If you live in central Warren and there’s a hurricane, you’re supposed to use Market Street to evacuate towards Massachusetts.
The road is also a major commuter corridor, along with County Road and Wampanoag Trail through Barrington.
But there’s a looming problem – both of these routes are projected to flood as sea level rises.
“You can just feel it as you drive down here,” said Nathan Vinhateiro, assistant director of the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Institute, sitting in a park in Warren on a recent afternoon. “You’re seeing all the water around you. You see boats everywhere. And everything is just a few feet above sea level.”
Vinhateiro has worked alongside students to develop maps that show how sea level rise will affect properties and roads in this area.
“You see this situation emerging where, as you keep raising the water level, you pinch off portions of the town,” he said. “Some of those projections are just showing [that] we’ll need new bridges, essentially, in order to maintain some of the transportation arteries.”
Sea level rise will flood roads in coastal areas across the state. But the East Bay towns of Barrington, Warren, and Bristol, are in a particularly tricky position. That’s because several of the region’s main roads run along the coast, or across tidal inlets. They’re among the most vulnerable state roads in Rhode Island and together carry an average of more than 90,000 cars, trucks, and buses a day.
Over the last century, sea level in Rhode Island has risen by about a foot. And the state is projected to see another foot of rise in the next 30 years. Vinhateiro said that small-sounding number could have big impacts.
“If you take one foot of sea level rise, and you just have a regular storm on it, something that happens once a year, you start to flood substantial portions of roadways around here,” he said. “And even with that one foot of sea level rise, there are hundreds of feet of road that will be inundated every single day.”
Already, Warren officials have to close Market Street to traffic a couple times of year because of high-tide flooding, sometimes combined with heavy rainfall. Both of those problems are projected to become more severe as the planet warms.
“Warren is surrounded by water. And just at a normal high tide or moon tide, whatever you want to call it, or a storm surge, we deal with flooding on certain streets,” said Warren Fire Chief James Sousa. “One in particular is Market Street.”
During a storm last fall, heavy rainfall during high tide meant the water couldn’t drain off the streets fast enough, he said, and officials had to close both Market Street and nearby Child Street.
“So that's two main roads that cut off our emergency vehicles to get to another section of town, the most direct route. There was still a way to get to that other area, but you had to go around this flooded area,” he said.
“It is concerning for public safety because you're delaying a response to somebody in need.”
Sousa’s bigger concern is what their options would be in a major storm, when high winds could force officials to close the Mount Hope Bridge – the only other route out of town.
“The worst case scenario is being cut off [in] one of these storms with no way out. At the height of a storm, or during a hurricane, and having a medical emergency – now what do you do to get somebody off?” he said. “We don't have a hospital here. Trucks can’t get out. Helicopters may not be able to fly, to fly somebody off.”
“Our shelters are in the eastern part of town. So that would mean that, if the road is impassable, we wouldn't be able to get people to the shelters,” said Bob Rulli, Warren’s director of planning and community development. “It just spirals and it builds upon itself. So we don't want to wait [until] that flooding happens. We need to be ahead of it.”
Sea level rise is a top concern for him. In the last several years, he’s been working on a ground-breaking plan to use tax revenue from new development on higher land to fund property buy-outs in the flood-prone Market Street area.
But these key roads are under state jurisdiction. The state transportation agency had planned to repave Market Street, but town leaders asked them to pump the brakes.
“If you're going to spend millions of dollars to pave a road that you know in 10 years is going to be underwater on a regular basis, then – I don't know as a taxpayer if that's responsible,” Rulli said. “Now, maybe there aren't any other options, but I think that needs to be vetted.
Since then, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation has launched a pilot study, looking into adaptation strategies for Market Street and nearby Child Street.
RIDOT declined to make any staff available for an interview. In a statement, RIDOT spokesperson Charles St. Martin said the agency already considers sea level rise as a risk factor in its planning process. And he said the goal of the pilot program is to develop a list of flood-adaptation measures that will “keep the roads usable and accessible through 2035.” The department is also applying for funding from the National Coastal Resilience Fund, which he said could be used in Warren.
Market Street and Child Street are just two of the roads statewide where sea level rise will cause problems. And one of the big unanswered questions is how much it’ll cost to adapt.
“Say a road would cost $100,000 to repave. But if you had to relocate it, it's going to cost several millions of dollars,” said Meredith Brady, associate director of the Division of Statewide Planning. “Your average local taxpayer is going to get a little sticker shock with the bill.”
Brady worked for RIDOT until just a few years ago, so she’s well versed in transportation planning. She says some adaptation strategies RIDOT could consider include raising or relocating roads, building causeways or bridges, and using natural systems – like marshes – to help absorb flood water and buffer against storms.
“It was already scary enough when we said just to maintain our roads and bridges we’re X-million dollars short a year,” she said. “We still haven't completely closed that gap. So now we have to add this.
“And part of the problem there is that's one area we don't have all the data that we need, because we haven't designed very many of these types of projects.”
She says her department and RIDOT are working to improve the state’s transportation planning tools, so that factors like sea level rise are easier to visualize and update as the data change. And they’re doing more detailed mapping to better understand the risk.
But the state has known about the risk since at least 2015, and Brady acknowledges the urgency of the problem.
“We're just getting to the point now where I think the information is refined enough that we should be developing more action plans,” she said. “You know, at a certain point, there will come a point in time when you've played the waiting game a little bit too long.”
“Tick tock, tick tock,” commented Bob Rulli, in Warren. “That's a frustration. [The report] was done in 2015. That's seven years ago. We're looking at 2035. That's 13 years from now…. That's not how we address the problem. It really is a classic case of paralysis by analysis.”
RIDOT’s pilot program has been underway for months, and Rulli said the progress has been slow. The site is a complicated one because multi-family homes and small businesses line both sides of the street.
“Even if you said okay, I'm going to build a bridge. Well, that's great. That gets you from point A to B. But it doesn't do anything for the homes that exist here now that are low lying. People aren't going to walk down stairs to get to their house. So I don't see a lot of options here that allow Market Street to continue to exist,” Rulli said.
It can take a decade for a transportation infrastructure project to go from concept to implementation. And Rulli said, Warren doesn’t have that kind of time.
--
Reporter Sofie Rudin can be reached at srudin@thepublicsradio.org.
