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Elizabeth Kaleo was standing on the side of the road near her house in Hauula when her phone started to chime, the musical ringtone punctuating the quiet Oahu morning. She pressed a green button and an automated voice spoke. “This is the Handi-Van,” the recording said, notifying her that her ride would be arriving promptly in 10 minutes. “Please be waiting at your pickup location.” Kaleo sits in the back of the van during the hourlong drive south along the two-lane Kamehameha Highway. The 63-year-old has only been going to dialysis since the day before Christmas, but already it’s become a familiar routine. The bus snakes along the Windward Coast, gray clouds hovering threateningly overhead as Kaleo checks her phone and watches the coastal landscape go by. The van’s steady pace is punctuated by stops for other passengers, including other dialysis regulars. But while her commute is doable now, that may not always be the case. A gradually rising water table is already eating away at the highway as sea level rises due to climate change, says Chip Fletcher, the interim dean of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii Manoa. Storm surges with king tides occasionally overflow parts of the coastal road, forcing temporary road closures. Fletcher and other scientists who have analyzed the highway predicted that portions could be inundated as soon as 2050, raising questions about how residents will access essential services like dialysis. Read more

Newport Beach is drifting closer to operating a solar-powered, trash-snaring vessel known as a water wheel to clean up its bay, following recent approval from the California Coastal Commission. The water wheel is expected to look like a snail with a paddle wheel or a conch shell crossed with a steamboat, mirroring its cousins in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where the first of two was installed in 2014. As proposed, two booms would span the width of San Diego Creek and funnel trash toward the stationary barge, which would be mounted with a 17-foot-tall water wheel. Any debris would land on a conveyer belt, then travel into two dumpsters mounted on a fixed rail system. The dumpsters would be conveyed to land, where a garbage truck would access them and dispose of the trash. Read more

Whether lurking as hazards beneath the water’s surface or becoming eyesores as they drift ashore, abandoned boats are a growing problem in Chesapeake Bay waters — especially in Virginia. And they’re not as easy to get out of the water as they were to put in. The U.S. Coast Guard has documented 170 abandoned and derelict vessels in Virginia waters since 2013, and state officials are building a list of even more that need to be removed. The Lynnhaven group, along with Virginia’s Coastal Zone Management Program and the Clean Virginia Waterways project at Longwood University, has applied for a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Marine Debris Program to fund more boat removals. The federal program funneled nearly $2 million into 10 marine debris removal programs in states in 2021, helping them tackle a backlog of derelict vessels decomposing in their waters. The Coastal Zone Management Program, operated under Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality, has largely completed a report on the status of the state’s abandoned boat problem. Read more

A 2.4-mile stretch of shoreline along the East River in Lower Manhattan is undergoing a multi-year project to protect the lowest lying neighborhoods on the island from rising sea level and storms the likes of Hurricane Sandy that caused roughly $19 billion damage to New York City in 2012. Tabbed at $1.45 billion the ambitious flood protection initiative by the city integrates a series of cast-in-place concrete floodwalls, 18 steel floodgates, berms and raised parkland to heights of eight-to 10-feet above existing grade. Called the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project, it is the first leg of the proposed “big U” – a 10-mile ribbon of protection extending from midtown on the west side of Manhattan south around the tip of the island and north up to the east side. Read more

The federal government said Friday that it will distribute $60 million among 12 states that have waterways that flow into the Mississippi River to help them control farm runoff and other pollution that contribute to a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The money comes from the infrastructure law that President Joe Biden signed in November, the Environmental Protection Agency said. Radhika Fox, EPA assistant administrator for water, made the announcement with Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig in Des Moines. “The Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico watershed is an iconic ecosystem that millions of Americans depend on for drinking water, agriculture, recreation and economic development and it is essential that we reduce nutrient pollution that harms water quality,” Fox said. Naig is the co-chairman of the 12-member Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force. It was designed to cut the amount of phosphorous and nitrogen that flows from rivers and streams into the Mississippi River and causes the Gulf’s dead zone. Read more

The EPA approved the permit for the Ocean Era aquaculture demonstration project in federal waters off of Sarasota County on June 8 – the same day another federal agency opened its public comment period on nine potential aquaculture sites in the Gulf of Mexico. The Environmental Protection Agency had withheld final approval for the Ocean Era project pending clarification of whether discharges of waste generated by the fish would degrade the water. The project, which would see about 20,000 Almaco jack fish raised in a net pen 45 miles offshore from Sarasota County between Venice and Englewood, requires an EPA permit because the water that flows through the net pen is considered to be “define e,” and so the nutrient levels will need to be monitored. Read more

California Coastal Commission - Multiple Coastal Program Positions

USACE Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, Flood and Storm Protection Division, Coastal Observation and Analysis Branch - Supervisory Interdisciplinary