Olympia City Manager Steve Hall and Public Works Director Mike Mucha were interviewed by Christopher Swope for an article title "A Rising Tide" that was published in the US GSA magazine Governing.com. You can read the article here. This article is from December 2007 so it is pretty current.

Here are some things to consider from that interview:

Steve Hall says the Olympia community is "pretty engaged around the whole climate change issue" and Hall says that Olympia has met the Kyoto protocol standards.

It's an interesting read and focuses on the impact of rising sea level which makes sense because Olympia is a coastal community, even if the coast is the intercoastal Puget Sound. The City's planning is set around sea level rise of one foot, two feet and three feet.

Public Works Director Mike Mucha notes that planning for sea level rise in Puget Sound is not simply looking at global sea level rise, the planning has to take into account tides that can cause regular 20 foot sea level fluctuations with the tides. Mucha also notes that the rising sea level is magnified in Olympia because we are at the end of Puget Sound.

The problem is that as sea level rises, it's not going to be felt as a gently lapping body of water that creeps slowly higher, it's going to be increased flooding that occurs during specific events when high winds, heavy rains and high tides coincide and that when these three coincide we will experience increased flooding.

Mucha is an engineer and demonstrates a sophisticated view of sea level rise in the article, mentioning that sea level rise is not simply the result of glacial and icecap melt, it is also an effect of thermal expansion of the oceans as sea water temperature rises. Mucha says the West Coast also faces an increased challenge of changing wind patters with prevailing winds pushing more water against our coast. Mucha also notes that the South Sound is sinking about a tenth of a foot in the next 50 to 100 year and says "So we have land going down, we have the water getting bigger, we have snow melt, and we have winds pushing the water around the globe in different ways. So it's a very complicated thing. And so when people ask how much are seas going to rise and I say three feet, it's based on a lot of assumptions and a lot of dynamics. Does anyone know? No. These are best guesses at this point."

Here is a quote from Steve Hall from that article "It's interesting, because when talk about sea-level rise, we get two reactions from the policy level. One is that we can't understand it--we can't know exactly how much it's going to rise, so we can't react to it. It's just too overwhelming, there's just too many factors of wind and subsidence of land and global warming, and maybe Greenland will melt and what do we do? So we do nothing."

But to their credit, they are not doing nothing. And by the way, the Greenland melt is a rich area of scientific study these days as the melt has proceeded faster than models have predicted leading to establishment of new ideas about Greenland ice melt known as the Zwally effect and the Jacobshavn effect.

Hall says, so what do we do? We take a reasonable approach and pick some number and start planning. "We said, let's talk about two to three feet of sea-level rise over the next 50 to 100 years. What does that mean for our community? What does it mean for our utility infrastructure downtown? What does it mean for our roadway systems? And what does it mean for investment in our public and private facilities?"

There is more and I hope to find time to post more thoughts about this article and especially how this planning that Hall talks about intersects with development of the isthmus and Olympia 2012's (myopic?) vision, but my time is short, so here, some more graphics from the article:

Rising Sea Levels in Olympia

As sea levels rise, much of Olympia will find itself submerged. These images show the projected impact of sea level increases of, from left to right, one foot, two feet and three feet.