Officials in Mill Valley, California, hope to start rebuilding their outdated public middle school soon. But the extreme flood risk facing the build site has many parents concerned.
What's happening?
NPR affiliate KQED reported on the story, explaining that Mill Valley is just one of 52 schools in the Bay Area already facing significant flooding risks. And with the planet continuing to heat up due to human activity, sea level rise will keep threatening these schools.
Even moderate sea level rise could risk turning Mill Valley into an "island," according to geoscience professor Kevin Befus via KQED. The area's high tide has already risen by 8 inches in the past century, and even moderate predictions from California's Office for Environmental Health Hazard Assessment predict it climbing 3 feet by 2100.
Other schools in the area face similar risks; one floods so regularly that pumps were installed in the parking lot.
"Administrators will have to be keeping track of king tides and the size of storms coming through," Befus said, suggesting that "high-water days," like snow days, may become a necessity.
Yet despite these concerns, Mill Valley's district is still preparing to rebuild the school on the same plot of land facing these risks.
KQED interviewed a local parent, Miranda O'Connell, about her frustrations. "The kids are massively losing out, and for what? To rebuild a building on a site where it shouldn't be rebuilt. It just doesn't make sense."
Why is sea level rise so concerning?
Sea level rise, when combined with the accelerating rates of intensifying rainfalls, paints a frightening picture for all Bay Area residents.
Burning dirty fossil fuels has been proven to cause Earth's temperatures to rise. In turn, a hotter atmosphere has resulted in an uptick in more severe and erratic precipitation, as well as accelerated glacial melt.
Mill Valley sits in an area at high risk of groundwater flooding, in which water is pushed up and out of the ground. This could cause devastating effects to the school's foundations, KQED reports.
What's being done about this?
While parents have pushed to rebuild the school on another site, the district has said they don't have any such parcel of land available.
School board president Sharon Nakatani, however, remains pragmatically optimistic.
"We are doing everything we can on our property to address sea-level rise," she said, detailing her plans to elevate the new school 5 feet higher than the predicted 100-year flood line.
She also stressed that flooding would continue to affect the entire community, not just the schools, saying, "We need to figure this out together because it's not just one jurisdiction's problem."
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