AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
People who live along America's coast are all facing the threat of rising ocean water due to climate change. We're going to hear from three communities trying to fortify their defenses, starting in Virginia with Katherine Hafner of member station WHRO.
KATHERINE HAFNER, BYLINE: Jamie Miller is the guy you call when something goes wrong with the least glamorous part of your home. He gets calls like...
JAMIE MILLER: I can't flush my toilet. I have sewage, you know, backing up in my house, or their yard smells like sewage, which wouldn't be fun.
HAFNER: Miller owns a septic repair business on Virginia's Middle Peninsula. It juts into the Chesapeake Bay. Lately, he's getting more and more of these types of calls. That's because as sea levels rise, the groundwater is rising, too. And that is swamping many backyard septic systems often used when you can't connect to a sewer line. They rely on dry soil to break down sewage. This area is especially vulnerable to rising waters in the Atlantic Ocean. Some residents here are now trying to turn this poop problem into a sort of boon for the community, people like Lewie Lawrence, head of the Middle Peninsula Planning District Commission. He says right now, residents often have to pay tens of thousands of dollars when their backyard system fails.
LEWIE LAWRENCE: We were watching millions of dollars being poured back into septic systems that are putting the same technology into the ground that is failing.
HAFNER: Lawrence helped bring in a company called Triangle Environmental. They're testing new septic technology here at a small brick house along a creek. Aaron Forbis-Stokes with Triangle shows how it all starts with a flush.
AARON FORBIS-STOKES: So we'll do the...
(SOUNDBITE OF TOILET FLUSHING)
FORBIS-STOKES: ...The lower-flush volume as if somebody just peed.
HAFNER: Just like any other backyard septic system, all the waste from this house first flows to an underground tank in the yard. But then the sewage is pumped up aboveground into something that looks kind of like a refrigerator or utility closet on a raised platform.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINE RUNNING)
HAFNER: Inside, a mix of filters and chemicals clean the wastewater. There's no price yet for this mini sewage plant invention, but Forbis-Stokes says it could help people fortify their homes.
FORBIS-STOKES: Our biggest goal with this system is pretty much to let people just to remain living where they live, even under the threat of changing climate conditions.
HAFNER: It sounds promising, but there's still a long way to go. Virginia has to approve the technology, and it needs to be affordable for homeowners, as they deal with sea level rise in the Atlantic driving up underground water levels.
HALLE PARKER, BYLINE: I'm WWNO's Halle Parker in Dulac, Louisiana, on the Bayou. Here, data shows the Gulf of Mexico is rising faster than almost anywhere else in the country. It's also home to several hundred residents who are members of the state-recognized tribe. They face a heartbreaking question - to stay or go. Their chief wants to do both.
DEVON PARFAIT: Our ideal would be to have a community to resettle to, some place that's further up north, but also keeping our community here and rebuilding it to be as resilient as possible, to work with the water and to be able to adapt to our changing climate.
PARKER: Devon Parfait leads the Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitamacha-Choctaw. His tribe is the result of racist policies of the 1800s like the Trail of Tears. Multiple Native groups were forced south to the swampy edge of the Gulf.
PARFAIT: Even back then, what people had considered unlivable lands.
PARKER: Now Parfait's tribe lives on the front line of sea level rise. They're vulnerable to more intense hurricanes that bring more flooding and higher storm surge. Until the tribe needs to move, eventually, he's looking for ways to adapt and fortify his community.
PARFAIT: There needs to be a place here, down the bayou, where people can go and be protected from these hurricanes.
PARKER: He wants a place that would act as a community and disaster center in the aftermath of hurricanes, one big, resilient solar-powered building for people to stay and regroup when homes are still unlivable. But he says this one idea comes with a high price tag for the tribe, $17 million. Parfait is trying to raise the funds, but his tribe is only recognized by the state of Louisiana, not federally, which makes it harder.
PARFAIT: We're basically just out on our own with no support from our federal government. We don't get any monetary support from our state government. There's no stipend.
PARKER: Instead, Parfait's tribe relies on grants or philanthropy. The chief hopes he'll be able to give his community something they've been stripped of in the past - a choice, even as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico continue to encroach.
EZRA DAVID ROMERO, BYLINE: I'm KQED's Ezra David Romero in San Francisco. This city's edge, with towering skyscrapers, metro lines and big tech companies is separated from San Francisco Bay by a sea wall that doubles as one of the city's main tourist attractions.
KRISTINA HILL: It is kind of an unusually fragile sea wall for a city of this size.
ROMERO: UC Berkeley professor Kristina Hill calls the seawall a joke because not only is it barely tall enough to keep water at bay now before major sea rise, it's also poorly built.
HILL: And there are even ships that were scuttled in it.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAVES CRASHING)
ROMERO: Hill says if no action is taken, the rising ocean could eventually overwhelm the existing seawall and flood the city's tourist center in downtown. Brad Benson knows all about this. He works for the Port of San Francisco.
BRAD BENSON: Essentially, what happens in a no-action scenario, is that all of the area that was filled gets reclaimed by the bay. And that goes as far in as Salesforce Tower.
ROMERO: Salesforce Tower is the tallest building in the city. It's about six blocks from the bay.
So the ocean really just wants to take it back...
BENSON: Yes.
ROMERO: ...Some way.
But San Francisco has a solution. The port, alongside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is working on a massive $13 billion plan to reinvent more than seven miles of the shoreline. It includes a higher seawall and fortifying shoreline structures, like the historic Ferry Building, with its clock tower that takes up about a city block on the waterfront.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLOCK RINGING)
ROMERO: Benson says the idea is to raise the huge building by 7 feet.
BENSON: They'd install a series of jacks underneath the whole building that are controlled by computer, where the whole building can be lifted at the same time to a new elevation.
ROMERO: But there's no guarantee San Francisco will implement this costly, elaborate plan. The city can't do it alone. Congress will have to approve it. If they get the money soon, Benson says San Francisco could be better protected from the Pacific Ocean by the 2040s. For NPR News, I'm Ezra David Romero in San Francisco.
RASCOE: This reporting comes from the environmental podcast, Sea Change, produced by member station WWNO and part of the NPR podcast network.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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