I'm reposting a climate change blog item from June 8, 2008 with origins from 2003, along with some current photos of Lake Michigan storm damage along the Milwaukee lakefront over the last few weeks.
My point is to show that experts' suggestions that municipalities upgrade their infrastructure to meet a changing climate have gone largely ignored.
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My point is to show that experts' suggestions that municipalities upgrade their infrastructure to meet a changing climate have gone largely ignored.
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SUNDAY, JUNE 8, 2008
In 2003, EPA Predicted Heavier Rain Events
Then-Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist and I attended a conference in Chicago in 2003, hosted by Mayor Richard Daley, where officials from the EPA told Midwestern elected leaders that climate change models predicted heavier rain events.
The EPA officials were urging the Midwestern leaders to adapt their planning and spending to more aggressively confront storm water and related services because heavier, intense rains were going to be come more frequent.
Part of the message was: forget the notion of the "100-year-storm." They'll come more often than that in the Midwest as the atmosphere warms.
Again - - this wasn't advocacy science or partisan scare tactics.
This was basic municipal planning/dollars-and-sense advice from people in the George W. Bush administration to Midwestern mayors offered as an inter-governmental service because climate change was going to hit cities' budgets and constituents in difficult new ways.
The EPA officials had it all in a very power point format - - which I requested, and was assured was coming - - but it never did, and I left the Mayor's staff in January 2004 and didn't make a federal case out of not receiving it.
Now I wish I had.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Here's what a County-owned parking lot behind Moosa's restaurant at North Point on the lakefront looked like om December 19, 2019 after story weather.
And here's what the lakefront in the same area looks like Saturday after overnight rain and wind. Moosa's restaurant at North Point is in that distant grove of trees in the first photo just past the south end of Bradford Beach, while the flooded area in the second photo is just north of the beach.
