Climate Mitigation: Battleship Edition
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Folks have been complaining about the lack of battleship content, so some very interesting stuff from the Battleship North Carolina Museum:
In 2022, even though the museum had nearly a quarter-million visitors and its most successful financial year ever, the site experienced nearly 200 days of flooding. Officials had to close it at times when the lone access road vanished underwater or visitors couldn’t safely navigate the salty lake that forms in front of the main entrance to the 35,000-ton warship.
“If I can’t sell tickets and provide parking, I can’t keep the battleship open,” Bragg said of the site, which is overseen by a state commission but receives no regular government appropriations for its operations.
Without some sort of intervention, there’s little doubt that the problem will become more dire. The battleship sits 28 miles upstream from the Cape Fear River’s confluence with the Atlantic Ocean and about a half-mile from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tidal gauge that has been collecting water level data continuously since 1935.
But fortunately battleships float:
Over time, Bragg said, he and his colleagues sought data and advice from coastal flooding experts, including at NOAA. Several years ago, they solicited proposals from four architectural and design firms about solutions to mitigate the incessant flooding at the battleship site.
“Three of the four said, ‘Let’s build walls around it,’” he recalled.
The engineering firm Moffatt & Nichol proposed a different path. In short, it boiled down to an idea that has long been embraced in places such as the Netherlands but only in more recent years has begun to take root and become more common in the United States: accommodating the rising sea rather than viewing it as an enemy to conquer.
There are five American battleships that I have yet to visit; Iowa, Alabama, Missouri, Texas, and North Carolina. Of these, Missouri and Iowa are moored in areas which leave them relatively safe from climate change. Texas (the oldest of the lot) has been in dry dock for a couple of years in a project designed to maintain her watertight status, and will probably be fine for a while although I don’t have a lot of confidence in either the Gulf Coast or the Texas state legislature. It seems as if the North Carolina folks have a solid maintenance plan; I’ll try to visit sometime this summer.