09:52 AM EST on Monday, December 19, 2005

BY PETER B. LORD
Journal Environment Writer

Second of three parts.

To see one of the biggest conflicts Rhode Island faces as it plans for the next hurricane, drive down to Field's Point, in Providence. The land, not much higher than sea level, has been a dump, a drive-in theater and a shipyard.

With spectacular views of upper Narragansett Bay, it is home to Save the Bay's new "green" headquarters building and a row of multistory apartments under construction by Johnson & Wales University.

Rhode Island is encouraging development on its scenic waterfronts, the very places where hurricane storm surges can be expected to do their worst demage.

When the next big hurricane sends a storm-surge wave racing up Narragansett Bay, the choke point will be right there, where the Bay narrows as Field's Point reaches out to East Providence's Squantum Point.

Low air pressure and high winds accompanying hurricanes help build up storm surges, a wall of water that can be as tall as a building. When such a wave hits marshes or beaches, it spreads out. When confined by jetties or cliffs, the surge gets bigger.

The fill for the apartments and the environmental headquarters will leave that much less low ground for the rising waters, forcing the surge to pile higher and higher.

No one knows how high. The upper Bay shoreline is not what it was 50 years ago, when the 1954 hurricane dispatched a 14.5-foot storm surge that destroyed houses, boats and marinas as it raced up the Bay.

More than 500 acres of the upper Bay have been filled in since the 1950s, according to one study. Many more houses and marinas line the Bay today.

Conversely, the south shore coastline has been eaten away by erosion during the last 50 years. Scientists estimate the erosion rate at 1 to 2 feet a year. It, too, is packed with new houses, and there is less land between the structures and the sea.

Journal photo / Andrew Dickerman

When the next big hurricane sends a storm-surge wave racing up Narragansett Bay, houses such as these along Bullock Point in East Providence will be vulnerable, scientists say.

The owner of a house that survived Hurricane Carol in 1954 should not assume that the next storm won't do more damage. In many areas, the shore has moved further inland, allowing waves to roll right up to doorsteps.

"It's a complex problem," says Michael Tikoian, chairman of the Coastal Resources Management Council, the state agency that regulates development on Rhode Island's coastline.

Some states have set policies to retreat from an eroding coastline -- prohibiting development so the coastline can change naturally. Some armor, or protect, their shorelines with seawalls. And some "nourish" their beaches by pumping in sand to replace what was carried away by the sea.

Rhode Island has at various times followed all three policies. Tikoian said the coastal council is still trying to develop one overriding policy.

"It's a balancing act," he says. "We don't want to say no to development in Providence. But it is interesting the way the scientists showed that the more you develop, the more it funnels the water as it comes into the Bay."

Tikoian said one complication is the number of jetties and other shoreline "armor" that were created before the Coastal Resources Management Council was. They alter the flow of sands along the shore and prevent beaches from being naturally restored.

The coastal council allows owners to use sandbags to protect their properties, but that doesn't work in the long run, Tikoian said. The agency is also looking at oversized sandbags that have been used elsewhere with more success.

Three or four houses in Matunuck are now in danger of being destroyed by the ocean, Tikoian said.

"My greatest worry is the destruction of houses near the shoreline," Tikoian said. Though, he added, houses are built stronger now than they were years ago.

Several proposals have been made for more studies to better inform policymakers on how to prepare for a severe hurricane.

* A Coastal Resources Management Council committee is updating the development plans for the upper Bay to determine whether a full-fledged new study of the coastline and its changes should be done.

* Pam Pogue at the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency has long sought financing for studies of a worst-case scenario of the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier failing along with any of the 100 or so dams around the state that have been deemed "high hazard."

* Providence city officials want to have an updated storm-surge study to determine whether the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier provides sufficient protection for the city. The barrier was built to withstand a 20 1/2-foot surge. The Hurricane of 1938 sent a 15.7-foot wall of water up the Bay, and the surge from Carol in 1954 was only a foot lower.

* Isaac Ginis, an internationally recognized hurricane expert at URI, has proposed to Governor Carcieri the creation of a new institute at the university that would work to improve the nation's hurricane-forecast system and provide regional climate modeling for New England and upstate New York.

* The Federal Emergency Management Agency has subcontractors scoping out Rhode Island in anticipation of updating the state's flood-insurance maps, according to Pogue. The new maps should be done in a few years.

Many changes on the coastline have already been carefully documented.

A recent study called "Coastal Wetland Trends in the Narragansett Bay Estuary during the 20th Century" concluded that from the 1950s to the 1990s, 548 acres of open water, salt marshes and tidal land along the Bay have been altered by filling or other uses.

The study, completed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, with the University of Massachusetts and the University of Rhode Island, also surveyed the 500-foot buffer around the Bay and found nearly half of it was occupied by residential development, stores and industry.

New development in the buffer area has risen sharply over the 50 years. Nearly 3,000 acres of open shoreline is now covered with houses and businesses.

In South County, Emily Shumchenia, a student at URI's Graduate School of Oceanography, has been counting houses around the salt ponds as part of a project that she has already presented at a national conference in Virginia.

There were were 2,821 houses in 1939; by 1972 there were 8,487.

As of 2003, the number was up to 14,691.

While the policymakers contemplate new rules for coastal development, one lawyer is hoping to prod quicker action.

Keven A. McKenna represents neighbors fighting a proposal for building three new houses on land along Hope Street in Bristol, an area that often floods in bad weather.

The new houses, the neighbors argue, will only make neighborhood flooding worse.

McKenna, on behalf of 63 clients, recently petitioned the Coastal Resources Management Council, the state Department of Environmental Management and the Rhode Island Building Code Commission to ban further development in flood hazard zones.

"The consequences of building these residential structures in flood hazard zones as permitted by the present policies of your council have created a danger to the lives of all Rhode Islanders, not only to my clients, during storms and hurricanes," McKenna wrote nearly two months ago.

Journal photo / Andrew Dickerman

Cedar Tree Neck in Warwick has been rebuilt since 1954.

Tikoian said he had not seen the petition.

But McKenna is undaunted. "We're trying to get a statewide group going," he said. "DEM and CRMC have just become rubber stamps for developers. We should put them all on the Titanic. They are useless."

It's not just the coastal communities that will be affected in a hurricane. Robert J. Warren, chief of the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency, says he is worried about the communities in the northwest corner of the state, where trees and power lines will be knocked down by high winds and flooding from rain-swollen rivers and ponds.

The record-breaking rains two months ago gave inland Rhode Islanders a taste of the kinds of storm damage that coastal residents fear the most.

More than 15 inches of rain turned the Blackstone River into a destructive force that wiped out waterfront parks and playgrounds, closed businesses and flooded houses and cars.

Residents in Pawtucket and Cumberland had to boil tap water, the Woonsocket waste treatment plant overflowed, and there were mandatory evacuations of many neighborhoods.

The storm was so destructive that it was still being discussed two months later, when a special group updating development plans for the upper Bay met at Save the Bay's headquarters. A large conference room was jammed with scientists, planners and business people representing the many special-interest groups fixated on the Bay.

Malcolm L. Spaulding, an ocean engineering professor at URI, gave a graphic presentation of storm surges striking various cities on the East Coast.

A storm surge of 14.7 feet would put Providence's Field's Point under water, Spaulding said. A surge of 24 feet would put the entire Providence waterfront underwater.

It is possible, Spaulding says, to devise an online system that could forecast storm surges and their impact on the Bay.

"With a Web-based system, anyone, anytime could look at the impact of a storm on their house," Spaulding says. "Evacuation routes could be listed. If routes became blocked, alternatives would be offered."

Narragansett Bay is the Achilles heel of the local coastline, said Glenn Ricci of URI's Coastal Resources Center, which provides scientific support to the Coastal Resources Management Council. "We're putting a lot of property into the flood plain. We've added a lot more boats. And even if we stopped all development, we're looking at more sea-level rise. The 100-year storm will be the 30-year storm by 2100."

Thomas Uva of the Narragansett Bay Commission pointed out that just up the coast, the shoreline is lined with the commission's sewage-treatment plant, as well as rows of massive fuel-oil and natural-gas tanks. All are seaward of the hurricane barrier.

"All of these tanks are direct targets for boat slips or whatever else breaks away during a storm surge," Uva said. "I wonder if we need to regulate more protection."

Then Robert Billington, president of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council, reminded the group of the October rains.

"It exceeded anything we've seen in 50 years. We lost most of our recreational facilities," Billington said. "It's amazing to me that the foundation of the Slater Mill didn't erode.

"We've been moving closer and closer to the river," he said. "This gives us cause to rethink."

LOOK BACK at the first day of this series, at:

http://projo.com/extra/2005/disaster/