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This article originally came to mind appeared Write and is part of Weather Desk agreement.
When Hurricane Ike struck in 2008, Bill Merrell found refuge in the second floor of a brick kiln in Galveston, Texas, along with his wife, daughter, granddaughter, and two Chihuahuas. Strong winds of 110 mph hit the building. The sea level rose to a depth of eight feet[8 m]. One night, Merrell saw a little of the full moon and realized he had entered the eye of the storm.
A few years earlier, Merrell, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University in Galveston, had seen a large barrier east of Scheldt, a nearly 6 mile barrier that prevents North Sea storms from overflowing into the Dutch south coast. As Ike roared outside, Merrell was just thinking about the barrier. “The next morning, I started drawing what I thought would make sense here,” he said, “and it was about to be closer to what the Dutch would have done.”
The artwork was the beginning of Ike Dike, a maritime appeal aimed at protecting Galveston Bay. Great idea: combining the main gates at the entrance to the Bay from the Gulf of Mexico, called the Bolivar Roads, with its very tallest pillars.
Just a short distance from Galveston, at least 15 people died that night on the Bolivar Peninsula, and a hurricane destroyed nearly 3,600 homes there. The bodies were missing the following year when Merrell began lifting Ike Dike, but, he said, the idea was “ridiculed everywhere.” Politicians disliked its price, environmentalists were concerned about its impact, and no one believed it would work.
Merrell insisted. When he returned to the Netherlands, he went to a specialist at the University of Delft and asked them to help him. Over the next few years, Dutch and U.S. academic researchers conducted extensive research into the Galveston Bay elections, while Merrell and colleagues sought help from rural areas, business leaders, and politicians.
In 2014, the US Army Corps of Engineers teamed up with the government to study some of Ike Dike’s methods for Galveston Bay. After several reviews, bills to establish a governing body on the $ 26.2 billion barrier mempholo, which the Corps formed in collaboration with the Texas General Land Office, recently passed through both the Texas House and Senate. In September, the Corps submitted its proposals to the U.S. Congress, which will need to approve funding for the project.
No one would have thought that what had happened would happen, based on its high cost. And as sea levels rise as hurricanes intensify with global climate change, Houston is not the only U.S. coastal region at high risk. Millions of dollars’ sea megaproject projects are already in progress or are being monitored from San Francisco to Miami to New York City.
President Joe Biden’s new $ 2 trillion construction project is looking for offshore jobs. The Houston target, the fifth largest region in the United States and the insecurity of the petrochemical industry, highlights critical decisions for coastal projects, which must address development needs, engineering feasibility, environmental protection, and finance.
Meanwhile, the seas are growing. “It’s a huge contradiction between the need to address these issues and act swiftly,” says Carly Foster, an Arcadis fitness expert,
Hurricane Ike, saw 220 miles above Earth from the International Space Station, on Sept. 10, 2008.
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