Experts Converge for Newport Resilience Assessment Tour

Increased outreach and education, financial incentives and ease of implementation could help waterfront businesses strengthen their resiliency to climate change and sea-level rise impacts and, ultimately, strengthen their bottom lines. Those were some of the messages delivered at last week’s Newport Resilience Assessment Tour led by the Coastal Resources Center (CRC) at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.

The assessment tour was part of CRC’s Climate Change Adaptation for Municipalities: Newport, R.I., project. CRC and partner Rhode Island Sea Grant assembled a team of experts to examine three waterfront pilot sites, assess their resilience and make recommendations for strengthening. The team included representatives from universities and government bodies as well as professionals from the insurance, disaster management and architecture fields. They assessed properties along the Newport Harbor with diverse uses and conditions.

The goal was to help Newport’s waterfront business sector (for profit and non-profit alike) continue to become more resilient to sea level rise, storm damage and climate change impacts. The knowledge gained and lessons learned will inform good practices and recommendations for the pilot sites that can then be replicated elsewhere in the city, state and beyond, said Pam Rubinoff, CRC coastal manager and a project leader.

One message coming out of the tour was that while resilience certainly can be designed and built into new structures, existing properties and environs also can be strengthened in cost-effective ways. “If you can do a little bit now, what that it is going to save you is monumental,” said Dan Goulet of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Management Council and an assessment team member. These measures can pay off not only by minimizing damage in a storm or flood of today (and high tides in the future with accelerated sea level rise), but by ensuring that an entity can operate without interruption after such an event. Tie-downs for rooftop equipment, properly protected utility hookups and water-permeable features for parking lots and streetscapes were among the examples shared.

Before any resilience strengthening can occur, however, businesses, municipalities and the public need to be made aware and educated. “We need to work across disciplines and get our messages out to different audiences,” said Teresa Crean, CRC coastal manager. Bill Coulbourne, a structural engineer from Delaware who has actively participated in post-storm assessments including Sandy and Katrina and was a Newport assessment team member, agreed: “This is not one size fits all. Outreach is important; make it easy for businesses to engage.”

Otherwise, lack of information can have a steep price, literally. He noted that up to 15 percent of federal funds awarded to a state in the wake of a disaster can be used for mitigation projects. Unfortunately, many communities don’t know that such incentives are available and how best to access them. Funds that go unused must be returned to the federal government.

The Newport team currently is preparing summary reports for each of the pilot sites and will share knowledge gained from the assessments with the business owners and other waterfront entities in the fall. Businesses and community waterfront actions will be highlighted at the Ronald C. Baird Sea Grant Science Symposium in December, Staying Afloat: Adapting Waterfront Businesses to Rising Seas and Extreme Storms. Pilot activities will be reviewed during a follow-up project related to green infrastructure capacity building in Newport, North Kingstown and Warwick starting in January. The Newport Assessment Tour was funded by the van Beuren Charitable Foundation, 11^th Hour Racing and the Prince Charitable Trust.

URI Leads EPA on Tour of Climate Change Frontlines

wetlandswalk2 — Touring salt marshes in Westerly, R.I. (CRC photo)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s New England Region Administrator Curt Spaulding and several of his colleagues spent two days this week touring Rhode Island to see the firsthand effects of climate change and sea level rise and to learn what municipalities, the state, URI and local organizations are doing about them. CRC and Rhode Island Sea Grant, who have collaborated with partners to address these issues, hosted the tour.

epaguy — Grover Fugate, executive director of the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, left, speaks with Curt Spaulding, administrator of the federal EPA’s New England Region. (CRC photo)

Spaulding and his colleagues saw vivid impacts of increasingly frequent and intense storms Thursday when touring the Misquamicut section of Westerly, which was hit hard by Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Since then some shoreline homes have been elevated or moved, and some businesses have chosen to scale back.

CRC and its partners were able to share how the state’s tools for taming the impacts of climate change can be applied in other New England locations, such as improving coastal management policy and planning tools to better address flooding and erosion from climate change and seal level rise. Examples include the Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM) for predicting changes in coastal wetlands and StormTools, which gives users interactive, detailed maps that illustrate sea level rise and storm surge flooding scenarios.

News reports on the visit were featured on Rhode Island Public Radio and in The Providence Journal.

CRC Leads Effort to Bring Resilience Tool to R.I. Homeowners

Tree damage to a South Kingstown, R.I., home from a “microburst” in August 2015 . (credit: Pam Rubinoff/CRC)

Thanks to the work of CRC and its colleagues at R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council, R.I. State Building Commission and R.I. Sea Grant, the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety is bringing its national Fortified Home program to Rhode Island. The building and remodel certification program requires upgraded standards to make structures more resilient to natural hazards, such as storm damage.

CRC’s Pam Rubinoff has been on the frontlines of this work, not only as a coastal management professional but as a homeowner, and she is sharing her story to help get the word out about the Fortified Home program.

The topic of designing and building coastal homes that can withstand impacts from climate change, increased storminess and sea level rise is a timely one in Rhode Island. Learn more about a Charlestown, R.I., architectural firm’s approach to the issue.

National Disaster-Preparedness Program Boosts Outreach In Storm-Prone R.I.

It’s nothing new to Rhode Island that strong storms can mean damage to homes and businesses.

What is new, says Fred Malik, director of FORTIFIED Programs at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), is that Rhode Island is well on its way to being a model FORTIFIED state. “There is a significant value to the property in Rhode Island with a lot of coastal exposure,” says Malik. “Rhode Island provides a great opportunity to involve the entire community to better protect residential and commercial properties from coastal exposure.”

The residential program, FORTIFIED Home™ Hurricane, is “a set of engineering and building standards designed to help strengthen new and existing homes through system-specific building upgrades to minimum building code requirements that will reduce damage from specific natural hazards.” Builders and homeowners choose to adhere to the voluntary set of standards. Late last year, a new home in South Kingstown was the first in the state built to FORTIFIED residential standards.

The FORTIFIED Program is gaining traction in Rhode Island in part due to the efforts of CRC, which provides science-based information, education and tools to coastal communities struggling to plan for increasing numbers of storms, one likely aspect of climate change. Through this work, CRC convenes opportunities for building regulators and professionals, as well as home and business owners, to learn about FORTIFIED.

Malik, in Rhode Island to train several local building professionals as certified FORTIFIED Home™ Evaluators, says with so many local property owners located along the coast, he is already seeing the residents of the Ocean State become increasingly interested in strengthening their homes to withstand storm damage. “Residents of Rhode Island typically live in their properties all year round and understand the risk hurricanes and Mother Nature can wreak on their homes and communities. They are ready to do something to strengthen their properties and protect what is priceless to them,” he said.

Pam Rubinoff, a CRC senior coastal manager helping lead the center’s resiliency work, did just that: she replaced her roof, damaged in a 2015 storm, with a FORTIFIED roof —one built to specifications and with materials guaranteed to withstand storm winds and water. The roof cost more than a regular roof, she says, but gave her peace of mind that it would withstand the next storm to come through the area. “Going this route may not be for everyone, but it gave me a level of safety I didn’t have before, so it was worthwhile to me, as a homeowner.”

A FORTIFIED Wise training will take place May 10 at the URI Narragansett Bay Campus. For more information or to register, please visit the training and certification programs online.