I heard you’ve invited the Dutch to come in as consultants. They certainly have experience with holding back the sea.

The Dutch have an initiative to climate-proof their country. In Holland that’s a national policy. We’re looking at a meter to a meter and a half of sea-level rise [39-55 inches], they’re looking so far into the future they’re talking about five to seven meters [16-23 feet].

They’re below sea level now.

So they’ve initiated a series of partnerships with deltas around the world--San Francisco Bay, Mississippi, Nile, Mekong, and Yangtze. They have expertise, engineering knowhow, and they want to export these. From our perspective, we want to capture that expertise, learn from them, and then export what we learn in the Bay Area to other parts of the world. We have developed a partnership with the Dutch. And we’re going to have a symposium in San Francisco this summer. The Dutch will bring their experts, we will bring some of the engineers and designers in the Bay Area, and we’ll talk about what we can learn from each other.

For example, they have a low-lying area that is already protected by a dike, and they wanted to build a community behind it. The dike is not high enough to deal with sea-level rise, so they could have put in a very expensive higher dike. Instead they decided to build a secondary levee at the back side of that dike, much as will be done at the South Bay salt ponds to protect Silicon Valley.

At the back?

Inland. So you have a vast low-lying area that is now below sea level but dry and will end up being below sea level and wet if they let the levee overtop. So they built a whole community back there but designed it so it floats, and then they partly breached the levee. They let the water in now and it doesn’t matter how high the water gets.

Fantastic!

I looked at it and said, this is just marvelous. And they said, “We got the idea from Sausalito.” That was never designed to be a houseboat community, it was designed as a series of marinas that were supposed to accommodate the boats anchored out in Richardson Bay. They were polluting the Bay, they were fire hazards. We thought we’d approve these marinas, and the live-aboard boats would move into them and we’d connect them to sewer and water and electricity.

Well, what happened was that the people in the boats didn’t move in, and a whole industry sprang up where they poured these huge concrete hulls--essentially concrete basements that float--and they put those in the marina berths and built suburban houses on them. BCDC approved marinas for hippies and ended up with marinas for yuppies! But the Dutch looked at it and said, “What a perfect solution for a low-lying area, let’s put in a community that floats.”

So we’re trying to stimulate people to be innovative, to deal with these low-lying areas. There are a whole lot of ways we can think about this.