A team of welders and engineers with the Port of San Francisco have fabricated a prototype for a “living sea wall” at the Port’s maintenance warehouse at Pier 50.
What may be the future surface of San Francisco’s sea wall is being assembled in an expansive warehouse near Mission Bay.
The pilot represents one way that The City is taking inspiration from nature to bolster infrastructure against worsening impacts of climate change including rising seas and stronger storm surges. “What we’re hoping for is that the more textured structure will attract a broader range of species, including a number of different seaweeds that exist in San Francisco Bay, which in turn are foundation species for lots of other organisms,” said Dr. Chela Zabin, one of the SERC scientists overseeing the pilot.
Although San Francisco is not the first to engineer a sea wall that more closely mimics nature, the pilot is one of the first to account for rising sea levels by suspending the tiles, made from a blend of concrete and oyster shells, across different various elevations to understand what happens at different tidal zones, including the subtidal zone, which is fully submerged.
But it will be years, if not decades, before the project, a massive undertaking estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, will be fully realized. “It’s a generational thing,” said Randy Quezada, the Port’s communications director. “These lessons really are about how do we green this kind of gray infrastructure as we plan for the future.”
“The more you put up seawalls, the higher the water becomes,” said Arthur Feinstein, Sierra Club California executive and longtime conservationist. “It becomes the bathtub. You fill it up. It’s got nowhere to go. And so it goes up.”
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