Monday, the Town of La Conner hosted a presentation on what floods may look like in the future — bigger, more frequent and longer-lasting.
Heather Spore, environmental policy manager at the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, said the information was just a snapshot of previous presentations given on the topic this year, with the focus of Maple Hall’s talk being La Conner.
The project was a collaboration between the Skagit Climate Science Consortium, the Skagit River System Cooperative, the University of Washington and hydraulic consultants, with funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
The models presented were built on previous studies, but address some gaps in what was known about flood risk, Spore said. Guillaume Mauger, Washington state climatologist and research scientist at UW, said the findings shouldn’t be surprising to those familiar with the issue in the area, but the presentation is a call for communities to take preventative action.
Mauger showed maps and animations illustrating how La Conner is and will be flooded in the event of a coastal or riverine flood sweeping in.
In a nutshell, severe coastal flooding events that we would expect to see every 100 years today (very powerful and rare) are less intense than the floods we would expect to see every 10 years in the 2080s, he said. At the same time, the 10-year riverine floods of the 2080s will likely be just as intense as the floods we currently experience every 100 years.
In an interview, Mauger said levees in much of the lower Skagit Valley are built for floods that would happen every 30 years, so they might overflow in more severe events. La Conner also faces the threat of sea level rise, with floods expected to last more days as climate change worsens, according to the presentation.
Mauger said that floods will continue to be rare, though more frequent than they are today.
It normally takes 20 to 30 years for a community to fully recover from a natural disaster, he said. This means that future floods may happen at a rate that doesn’t give communities enough time to bounce back. Therefore, prevention is key.
Luisa Loi is a general assignment reporter for La Conner Community News.
