Almost three years ago, a tsunami wave was triggered in the Pacific Ocean by one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions documented in decades.
I was 2,724 miles away from San Francisco when the first emergency alerts came regarding the then-in-place Tsunami Advisory on January 15th, 2022; it was an oceanic threat caused by the active Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano (HTHH), which had be smoldering for weeks before erupting in a “very large” explosion that sent shock waves through the atmosphere and tsunami waves across ocean basins; the largest tsunami created by the blast was 72 feet when it made landfall off nearby Tofua Island; collectively, an estimated 1,500 people were displaced by the tsunami waves, another four individuals died, and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of damage, was done by the waves — which even affected the conspiracy-wrapped fiber optic cable on the seafloor responsible for global internet connections.
Living in a coastal city, especially those found on the West Coast, have an alluring, almost desensitizing quality to them. It’s sentiment akin to doing complimentary cocaine at some lavish party at a queer multimillionaire’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills, only to then return to your budget hotel room in Studio City — that you’re splitting with two other queerdos. There’s the dream, that hyper-specific high. Then there’s that cold, wet plunge back into actuality.
And for us who are fortunate enough to call the Bay Area home, that reality is a future spent navigating higher sea levels.
“But for a tsunami, this seems hella small,” they added. “It’s cute.”
After the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano triggered a global tsunami warning — the volcanic blast now perhaps the most violent eruption ever captured by satellite — deep waves of displaced water began traveling toward the West Coast, including the Bay Area. Though the National Weather Service indicated that peak waves from the tsunami were around 2 feet, widespread flooding was observed across the Bay Area.
Saturday’s events were only exacerbated by January’s king tides and the fact that the tsunami made landfall during high tide, as well — the two circumstances only adding to the pontifical nature of this tsunami.
SFGate editor Andrew Chamming wrote in 2016 that a 25’ sea rise would effectively wipe out the Embarcadero… as well as Bayview-Hunters Point, the Mission District, and the Marina District; these neighborhoods could disappear into the San Francisco Bay in a century. Though that severity of sea-level rise won’t come our way by 2050, the next three decades might see the San Francisco Bay swell by up nearly two feet, which could more than triple by the end of the century.
Because of this looming climate catastrophe, SF Port Commission released a report last November saying the City will need to raise parts of the Embarcadero by some six feet to avoid the worst of the flooding, per KQED. And if you’ve spent any time near Foster City within the past year, you’ll notice that the City installed a twelve-foot sea wall meant to protect nearby real estate from rising sea levels for at least the next two decades.
Sea rise, too, will wreak havoc on local economies. Millions of people in the region currently work in buildings that are collectively worth hundreds of billions of dollars within the Bay Area’s projected sea-level rise zone. And as the tides continue to climb, the idea of simply constructing taller, thicker sea walls will become increasingly futile.
The answer? Redirect the flooding.
In a Stanford-published paper released last year, researchers identified places where Bay Area communities could strategically choose to guide floodwaters, rather than holding them back with walls — the latter strategy expected to inevitably benefit some local counties, but leave others worse off. These guided flood passageways will essentially act as “overflow zones,” absorbing the increased water from high tides and rising sea levels, all while helping avoid damage to the most vulnerable communities, like Foster City.
One overflow zone example noted in the paper would be placed along the Napa-Sonoma shoreline, where Highway 37 is under threat of impending sea-level rise. The idea currently in motion is to adapt the road to prevent flooding in the future by either building a taller embankment to raise the road or by rebuilding it as a causeway that allows water to flow between the bay and marshlands on the other side; researchers modeled that the former option would, in fact, worsen flooding for almost all the Bay Area communities studied. Reconstructing the road as a causeway, however, would provide a natural absorption area for extra water to flow.
This Bay Area-wide approach to rising sea levels gives way to understanding how water flow projections can safeguard local communities for decades to come.
“It’s critical to consider the regional impacts of local actions,” said Michelle Hummel, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and lead author on the paper. “Studies like ours can identify actions that will have large impacts, either positive or negative, on the rest of the bay and help to inform decisions about how to manage the shoreline.”
Alas, the 2022 Tongan tsunami didn’t just bring the Bay Area an immeasurable amount of seawater. It also offered locals a tangible, even tactile glimpse into a future not too far off, should human beings continue playing sheepish with the climate crisis (and all its dystopian outcomes).
We don’t ideate and operate outside the disciplines of consequence; whatever we make of our relationship with Mother Nature will come back to either harm or help us. We can choose to get society through the small car window of opportunity still open to steer clear from the worst of the climate crisis. Or we can get our fingers stuck as the pane of glass closes, leaving our species to sweat and die in the driver’s seat, locked inside this proverbial warming automobile parked in the summer’s sun.
No amount of snorted stimulant drug can apparate one from the environmental catastrophes at hand.
Feature image: Signage on the side of a trash can reads Tsunami Hazard Zone on Bridgeway Road in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Sausalito, California, June 29, 2017. Tsunamis are a threat to the seismically active Bay Area. (Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
