, let's talk about what it looks like after the storm and there was not one municipality that wanted to do that. So I think now we're starting to get there, but we're starting to, you know, outside of the whole sale, what does it look like after a storm? We had a year ago or so, a realtor and builder come in and talk to us about, they were teaming up to be able to buy up some properties, like what you're saying, you know, so okay, I wanna sell my house, it's slab on grade, and so there would be some developers that would say, okay, let's work the realtor and the builder and let's upgrade it now. Let's elevate it so that they're above BFB so that you're not buying, so that the insurance for a new homeowner who likely will need mortgage is more reasonable. And so that kind of a package deal of, okay, I'm selling my house and who can buy it so that you could actually buy it and rebuild it in a way that's up to standard. I know that that doesn't address what you're talking about, but it was interesting, these folks were from the Cape and then they were starting to do something, what on the East Bay was Bristol or Barrington? Or they were starting to do that more frequently. So you're starting to see some business opportunities there. That's not gonna help the people that are in there and will likely be damaged by the next hurricane. Yes, just to give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem, we've been doing a lot of work in Matunik. It seems to be our guinea pig for a lot of these things because it's one of our worst case scenarios. And we were looking at an area of the engineering students were looking at a project that they're currently working on for us. And within this area, there were about 150 homes that should have been elevated to get it out of the storm. Of those 150 homes, only seven were elevated. So the next storm that comes, most of those houses will be gone, even the seven that were elevated, if they get kneecapped by the structure in front of it, they will be gone. So it's, you know, we've got the magnitude of the problem due to the old building stock that we have is huge. And we need some sort of incentives to get that going. This is also why we're looking forward to this afternoon's discussions about municipal liability and how we get our heads around that, how we can work with that. Go back. Yes, I represent a number of clients who upgrade their homes to tear down and rebuild. And the standards that you have to face when you go to zoning or planning boards is the character of the neighborhood. Inevitably, you get the neighbors coming in and sitting in front of the door. Your house elevated to flood standings is gonna change the character of the neighborhood. You get that, I get that feedback from board members. So it's the board members as well as the neighbors that you have to educate to say, listen, I'm trying to do the right thing. Any one of these other people is trying to do the right thing too. But you're penalizing me because you're telling me that I'm changing the character of the neighborhood. What I try to tell them is, everybody in this neighborhood is gonna be changed, whether you like it or not, eventually. But that's the point that I end up on a regular basis, trying to deal with neighbors and board members who think they're changing the neighborhood. People say it, I cringe when they say it, but they say what we need is a good hurricane. There's no doubt a storm changes the way that you now perceive things. And I think Westerly is a good example of that, Westerly is doing the right thing by granting those experiences and allowing people to gain that elevation. They've learned that through a very hard lesson. I would hope that the rest of us don't need that lesson to learn, but we don't like change. I mean, we as a species just don't like change. And particularly in many of these neighborhoods, we like it, we bought into it. That's the way we want it and we don't want change, but our world is changing on us. And we need to come to grips with that and deal with it in a sensible fashion. On the flip side of that, we also hear from different people we talk to in the field that we've been adapting in this country for several centuries now. And this is just another opportunity for us to continue to adapt. And in the point neighborhood of Newport, there are houses at street level, there are houses that are elevated, they're kind of, it's all over the place. And then you come to learn that some of them have been relocated four times across the Quiddinick Island. And America's Cup used to not be there. I mean, so there's always these, they're these great examples of the way that the Rial landscape has adapted and evolved over time. And this is just another way to, another issue that we have to get our heads around to adapt. And so when we try to get away from the fear-based, I guess, perception of this topic, it's like, well, where are the opportunities? How can we prevent flooding or maintain public health safety and welfare? I mean, that's a driver for all of this. And then focus in on those issues for the public good and move forward with that in mind. I think that one of the other things that we, maybe the boards could use as a tool or the project proponents a while back. I mean, 10 years ago we used to use like a Photoshop program, really, and it's called CanViz. And it's a very easy tool to envision what these houses or structures could look like with sea level rise and potentially different kinds of treatments to reduce their vulnerabilities. So I find that with board members and with comprehensive plans and such, that might be a useful tool to start to envision what some of the change could look like. And that could work for or against you, it could be. It's a free tool. Yeah, so it's just one of those good ones. And I think some of the conversations that you guys have started with the BeachSamp has sort of been introducing these conversations, which I think is an important point because I think coming to different municipalities with, even though they might want the solutions, coming with, here are all these problems is a tough thing to take in the community. So the relationships that you guys have done through the BeachSamp going out gradually and incorporating folks into the process, especially with the SLAM project before the BeachSamp, I think has been really helpful in getting people willing and open to hear some of these ideas. Chris, and then I saw a gentleman over here and then a couple of hands here. If it was a question for Jim or Robert, I think there's some time now that there's been even on the draft form changes in the bulletin to section 1.5 policy on climate change. And in that context, is there going to be any changes or restrictions, hard restrictions or prohibitions on issuance of permits for either expansion or new construction, particularly in these areas which you can say, look, if we issue this permit, we're going to be creating, displacing flood waters in these periodically or on a permanent basis, creating public infrastructure or public expenditures. So where is that, it talks about guidelines. Is there going to be restrictions or prohibitions and I don't know what to say about it. Well, I think a lot of that obviously remains with the council still, it's under consideration. I think we've been looking at, for instance, with the wetlands where an area might be available for migration on those wetlands and people are seeking buffer setback variances where we might tighten up on the ability to get that variance to allow them to march to migrate in those areas. Those are the types of things that are under discussion right now. The guidelines that we're looking at or the shift within the BEAMSAMP itself is, as I said, there's very little solutions out there. So what the forerunners in all this have sort of started to edge into is to look at essentially design life and scenarios and have the development look into taking into account those scenarios and how they're going to deal with it. Throwing it back to the development community to get creative in this business to show us how they're going to deal with it up including potentially that site becomes inundated, relocation of that. Some of the programs, for instance, are suggesting that you design the structure to be able to be readily moved, period. So if you need to pick up the house and move it, you move it. Those are the types of things that the council will probably be looking at. And yes, there will probably be some tightening up on some of this stuff as we go forward. I mean, we can't go as business as usual. Those days are gone. Permit language in the future potentially permits being just returned out of it. You may, it may only be granted for a certain period of time. And then if it's destroyed by a storm or it reaches a certain time limit, there's the possibility that the project has to be removed. But I'll give you some of the things that we're thinking of. Not within section 145, by the way, that's really just going to set the policies of the council with respect to civil rights and the act of having change in the works now for the office to break the door to reform. And so sometime before the end of the year, we'll have that out of public notice. But that's really just to incorporate the NOAA sealable rise curves and the sealable rise scenarios on a shorter mid-range and then long-term out to 2100 rather than just the three to five feet by 2900. Dennis, add something to that. One thing I do want to make clear is that I'm going to answer this in advance. This SAM that's being done by the state is different than all of the SAMs. So when I'm looking at this as a regulatory tool, the first line of defense for local landowners, if you guys, is to local against the power. And the idea that we have at established the workshop is to just be the beginning. This afternoon, I think one of the most important parts about the workshop is going to be the next steps. How can we help you? We want to give you feedback. We want to hear from the guys at Dottie who says, okay, I've got to reach out to your board because I'm thinking about changing your character. They look like we know we've got a sealable comment. Sealable is a good defense, so I'll take some time. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, what did I say? My partner is crying here. Anyway, we really want to have your feedback. But this is an ongoing process. We'd like to have more of these workshops coming through planners with folks that are on the front line. And if you are thinking about the legal tools that I've been talking about this afternoon, what the science is, but at the end of the day, you're going to think it's back to your own shops. And that's really, we have to get to what? Part of this presentation, I think comes from money. Great. Sir. The rover mentioned rest of the, I mean, do they make changes to the process or is the board just a manual to create the experience of what's going on at Westwood? You've got the expert right here. Also Jason's here, too. Yeah, okay. He's trying to do an emergency board, and it's a lot of people, too. And actually, we dovetailed it in Sierra and it seemed quite nicely done. It was a pretty much seamless process, I think. And going forward, the state were planning is looking at doing that for the entire state as we did. We did it as a need basis, and it had a definite end, we gave it an 18-month period. What did you actually do? We passed an ordinance to bypass some of the local regulations, so it put the approval on us on the staff, the major staff, the building official, planner, the zoning official, who made all the decisions, so it wasn't going to a board. However, if you needed variants of any kind, Jason's true, if you needed variances, you wanted to go a lot higher, and this speaks to the culture, too. If you're in a one-story bubble, and then you go around and put a three-story house on stilts, that, to me, that's not, it's not prudent. You're putting more degree, you're looking at an advanced CIP request that's going to add whatever degree calculations you have now are going to be three times as much because you're putting gigantic ounces on a footprint that had a small bungalow on it. So, you know, those kinds of things, we looked at all of that sort of stuff to do that, but people had to be quick. You know, we were going to have this open-ended process forever. So essentially, what we did in my story was for storm damage structures to town block them to add in freeboard above and beyond what was required in the state building code, essentially up to three feet above the base flood elevation where the state building code is BFE plus one. So, West will they basically said, we'll give you an extra two feet without having to go through an onerous variance process, but only for the storm damage structures and a time-limited period of 18 months to go through that process. And it wasn't a requirement, it was an optional. I think that's one of the best, while the height, actually Jim, that's become part of our warden that's gone moving forward in certain areas, certain zone districts in and around the Squamak area are allowed to utilize up to three feet three without being impacted on the height. Exactly. This brings up an important issue though, particularly for the city solicitors in this group. If we have a 1938 event again, or when we have a 1938 event, I should say, we've got a special process that's designed in a post storm situation. We suspend all normal permitting operations and we go into what's called emergency permits where we can issue permits in the field. It allows us to give a very rapid response and get people back on their feet. When we had Sandy, we were sitting down with some local communities, and there was about 100 homes that we had to deal with. We were pushing them back because the property was no longer there and we were going all the way back as far as we could push these people on the property, which then triggered variances that they had to go and see. Local variances. Local variances. The issue with 100 homes, not so bad, but if you have a 1938 event, there will be thousands and thousands of structures that will be caught within that realm. In addition, an event that large will start to dislocate the population. So your zoning board who may need a quorum of five only has two members left in the town because the other three had to leave town because they no longer have structures. I mean, that's the reality we're facing. So to the extent that you can have an emergency process built in place, so it allows you to react at an administrative level to go back rapidly, those are the types of decisions you're gonna have to think about. If we have a 1938 event, virtually every home in this state will probably be seeking roofing permits because of the wind damage that will be associated with that. Do you really wanna process a thousand roofing permits in your process and how do you even go about that? Those are the types of things, I think, need to be discussed and thought about. Broker, if I may add on to that, that's one of the things we've been working with the coalition of folks who have benefited from the lessons that were learned in the West, for example, and put together some state-enabling legislation that municipalities can then use as their option to put exactly these procedures in place. So we've been working away on that when hopefully that will see the wedding day and something like that will all be ensured. We have time for one more question, Andy. Yeah, I just, back to Broker's point, I mean, don't we not want to be approving these things after the next major 100 or 500-year arcane? Isn't that what we wanna say no? We wanna basically have the rainy day phone or whatever, but appearing on the beach with the cash and saying, okay, we'll pay you 10 cents on the dollar for your land, that's a thing that we're gonna build here again and not approving those days quickly, which is a big thing you might have to see about the price. I think, yeah, there's certainly a certain number of structures, yes, you're absolutely right. But it's a small number in comparison to the damage. If we look at, for instance, in the Squamacan, and we look at the potential damage envelope, that's all the way up to Route 1A. Are we gonna say no to all those properties because of a storm surge that they might see once in a hundred years? Or are we gonna allow them to rebuild to new standards? I would suggest that we're only gonna allow the vast majority of those to rebuild to new standards if we think it's sensible, given the sea level rise, groundwater rise and all the rest of it. But there are certainly properties along the coast that, yes, you're absolutely right. And that's definitely the next thing to the plan, where is that line? Where is that line between the current shore and 1A, where we're saying south of this line, nothing be caused of what's gonna happen in 1,200? The coastal risk environmental index that we were developing, it develops an index for us to rank the risk to the shoreline. But the other aspect of that is that it allows us, as we've already told you, we can take what are called damage functions. The Army Corps, when there's a storm event they go in and they look at a structure, they look at the construction type, they see what the overall damage has been to those category of structures, and they assign a damage function to that based on the storm and the rest of it. So we can take a storm scenario now and we're getting to the point where we can go structure by structure and tell you what the likely damage is to those areas. That starts to give you the ability to look and rank areas within the state that, yes, you can start to say, in this enclave here, 60% of these homes are gonna be gone. And should we be looking at that? We're getting the capability to do the what if analysis now before the storm occurs so that we can start to look at that. Each storm has its own characteristics. 1938 went a little further west, for example, and the amplification that we saw in the surge in the bay was not as high as 1954, even though it was a smaller storm. 1954 was closer to Rhode Island and therefore in that right front quadrant where we get the most wind and surge. So each storm is different in how we see the response, but that modeling capability gives us the ability to start looking at those scenarios and plan for those events. Please join me in thanking our panelists. We are at the lunch 45 minutes, not quite an hour. There's box lunches right outside here on the table where you got breakfast. We have the Bay View Room, which is down the hall once kind of time looked out on the bay before the gym existed, that folks can sit in. You're also welcome to come back here and then there are some seating spots outside. See you at one o'clock.