Venice Battles Flooding Amid Highest Tide in 50 Years

I disagree, that might be true for USA, but there are many other examples where the vast majority of the population does in fact subsidize intervention in less fortunate areas. Take the Netherlands for example, the struggle against water has been a collective, charitable effort for centuries, and finally harmonized at the state level: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate-General_for_Publ...

Not everything needs to be done in the name of individual profit.

As a side note, using the term "golden toilet" for New Orleans, or Venice, or pretty much any other City in a difficult situation, doesn't certainly convey empathy as my initial comment wanted to point out.

So to each his own I guess.

You don’t live in a disaster zone until you do. I’m sure you think you would have had the foresight to see that this was coming a decade ago, but I sincerely doubt you did. Hindsight is 20/20.

You could say the same about climate change. It's a collective mistake, everybody knows about it, yet we can't fix it.

It's YOUR planet, why aren't YOU saving it? As an earthling I've seen a lot of amazing nature everywhere on earth but a lot of it is left to wither. No one seem to be interested in taking care of it.

We are hopeless in long term thinking.

"Italy has also invested billions of euros in a flood-protection system known by the acronym MOSE, but its offshore underwater dams have yet to be completed."

> Sorry, no, Venice isn't what I'd call a real city. It's a tourist trap. AFAICT, the only people who sleep there are tourists. The "locals" who service the place commute from outside of the town.

Sorry but no. The entirety of my mother's family still lives there, in the "city" city. A lot of people still live and work in the inner Venezia. There are some commuters especially from Mestre, but that is what you expect with any medium sized center with satellite smaller towns around.

Also "Venice" is quite misleading because aside the usual tourist destinations, the city has quite a large horizontal development inland. You contraddict yourself stating first that Venice is only a tourist trap with no locals and then stating that you saw local women buy groceries, and inviting people to visit the "real" Venice, which of course you saw, which of course has a resident population.

Your vacation-long experience might not necessarily reflect the truth.

> The "locals" who service the place commute from outside of the town.

Fascinating.

> It was only one I was well out of the older parts, and well away from the tourists did I see the sorts of things I visit foreign places to experience.

Fascinating, you walked out of historical Venice (famously surrounded by lagoon) that has been mostly the same for centuries? Must have been a wet walk...

>I have no idea how these real places are fairing, but I suspect much better because the walls of the canals were higher.

Fascinating, you were carrying around an altimeter and doing measurements on the height of the water. Was it high tide? Spring tide? Do you even know what a spring tide is?

>It's gritty, real and nowhere near as pretty, but I remember my walk through there far better than I remember Venice itself.

So really, you walked out of St Marks and ended up in "real" Venice? It's the most famous city surrounded by water on Earth, did you think you were going to come on HN and make up lame bullshit?

This is literally just your opinion of a several centuries old city based on a day trip. The epitome of superficiality.

Even if your unfounded assumption that "the only people who sleep there are tourists" was true, you don't let a symbol of western civilization sink. Do we let the Colosseum fall? Does someone live in there? What was your reaction when Notre-Dame was burning? Should we care at all about preserving memory? Are these just stones?

While I must admit that is hard to see beyond fake Carnevale masks and other trinkets, I am afraid that in your trip you failed to perceive the greatness of the place you were visiting.

The fear is that the gates will need to be closed too often and for too long, damaging the lagoon’s ecosystem: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07372-3

Venice was built on marshy landfill in a lagoon and has sunk 23cm in the last century. This is the main problem here. It will continue sinking and there's no way to make that stop as you can't build stable foundations under an entire stone city built in the actual sea on top of mushy mud and not anything stable. Venice is and always has been inevitably doomed due to poor engineering choices made centuries ago. Same goes for much of New Orleans.

31 December 2021 is the official deadline. http://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/flash/2019/09/12/-mose-conse...

Interesting, but a bit deceiving. When selecting "current coast" it shows the current coastlines, but selecting even a single foot of sea level rise it draws the new coast respecting the actual elevation. The problem with this is that in several places, for example around Venice and in the Netherlands, the land is already below the sea level, so they appear to flood even with a single inch of water. Which is not the case.

In Florida, the entire first floor cannot be covered by flood insurance. Most homes do not have basements as you cannot dig down to create one. Most 1st floors of nicer homes are essentially a finished basement and posts to support the rest of the building and the main floor starts on the 2nd level.

During a hurricane, you assume everything on the first floor to be a loss so usually people may have their pools, have granite/tile flooring and do not have carpet etc so that way after a flood/hurricane it's easy to clean/fix up.

I think shoreline erosion is a good example of what will happen.

An apartment building just south of SF was recently condemned and torn down because the cliff it sits on is slowly falling into the ocean.[1]

[1]https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-pacifica-apartm...

And yet, elsewhere someone posted a link to an article about how three large apartment buildings have already been torn down in Pacifica. The ocean doesn't care much about city policy. Eventually it's going to be untenable to resist no matter how wealthy you are.

That’s not how it works. That’s why you are getting downvoted.

Firstly the rise is not the same everywhere - some places will have vastly higher sea levels. Secondly Venice didn’t suddenly get flooded by going from from 0cm too high to 1cm too high this year; the issue with climate change is not just the level but also the highs from more energetic, wetter storms etc.

Yes, it will be slow. My family has a guest house on the beach. It's on short (5 ft) hill about 30 ft back from the ocean. The back sits on the hill and the front is help up by support beams. The yard is barely (1-2ft) above the average high tide mark. I was visiting during a storm and was in the guest house looking out of the window and it dawned on me that if (when) we get a bad-enough storm during a high-neap-tide, the support beams holding up the front room be washed ou. It would only be partial damage, and most people would probably consider it a "once in a 100 year storm", so I'm sure the damage would be repaired. With sea level rise, a 1:100 year storm will quickly become more like 1:50 or less, then 1:20, then 1:10, etc. At some point, we (or future owners) will give up rebuilding. If you only want a small get-away cottage on the water, then I'm sure sea level rise will be slow enough that you'll be fine. If you want a home on the water that you can pass onto your kids or grand-kids as a family investment, then I'd stay away.... or at least, consider the geology/topography/distance to the water.

A difference of even 2 feet makes a difference across huge swaths of US beachfront property. A storm surges can get up to 34.8 feet at current sea levels. Moving that to 36.8 would both more frequently destroy structures within 35’ of sea level, and B put massive numbers of new buildings at risk.

You're not right. You have neglected to consider the impact of tides, because the 1cm rise in average sea level is not evenly distributed.

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(Secondarily: language like "your aversion is more emotional than logical" is best avoided on HN too. I appreciate your intention to be respectful, but it's still a gratuitously personal comment. If you converted it to an actually respectful expression of the point, you wouldn't need to label it "respectfully".)

Subsidized by your taxes via the National Flood Insurance Program (edit: speaking US-centrically here)

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=10524

> “The potential losses generated by NFIP have created substantial financial exposure for the federal government and U.S. taxpayers,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded in a February 2013 report to Congress. “While Congress and FEMA intended that NFIP be funded with premiums collected from policyholders and not with tax dollars, the program was, by design, not actuarially sound.”

> In 2012, in an attempt to provide some financial stability to the ailing NFIP, which was $20 billion in debt at the time, Congress required FEMA to phase out many of the subsidized policies in order to more accurately reflect cost and risk. Existing policyholders naturally balked at paying the higher premiums, however, and the backlash was strong enough that politicians quickly caved and rescinded the requirements, restoring the grandfathering of subsidized policies and capping premium increases.

tl;dr: Beachfront property owners don't want to pay for their own flood insurance, so you get to pay for it instead. In October 2017 the government wrote off $16 billion of that debt, and as of February 2018 it was still in debt to the tune of $20.5 billion.

Thanks to these subsidies, people will keep rebuilding in the same idiotic places knowing that it will flood again, which is fine because you're paying for the bulk of their insurance.

There's a few other factors and I'd be worried about the combination of them more than any single one. Depending in location and geography and timing you can easily lose a couple of feet by an exceptionally high tide, sea level is the average of high tide marks and not the highest it can get. Even in inland areas well above sea level this can affect drainage and cause flooding. Then you've got large waves that can be whipped up by a regular storm or a hurricane, these can easily go another couple of feet above the current tide level and just standing ankle deep in water like that isn't the safest thing in the world. Then there's things like rainwater flooding that can come from inland, depending on geography and rain that can be negligible or huge.

But if the high tide and waves alone conspire then you might only have 6 feet of storm surge buffer. With an 18 inch sea level rise that's down to 4.5 feet.

Even without that erosion can do a lot of damage without expensive remediation.

Topography?

Mission Bay, South Beach and parts of SOMA, and most of the Financial District, not to mention the waterfront, are threatened by sea level rise. That's why the city has been [endlessly] debating plans for reinforcing and expanding the sea walls. Newer developments, like in Mission Bay, have been required to elevate the grade, AFAIU.

Yeah, I live here. :-) You're right that most of the city is at a pretty good elevation and won't be directly affected in the sense of getting flooded.

But if the Embarcadero floods that's billions of dollars worth of damage right there. Same for China Basin / Mission Bay area around Mission Creek. That's got a baseball stadium, the major train depot for the city (CalTrain terminus), and a bunch of new multi-story condos and UC Mission Bay they just finished. It's going to suck if that area gets flooded, the sidewalks around the new condos are already cracking due to subsidence. ( https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/sidewalk-sinking-missio... )

The whole city doesn't have to flood for things to get pretty grim. As an example, take a look at Pacifica, which also shows very little flooding on that map, yet has already had to start demolishing buildings as coastal cliffs erode. Also, if you look down the peninsula, heavily populated areas start to look pretty wet pretty fast. That's not going to be good for the area as a whole.

NYT is known for doing that.

Ah. I should have suspected that and phrased my query accordingly. Apologies for any slight on your good name.

It would be more accurate to say "Don't build your city on a river delta or flood plain", but that's where the good soil is. It's also hard to go back in time hundreds of years to yell at your ancestors.

I don't think it's in jest, and I actually agree with that statement to an extent.

If humans weren't polluting the atmosphere, the climate would still be changing. The only difference is time scale and possibly the temperature delta.

This is why building cities right up against the shoreline isn't a very good idea in the long term. And, no, you can have ports without building metropolises right next to the water. Someone's going to say that I'm a "climate denier" which is totally false because I believe in anthropogenic global warming.

I just imagine this commenter standing there smugly "yes, I contributed. snort I mean WHY would anyone build a PORT city on the WATER??"

Well, in the middle ages, Venice had no objection to fixing flooding by piling a few more layers of stone and wood onto an existing (sunken) structure and using it as a foundation. And a few hundred years later, doing it again. It didn't used to be a static city.

But now that the structures are considered historical and preserved, they're trying to maintain a particular snapshot of the city, with the exact same buildings. Which is a lot harder than maintaining the city overall.

Karma Police... arrest this man!

Oh I think the idea of Venice is brilliant. Historically it must have been incredible, when the palaces were actually in use and not simply museums. But at this point the entire economy of the city is based on tourism. Any trace of authentic life sunk a long time ago.

> Venice is actually a great place to live if you don't prioritize for comfort but appreciate other aspects of life.

Perhaps, if you're prioritizing access to hordes of tourists.

"What's wrong with McDonalds?"

Arguably its bad food. Anyways its mass produced food that has no attachment to the place where it is consumed (outside the USA). Food, like the appreciation of a city, has a cultural aspect that McDonald's lacks.

McDonal's for someone visiting Europe makes no sense at all. You've dropped a few thousand in airfare and hotels, now you're being cheap on the food?? (Here I make an exception for Europeans eating McDonalds. They live there, they know their culture and their food. Go ahead stuff your pie holes just for the purpose of filling your bellies).

"Disneyland is also great."

idem for Disneyland. It's a fake image of a medieval utopia that never existed even in fairy tales. It's purpose is to create value to the Disney brand by becoming, through sheer force of the ubiquity of the Disney company, a part of children's childhood replacing real experiences and the myths handed down through generations. You don't learn anything at Disneyland, you do not grow as a person at Disney because there is no substance to Disneyland.

At best you have "fun", whatever that means. More likely you're told you had fun, and you repeat that to yourself to avoid admitting you mostly just waited in line.

Venice as Disneyland is a place where hoards of bucketlisters checkoff yet another selfie at Piazza San Marco (or is Piazza Spagna? who remembers? who cares!?), not for the San Marco's sake, but to pretend they accomplished something merely by buying a cheap ticket and airbnb.

You made it to Venice! Big deal! How hard is that?

No. A person who wakes up 4:00am to make it to San Marco at dawn to see San Marco alone has accomplished something (albeit small). A person who goes to Venice and doesn't go to Piazza San Marco, but instead spends the whole time alleys long forgotten by the hoard has accomplished something.

Because they are.

McDonald's outside of the USA is supplanting rich cultural histories.

Tourism, especially as practiced by those who eat at McDonald's while visiting a foreign country, is typically disastrous to the local way of life. Locals end up selling trinkets to people for afar with more money then sense. Eventually the city becomes affordable and unbearable for the locals and the city becomes a lifeless shell of what it once was. Insipid like Las Vegas.

OK, I was so completely wrong about that... It was 2003, and it was Rothenberg ob der Tauber, Germany, not Venice. We went both places on the same trip so it's easy to see how I got confused.

In the USA the national flood insurance program has distorted the market in an incredible way by incentivizing building and constant rebuilding in flood prone areas.

Whether that cost is paid unexpectedly after a disaster or in installments leading up to a disaster really dodges the question - also, offering any sort of long term weather related insurance seems pretty risky right now and I wouldn't really trust any such insurance. The party offering it might just get overwhelmed and declare bankruptcy.

No matter which approach to ameliorate the cost is taken, I think it's quite valid to be concerned that this cost won't be levied on those that have contributed to the damage.

Insurance doesn't work that way. Insurance works by the insurer selling a bet that an event wont happen so that the buyer is covered if it does.

The insured doesn't mind paying for a (negative expected value) policy because the peace of mind is worth much more than the premium.

The insurer doesn't mind because they're making many bets across many flood plains.

The insurer is basically making money by charging a small premium to coordinate and ensure different people help each other out when they get unlucky.

As soon as flooding is guaranteed, there is no point of insurance since the premium is equal to the coverage provided.

Uhm, I would answer that as a Yes (but I think you would disagree). It'd be a subsistence level of existence for the several (tens of) millions of humans in existence in that scenario, but one with hardly any human impact on the global climate. The thought would be that massive specialisation led to our current level of (material) wealth and that both countries and corporations are signals of cooperation and thus facilite specialisation.

Even if I think of something like a Nozickian world as a starter, with exchangeable money as a transaction facility for transferring information, I immediately think we would see the roaming "tribes" as something akin to corporations.

It would not be static, but the rate of change would be much slower than it is right now. Raising the level of atmospheric CO2 by over 50%, which humans have done in the past hundred years, increases the greenhouse effect enough to cause rapid warming and sea-level rise.

The changes in the weather patterns observed over the last few decades are more complex than just warmer temperatures, and it will be many decades before it is clear if climate change contributed to the intensifying storminess we're seeing. But the new research is a reminder that these extreme weather events are likely to increase in frequency and intensity as the planet warms, and that scientists need to keep an eye on that.

Yeah, most of Venice's problems are due to pumping water from the aquifer under the city.

We are already below sea level, and experts claim we can handle an additional multiple meters of sea level rise : https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/10/04/we-kunnen-meters-zeespi... ( Dutch )

We will be fine and there are no worries in NL except from climate alarmists.

Tides are deviation from mean sea level caused by gravitational interactions with the Moon (primarily). "Climate" doesn't impact gravity. It absolutely does impact the baseline sea level (a higher sea level means higher tides).