[Brenda Pike]: There we go. So welcome to this webinar on Flooding Potential in Mystic River Watershed called The Tide is Rising and So Are We, Hope in Hard Times. So we'll have Bob Payne from the Medford Energy Environment Committee speak at first, a little introduction, and then Julia Wormser for the Mystic River Watershed Association. But if you have any questions throughout feel free to enter it into the Q&A. You'll see the button for that at the bottom of your screen right next to raise hand. And we can answer them as they come along. So with that, Bob, would you like to get started?
[Robert Paine]: Thank you, Brenda. This webinar is co-hosted by the Medford Energy and Environment Committee and the Tufts Energy Group. And I'm going to just briefly discuss those two groups and then introduce Julie Wormser and her presentation. Let's see if I can go down here. Let's see. I paged down. I got to figure out how to page down here. Let's see. Oh, there we are. Our mission statement of the Medford Energy and Environment Committee is to promote policies and actions that improve energy efficiency. encourage conservation and increase the use of renewable energy to meet our present needs while considering future generations of the Medford community. And the Medford Office of Energy Environment supports, we are supporting that organization and we support the city's goals, the city of Medford's goals of energy independence and environmental stewardship. Our committee provides technical and consulting expertise to the city and organizes energy and environmental-related projects and events, such as the Harvest Year Energy Festival that occurred a couple weeks ago, and programs that benefit the residents of Medford. And one of these events is this webinar, which is we've had, this is the fourth in a series of annual November events. The committee is actually comprised of Medford residents who bring a variety of expertise to the city, particularly in the areas of energy efficiency, clean energy, community outreach, and education. And the current chair, Bob Payne, and there's a website. This is all recorded, so you can always come back to this website and Facebook link. Yeah, let's see. Next slide here. Okay. The Tufts Energy Group, It's an undergraduate group at Tufts that works to promote renewable energy through projects and events, both on and off campus. They do have a conference typically in late winter, the Tufts Energy Conference, so stay tuned to that. They also are allied to the MIT Energy Conference as well, which occurs about the same time of year. And there's a few links to get to the Tufts Energy Group information, Facebook, email, and website. OK. The tides of each focus, the tide is rising, and so are we, hoping hard times. Hope can be hard to come by, and this is what Julie Worms wrote as a sort of a theme. Hope can be hard to come by. Let's go back here. When facing down something as existential as climate change. So she's a long time environmental organizer and co-founder of the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. And she speaks of how She's going to speak about how the Mystic River communities, including Medford, are successfully working together to bring more beauty, safety, and fairness to the people and places most at risk from extreme weather. She has been with the Mystic River Watershed Association for several years. She's their senior policy advisor and founder of the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. Since its launch in September of 2018, This collaborative has grown to include 20 municipalities and secured over $61 million in funding to pursue regional climate preparedness projects. One last slide. She's executive director of the association listed here. She's been instrumental in drawing attention to Boston's need to prepare for coastal flooding from extreme storms and sea level rise. She did co-author, Preparing for the Rising Tide in Designing with Water, and co-led the Boston Living with Water International Design Competition with the City of Boston and Boston Society of Architects. She has a BA in biology from Swarthmore College and an MPA from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. And that concludes my introduction. So I'm going to stop sharing and let Julie share her presentation.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you very much, Bob. And I'm really glad to be here. So if you are like me, you are probably feeling a bit fried these days from all the news around us, what we've gone through and continue to go through in our personal lives. So this talk is not just about the nuts and bolts of how we're doing climate resilience, but a little bit extra. I wanna start with a quote from the public philosopher, Dr. Cornel West. who makes a distinction between hope and optimism. I just want to make sure folks are seeing the slides okay. Yes? Yes, we are. Great. So Dr. West says, optimism is the belief that things are going to turn out as well as you would like. Hope is when you are convinced something is right, and so you fight regardless of the consequences. He goes on to say, it's no accident then that hope and despair go hand in hand. Hope is a wrestling with the despair over and over again, but never allowing despair to have the last word to dampen your fire, to sustain your hope in your quest for truth, goodness, beauty, and maybe the holy. I also want to add that hope is a verb. It's something that you do, that you act on, and then possibly you feel. But we are living through such hard times. Maybe you lost somebody or your own health during COVID. Maybe you can barely afford to live here. Maybe you're struggling with just how awful people can treat one another. But then there's the existential threat of climate change, making it so hot that a lot of kids couldn't even start school on time. and dumping 11 inches of rain on Lemonster in five hours in Massachusetts. So I wanna tell you where I get hope these days. I wanna introduce you to the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. So we are in the Mystic River Watershed right now. The edge of the Mystic River Watershed, sorry, the Mystic River Watershed goes from about Porter Square in Cambridge up to Reading and Woburn, over to Revere Beach, and over to Charleston Navy Yard. And Medford's right in the middle of it. And Medford, in fact, was one of the founding members and really a critical core member of the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. The name Mystic comes from a Massachusetts word for estuary, because the entire river used to be a tidal river. So this whole watershed is about the size of Brooklyn, New York, or Amsterdam, but it's chopped up into 21 cities and towns, each with their own budgets, governments, zoning, rivalries, and aspirations. We also host the highest concentration of critical infrastructure and environmental justice residents between New York City and the North Pole. We have no county government to help us work together on regional challenges. So five years ago, our executive director Patrick Heron and I asked 50 local thought leaders, including one tonight, Alicia Hunt, we asked two questions. You've done your initial climate vulnerability assessments. What are the challenges that you face that you cannot manage within your own small municipal boundary? And the second was, how could a collaborative watershed association help? And people had great answers. One was, we have our planning agencies to help us with planning, education, training. Don't do that. We want to do stuff on the ground to make us safer. And we have no staff that helps us work across municipal boundaries. Might as well be dragons. Please facilitate us, but have us lead. So we launched in September 2018, and the members continue to be predominantly senior municipal staff, like Alicia and Owen, with experts in environmental justice, public health, and land use backgrounds. And they've come up with what's become a very successful playbook. We start with watershed-wide exposure data to understand where climate challenges, whether it's extreme rainfall, coastal flooding or urban heat islands are to say where are we exposed to extreme weather. We then look at where the people and resources are that are most at risk from damage, whether they're super low income people or high priority infrastructure or supermarkets. We're especially focused on closing the gap between low income BIPOC residents and workers and people who have the resources to stay out of harm's way. We then work with communities to design solutions and raise the funds to put these solutions in place. Since we started, and even since I sent Bob that intro, we've raised over $111 million in grants, and we hope to raise at least another $50 million over the next three years for beautiful, effective projects. that protect people from harm and make our communities more fair and beautiful. You may be hearing my cat in the background, who wants cat food? So I wanna give you an example of what this looks like on the ground. So here's an aerial photo of the Mystic River in Medford a few years ago, and I'm gonna show you what it looked like the year my mom was born, and she's still with us today. Look how much room people gave the river then. This was before we built the Amelia Earhart Dam between Everett and Somerville in the 1960s, and that now keeps the rivers level at mid tide. Upstream communities responded by developing right into the floodplain, and this now gives us a huge design challenge with sea level rise. So if you scale back a bit, I want to show you a 1900 drawing of the Mystic River by the Geological Service. And all of these blue areas used to be salt marshes, and that would be flooded at astronomical high tide. And our ancestors filled these areas in predominantly with horses and shovels, and it took a ton of work, and they never contemplated sea level rise. So I now want to show you a map of the likelihood of flooding with salt water 50 years from now. And you can see that the marshes remember where they were. So the question is, what do you do with this intense risk of flooding? And you can see how much Medford is affected by this. You first have to understand what's at stake. and not just what will flood, but what will be harmed by flooding. We took a map like this and then looked at what will happen to this area when Boston gets hit by our own Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Katrina. And our Resilient, Mystic, Collaborative communities collectively got funding from the state to do an emergency exercise of a pretend 2051 and 100 storms, so this is basically two and a half feet higher than the record storm we had either the blizzard of 78 or in 2018. So I want to show you what that looks like.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, everyone. I'm meteorologist Eric Fisher. We have a doozy of a winter storm gearing up here. Now, we're still a few days out, so things will likely shift at least a little bit as we get closer over the course of the weekend. But as it stands right now, classic setup for a slow-moving big nor'easter. This will be swinging for the fences. We'll call it Big Poppy.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Eric Fisher is, in fact, a real meteorologist with CBS in Boston. You may watch him. But Big Poppy for sure was not a real storm. But the exciting thing is we had operations managers from 13 key infrastructure facilities from Logan Airport, to MassDOT, to the MBTA, to the oil terminals along Chelsea Creek, and they all faced nor'easter Big Poppy, both in terms of, you know, the storm that was coming and then during the storm and then two weeks after. And so they could understand what would break under record flooding and then what would take a long time and very expensive to fix. And the thing that was so great about having them all late at the same time is every source could say, okay, the grid's down. And then the T would say, okay, the subway is down because it relies on electricity. You know, and then Logan would say, okay, we can't get any workers here because they rely on the subway. So we could see the cascading effects of a pretend storm, even though we haven't had the big one strike yet. And then once we got all of that information from the infrastructure managers, we then went out and interviewed about 400 very low income residents, half of whom did not speak English as their first language, I asked them what would happen to their lives if these public services went down, and they had very, very different responses than infrastructure managers. They said things like, if the schools are closed, I can't go to work because nobody's there to watch my kids. If the bus isn't running or the sidewalks aren't plowed, I can't afford a taxi. to get to work, and if I don't get to work, I can't put food on the table and pay rent. Also, people who are very, very poor don't have Wi-Fi at home. If their cell phones died because the electricity is off or the cell service is down, they have no access to information. So now we are working with elected officials at every level of government to take these lessons learned to bring the funds into design and complete projects that will lower the risk of a big coastal storm. But we're not just focusing on coastal storms, it's way more than that. So for example, and we're going to talk about swim water, but if you look at the Mystic River, it's really a tale of two watersheds. It's very, very urban and fragmented in the lower watershed very, very paved in the upper ship watershed there's much more open space and our original theory of changes, could we create a lot of stormwater wetlands. To hold water upstream to prevent flooding downstream. And Cambridge had just developed like a million dollar very fancy pants model to understand how rainfall flooding would affect Cambridge. And they basically gave us a cheaper version of the model that we could use throughout the watershed. where everyone put in their stormwater systems. And we're able to now predict if we store water here, what's its impact locally and regionally? What if we de-pave? What different things could make a difference to a big storm either now or in the future? And so we then looked at Every piece of open space, three acres or larger in the Mystic Watershed. Turns out there's almost 500 of them left, but some of them are vertical and some of them have contaminated soils or it's somebody's backyard and they don't really want to convert it to a stormwater wetland. Thank you very much. Of the 465, there are actually 120 left. We went down to the highest priority 18 based on their effectiveness and whether the landowner wanted to do this and how feasible these were and how close they were to environmental justice communities. So we are in the process of creating the first six. At the same time, what we realized, and you look at how few of these opportunities there are, we realized that we could not succeed. These are too expensive. and too slow to permit. And with extreme storm, a lot of our flooding was coming from straight down rainfall, not from upstream. So we're now shifting our attention to how do we prevent flood damage and get our key resources and people out of harm's way. And that's what those orange spots are, are the areas that we expect to flood in extreme weather. And so how do we get them out of harm's way? And what are the, what's the storm hardening we could do? What's the zoning we could do, et cetera, to move away from flood prone areas. Another piece of work we're doing is, we first called it Wicked Hot Mystic. And one of the things about heat challenges is it really has so much to do with income and actually the impact of old policies. So redlining was a federal housing policy under the New Deal. And unfortunately it was racially biased. So this was a federal insurance program that insured mortgages, but only in white neighborhoods. And if it was a mixed neighborhood or a Southern European neighborhood of people who were not considered quote unquote white or people of color, it was nearly impossible to get a mortgage there. And that redlining then led to intense disinvestment from those neighborhoods. And you can still see that policy almost 90 years later in those are the places that also lack trees and parks. And so our goal in this case is to say it was a public policy that caused some people to, suffer disproportionately from urban heat, let's use public policy and public investments to fix that harm. And so we went around in August, 2021 with these sensors. We partnered with the Museum of Science and we drove around and bicycled around with air temperature, humidity and particulate matter sensors. And we ended up with these transects that were done at the exact same time in the morning, afternoon, night, and the next morning during a heat wave. And you end up with this very high granular heat map. And this is what it looks like for the mystic. And this is now online and you can look down to your house of what's the relative temperature in different parts of the watershed. cross hatching is where are the most at risk community members, particularly based on income and race and language isolation. So now that we know where those heat islands are, we are working with communities and community members to understand, hey, your neighborhood's really hot, what would you like to see in terms of cooling solutions? What's most beneficial to you terms of recreation and having places for kids to play and places to gather. And that's been a very cheerful part of our work. And then the final thing I want to mention is our work to manage coastal flooding. And the challenge with coastal flooding is Unlike heat or even rainfall flooding, coastal flooding cannot be managed locally. If you build a beautiful infinite high seawall in your community, but your neighbors don't, the ocean will laugh at you and go right around your wall. So this is something that has to be done at a regional level. So we, Resilient Mystic Collaborative communities and the state, We were looking at the Amelia Earhart Dam, which is Medford's key but single defense against sea level rise, and said, okay, what's going to happen in 50 years when that same record flood that we saw in 2018 is expected to be five feet higher, both because of sea level rise and more extreme storms? what happens, and this is that same flood map as you saw before. Without doing anything, these areas, the gray areas are expected to flood every 18 months. Medford is expected to flood, a lot of Medford is expected to flood every two years, and then areas further out, five to 10 years to 20 years. And so our question was, You know, these dams protect upstream, but as that sea level rises, we now see these additional flood pathways where it's not just the dam, but there's these low-lying areas along the river that also let water in, especially if the dam no longer works. And so our question was, what will it take to maintain the dam's existing protection against coastal flooding, which is quite good today, 50 years from now when coastal storms are expected to be five feet higher. And the good news about this is there's actually nine specific areas. There's a 10th up in Revere, but mostly what we're focused on is nine areas in the Mystic Watershed and the Charles River Watershed that if we elevate just those places, You go from a storm that covers all of this area with very corrosive salt water, and you're able to block off this much area, which actually would affect over 100,000 people and over 60 billion with a B dollars of real estate and infrastructure. That's all protected by less than a half a billion dollars worth of investment. And the vast majority of that money is actually just the two dams, elevating the two dams. And of those, one of those dams is owned by the Army Corps, so we don't have to pay for it locally. So we're really talking about about $300 million worth of public grants to protect about $60 billion worth of built environment and 100,000 people. So it's an incredible opportunity and we're actually surprisingly far along doing that. So you can see Alicia right in the middle, just in front of our tallest ever state rep. And this is at one of our celebrations where we had secured a whole lot of bond money to match any of these big grants we're getting. for climate resilience. And I just want to show you for a moment what that first, just the $61 million in grants looks like. And imagine how much work and success this represents. It's almost but not quite boring. And on top of that, there's another $50 million that is slated to come from the federal government to protect protect an area that's very flood prone between Chelsea and Everett as well. So there's more to celebrate. So this is all a tremendous amount of success for a voluntary partnership that's only five years old. But if you think about it, if our water and sewer were managed by a small nonprofit with no regulatory powers dependent on competitive grant funding and no heavy machinery to build and fix things, you would call it a fail. So the Resilient Mystic Collaborative truly is a pilot project. Climate resilience at scale has to be a core government function paid for by taxes, not gimmicks or borrowing. And the exciting thing is the state is really moving in that direction. And they just came out with a state plan and recommendations to get that going, to start to institutionalize climate resilience. I want to finish by going back to hope. Honestly, I'm really proud of the work we do, but hope is a head game that cannot be dependent on success. I'll tell you what's helping me these days, and I say that as a pretty secular person, is from a small town preacher named Rob McCall, who passed away earlier this year. He said, if Armageddon is around the corner, if this time really is the end time, how do we want to be found by the Creator? Anxious and confused? Angry and bitter about faraway events? Condemning and judging those around us? Wounding further the wounded? Scrambling for a ticket to heaven? Or do we want to be found binding up wounds in our own communities, comforting our neighbors who mourn, and freeing those who are captives of pain and fear? I want to leave you with this. We all get one of these someday. Our whole lives boil down to that little dash. all our fears and aspirations, all our love and despair. We can't control the world around us. We can only control our reactions to it and how we treat one another. Every day, no matter what, I choose hope. That's my presentation.
[Alicia Hunt]: Wow, Julie, that was great.
[Brenda Pike]: So I'm not seeing any questions in the Q&A right now. Folks, if you have any questions, feel free to type it in there or to raise your hand and we can call on you here.
[SPEAKER_03]: While people are thinking, can I tee up Alicia and Owen? Because I can do the flowery language around what we're all doing. They're where the rubber hits the road. And Medford not only was one of the founding members and the founding thought leaders of the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. We actually had our very first meeting at Medford City Hall and outgrew it, that very first meeting. But they're also doing among the most creative climate resilient projects really in the country. And I'd love to have them talk more about what you guys are doing in Medford proper. not just on a regional basis.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sure. So as people generally know, I'm Alicia Hunt, the Director of Planning, Development and Sustainability. So we have had, Medford's had for a long time, an Office of Energy and Environment. And in 2020, Mayor Brianna said, I would like to take what you're doing in energy and environment and take that energy to all of our planning and development. and bring these two offices together and have you do the sustainability stuff in everything that we do and all of the planning. So our office is now called the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability. And through this role, I've been working with Julie for many years on the climate resilience stuff. You can imagine there was a time when I said to Mayor McGlynn, there's this adaptation stuff, and they're talking about adaptation, and it's kind of scary, and I don't know if Medford's ready. We didn't know if Medford was ready. And then Cambridge did that study you talked about, and they shared it with a bunch of the sustainability directors from the region. And we went, oh,
[Brenda Pike]: Oh, I think we may have lost Alicia. Hopefully she'll, she'll come back on. Um, in the meantime, thank you. Thank you, Lisa, for, uh, for the, uh, the compliments to, to Julie. That's wonderful. Um, Bob, I see that you have your hand up. Do you have a question or comment here?
[Robert Paine]: Right. I was trying to figure out how to enter a question, but I couldn't type it in. So, um, Besides a coastal storm, what about this lemester type? So we just have like a thunderstorm that developed, you know, there's a foot of rain in five hours. And it's not just washing over the dam, it's just like collecting in the watershed. I've always heard that the, like the horn pond could fail and that everything would just cascade down the whole Mystic River watershed and just just totally wash away everything in sight. Is that true? So what about those scenarios? Julie, you're on mute.
[SPEAKER_03]: You mean Horn Pond way up in Woburn?
[Robert Paine]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I would say, I mean, it's possible. I mean, who would have thought that Lemonster would go through what is going? The Mystic River is a very engineered and I want Alicia to come back on and finish the interesting thing she was saying. So when there is, as long as the weather forecasts keep up with the weather, but think about what just happened in Acapulco, where they had a nothing burger storm turn into a maximum category five hurricane. As long as the predictions are accurate and enough ahead of time, DCR will draw the river way down. and they can draw each of the lakes way down. So this is a highly engineered river. I think the bigger likelihood is that the rain coming straight down and hitting pavement and flooding out Medford Square, you know, like that kind of, you know, coming, I think it's going to be more localized than coming down from Woburn is my, I'll eat my hat when it isn't that case, That's our sense of it. Alicia, what cool things were you saying before your internet failed you?
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry. Sorry. This is my home internet, not City Hall's internet today.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you're talking about the former mayor saying, what about climate?
[Alicia Hunt]: We were like, Adaptation, that's scary. Adapting to climate change, because we were just starting to do climate work. And then Cambridge did that study that you referenced. And they looked at flooding that would occur up the Mystic River past the Amelia Hart Dam into Cambridge. And they shared it with sustainability directors from the region. And I looked at that and I said, oh, we have a problem. And I actually asked Cambridge and the Cambridge engineer and sustainability directors came and presented to the department heads in the city of Medford back probably 2014 2015. And I think it was 2015. the mayor said, we need to work on climate. You need to start focusing on climate change and sustainability. And so we started focusing on that work, thanks to the support from Cambridge and their help, and we started to pivot. But recently, we've been doing a lot of really interesting work. And at that time, it was sort of like me taking the reins and the mantle and saying, let's do climate change. Now it's all our departments. Now everybody in Medford is involved in climate change and sustainability. And that's how we're doing like groundbreaking work. One of the things that you're referring to is Medford's doing a community liaison program. We're building social resiliency because when there is a disaster, you're gonna turn to the people next to you, your neighbors, the people on your block, the people that you know and the people that you're comfortable with for help. And the communities that bounce back the strongest are the ones with the strongest interconnected fabrics. and community resiliency. There are actually studies that looked at like Hurricane Katrina and stuff and showed that the communities with the community resiliency and fabric came back faster. And so the Community Liaison Program is actually a program that's being run out of Medford's Department of Health by our Office of Outreach and prevention. And this is where we've hired people from the underrepresented communities in Medford. So we have liaisons who are Portuguese, Haitian, Creole, Spanish speaking. We have an Asian language liaison, and we have of black person and a low income who are representing these communities and who work between us in the communities right they work in city hall and they work with people in the neighborhoods and they're building social resiliency and building connections between the city and the various populations in Medford and that program. has been so innovative and groundbreaking that the state is modeling its new Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program off of our Community Liaison Program. And MVP 2.0, as they are calling it, a state program, now is requiring all communities to identify their underrepresented populations and hire people from within those communities to do this kind of work. So that's actually really exciting and what I what I love about that is that they call me in as an advisor and it's being run completely out of a whole different department. And then to owens work in the engineering office and he's in dpw dpw just got our most recent climate vulnerability preparedness grant to do a. urban forest vulnerability assessment. So they don't just plant trees, but they're saying what's going on here and what can we do? And I'll let Owen talk to stormwater, but do you wanna talk to stormwater and then I'll talk about our solar stuff?
[Owen Wartella]: Sure, what we're doing with stormwater right now is basically we're focusing on, there's a few localized flooding areas that we did a report on. And we now just got some grant money to do some design for a particular area in South Medford. And that's going to help a lot of EJ communities in that area. So we're really happy about that. And we've got a lot going on. There's a lot more. There's about six more areas that we want to focus on in the coming years, and we're you know, looking to get it done. It's pretty interesting.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, so that's exciting. And then we've been doing solar. So we've been doing hard, we've been trying to, we're looking at upgrading our buildings to make them all electric. But in the meantime, DPW has solar on it, the police station has solar, the library has solar, the library has enough solar that it actually powers, it provides all the electricity that the building needs over the course of a year. So that's really exciting. And we've been doing a bunch of park, oh, and we're working on putting solar on the Andrews School. Each of our schools will need a new roof before it gets solar. So people will be seeing new when you see new roofs think solar electricity is coming. But we're, we've got, we've been working on car park, and when we were doing out, we did a lot of outreach for car park to say what do people want in this park up in North Medford what do what is going to work for the community. And one of the things that we heard from the youth was that they didn't just want a basketball court. They didn't want their basketball court replaced. They wanted it covered so that when it's too hot in the summer, they can still play. And when it's raining in the winter, it's not so cold all the time in the winter anymore, but there's snow. They want to be able to play even though it's not so, you know, even though there's snow. So they wanted a roof on it. And we looked at that and then we said, Why don't we put a solar array on that roof. And so we have been designing that. And we took that to Representative Catherine Clark and Julie helped us with that outreach actually. And she said that's brilliant. We need to help fund that. And so we're getting a $1.5 million earmark, courtesy of Catherine Clark. for that park to help with the work there. That's actually coming to us through the U.S. Department of Energy, which is really interesting. There wasn't park funding available through earmarks, so they are making this a pilot renewable energy project to do solar at our park, which is gonna, it'll power the lights, it'll power the car chargers, but there's a fire station across the street and the excess electricity will get net metered over to the fire station across the street. And then we also have a federal land and water grant to actually to federal land and water grants to help with the development of this park, this is a big expensive project. And one of those is one of those is funding the work people see ongoing right now we're doing the fields and. a loop path, and the other is that we're going to add water play into that park. And we're trying to figure out how to do water play in a way that's really just integrated, so you can use that space all the time. But when it's crazy hot out, we can turn the water on, and we can help people cool off in that neighborhood. And we're actually doing outreach on that project. We have, I think there are going to be people in the park this Saturday, looking to hear from residents. And over the next month, We're going to be doing outreach to hear more from people about the details of what those elements should be in that playground. So that's some of the other interesting things that we're doing around the city right now. So we're happy to take more questions if there are, or if any of the panelists have questions for each other. Thank you, Julie. That was an amazing presentation.
[Brenda Pike]: Definitely. Julie, would you mind, Will, I know you answered Will's question in the chat, but for the benefit of the folks who might not be able to see that, would you mind just answering that now?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so the question was like, okay, so that dam that protects Medford, what's going on with the dam? And that was actually one of the key things that brought us all together. So Alicia was talking about how Cambridge realized how soon the dam would start to be overtopped. And again, the record coastal storm we've had, it's just a little bit higher from the blizzard of 78, but it is the biggest storm we've ever had. Biggest flooding we've ever had was in 2018. The fourth biggest was like last December. It was totally unnamed, but that also caused a lot of flooding. But anyway, With these storms, it came within like a foot and a half from the top of the dam. And that's when the state DCR owns the dam and said, oh my gosh, that was a close one. What would happen if the water went up and over the dam? And it turns out, if you've ever been down to the dam, there are big locks, navigation locks, so boats can go through. Then if water went up and over, there's a door going down into the dam that didn't even have like a rubber gasket on it. And that water goes down the stairs and knocks out the hydraulic. And Medford and Malden get flooded twice daily at high tide. Because remember the rivers kept at mid tide. So they said, wow, that was really close. So they have been working since then to design and fund and now build, I think, I think this is already out for bid, to storm harden both the Amelia Earhart Dam and the Charles River Dam. They own both of them, they're both the same height. But beyond that, because of the RMC's advocacy, they've also agreed to put up the funds through ARPA, in fact, to elevate the dam by four feet. And the reason why it's four feet, not five or three, four feet is the highest it can go without getting exponentially more expensive, because the land is so flat, all of this former salt marsh, that to elevate it five feet, you'd have to have this berm going way out into neighborhoods in Everett and in Assembly Row. And so four feet is the highest cost effective. And that is expected to take us another 50 years before that starts to fail. And by that time, knock on wood, we will have moved back a bit from harm's way. So, you know, we're sort of in this two-phase thing of like, how much can we shore up what's there right now? And then what do we do when that gets too expensive?
[Brenda Pike]: This is great. So folks feel free to raise your hand or ask any more questions. I actually have a question right now. So I'm wondering what are some of your next steps? Like what are some of your short term goals?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a great question. And I think Alicia could answer that because we just had that conversation a couple of weeks ago. But so the reason we've raised so much money is that we've done some great planning And then all this federal funding came down and a lot of state money came down. So we have our little watershed, which is 1%, it's actually 0.7% of the landmass, 10% of the population of Massachusetts, but 0.7% of landmass. We have captured 20% of all state funding ever given through the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness State Program, which is the only big program for climate resilience. And it's because folks like Medford are doing really outstanding work and score the highest in all of these grant proposals for how effective and engaged and engaged with people and, you know, science-based, et cetera, all these projects are. And that state funding then leverages, gets us ready for much bigger federal funding. So the federal funding is available for basically two more years, hoping that DC politics keep moving it forward. And we're trying to get another $50 million of great projects before that fades back into normal levels of funding. And we just had a conversation a few weeks ago saying, so what are the remaining big regional projects that we haven't thought about yet that are not already underway? And one of them is to say, can we do urban forestry at a watershed scale? And I've just been mulling over in my mind, like a million for the mystic. What would it look like to plant a million trees? And I thought, okay, how many trees per acre is that? And it's 20 trees per acre. It's actually a reasonable number. Though probably like the fells, Middlesex fells doesn't need any more trees, but you know, a lot of places do. But when you think about a big project like that, it's really a question of how do we go to scale, not just to get trees in the ground, but to make sure that they survive, because they have a pretty low survival rate. They get hot and dried out during heat waves. They get knocked over by the wind. They get cut down with new development, et cetera. Natural gas leaks are really hard on trees. So what can we do across the watershed to just get a ton more trees? they really are heroes. You know, those streets and bike paths where they have kissing trees, where they cross over, are 10 to 15 degrees cooler in the summer than, you know, a big Mass Ave open boulevard. And so that's a big effort, and they're actually using an enormous amount of money from the Forest Service for urban trees right now, more than they've ever had. The other question we have is, how can we make sure that the climate resilience we're doing is decreasing risk across particularly race and class, which tends to be where the inequality is most extreme, rather than increasing that inequality. And a lot of the climate resilience moves, especially in Boston, because there's been so much development in Boston, is actually making that inequality worse. There's so little local funding that they've been relying on developers to redevelop communities to then decrease flood resilience. And they're doing so in doing market rate condos. So if you can afford a million dollar condo, you're set. But if you don't wanna redevelop an old neighborhood or you can't afford that kind of housing, you're still at risk. And so I think another thing we're really trying to do is how can we make sure that our climate resilience work is decreasing inequality of impact, not increasing it. Those are two of the thought processes we're having.
[Brenda Pike]: This is wonderful. Unless, oh, Bob, do you have a question?
[Robert Paine]: Oh, yeah. Regarding the tree management, is there strategy where you would want to plant more trees in specific areas that would be more effective? I mean, do we want to concentrate on the areas that are of tree deficiency or near the Mississippi River? I don't know if there's any studies as to what would be most effective. If you have X number of trees, where should you go with them?
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the big things is we know that those areas that showed up as hottest had the fewest trees. And some of it is because the streets are so wide that there's just a ton of pavement. And so it could be trees and street diets. But some of it, those trees take a while to grow. So while they're growing, you also want to just have shade, whether it's big awnings or more bus shelters. Depending on the neighborhood, trees are always good. And in neighborhoods with a lot of leaky natural gas pipelines, which we know is also a major greenhouse gas, that kills the trees. So there's some deferred maintenance around our infrastructure that is preventing those trees from surviving. So there's a bit of a both and. Street trees are really important. They have a lot higher mortality, as Owen, I'm sure, knows well. Trees in private lands, you know, if you put a tree in a backyard where it's not like a tree coffin in a sidewalk, but rather it has soil around it, that's a much higher likelihood of surviving. And then trees along places like bike paths, so that people can actually bike during the heat and be cooled off. It's sort of like, how do you cool off the hottest places? How do you also create oases in parks and along bike paths for people to be and to travel? And around bus stops, how can people stay cool as they're moving around? And then how do you fix our infrastructure so that our hottest places can have trees that survive and thrive? Oh, and do you want to add to that?
[Owen Wartella]: I mean, the city has planted over 200 trees this year. We're working on a stump removal process of, you know, we have a lot of stumps. We're trying to plant the trees where we remove the stumps, fix the sidewalks. And, you know, the mayor and the administration has had a really great, you know, You know, resource to, you know, keep this project going and plant numerous trees and the way that we, you know, we tried to disperse them equally through the city of Medford, we do it in South Medford on West Medford and so we're trying to, you know, kind of spread. Spread the trees out as much as we can. And, you know, Hopefully we'll get to plant more. I know that the tree warden wants to do hundreds more, but you know, we're excited.
[SPEAKER_03]: So a million for Medford, not just the mist.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. Something that you mentioned, Julie, is keeping them alive. So Medford has an organization called Trees Medford that has an adopted tree program that basically you indicate which of the new trees you're willing to make an effort to water and help take care of these trees, because it just takes more effort than is possible. And so that's a really awesome effort. And the other thing that they've tried to spread the word about is that we will take requests, like the tree warden can't do every request that she gets exactly, but she is happy to hear where do people want trees. And if it's in front of their house and they say, and I'll water it, that's gonna up the likelihood that we'll plant a tree there because we have more faith that that tree will survive than one down the street where nobody, volunteering to water it. We also have a back of sidewalk program, where if she can't plant the tree right up at the sidewalk, she can plant it in your yard, and then the city owns it for two years before it, and then it becomes your tree. But it's in order to help increase, especially places where we can't put it up against the street.
[Owen Wartella]: You know, and also I wanted to add that, you know, the tree warden does a really good job of picking which species will fit in these tight corridors. Sometimes you have overhead wires. So you, you know, she makes sure that a tree is, you know, you know, doesn't grow as high into the wire. So it has a bigger chance to, you know, create a longer life of a heat island effect, you know, and, you know, help them that way.
[SPEAKER_03]: I would love to see every kindergartner in the Mystic be given a tree to adopt. And if it dies, they get another tree. But by the time they're high school seniors, we probably would have that million trees, you know? And the kids could be proud of something. Anyway, yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: Somehow it always comes back to trees. I know somebody asking about trees from the public, but it's still it always comes back to trees.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they're pretty. They're great.
[Brenda Pike]: They're superheroes. Well, can we can we bounce off that and go back to stormwater a little bit? I would like to mention that there's also an adopted drain program in addition to an adopted tree program where folks can volunteer to look out for a drain that's near them and clear it of debris. so that during a storm, you're not going to have water backing up in flooding areas.
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely, yep. Or all that stuff going down and going right into the river. You may think that storm drains, that water's treated, but it's not, it goes right into the river. So yeah, for both pollution reasons and for backing up and flooding reasons, it's really important. I think this is maybe a good time to close. Thank you, everybody. And I'm honored to be here. Thanks for having me.
[Brenda Pike]: Thank you so much. Thank you. And I just want to mention that this recording will be posted on gogreenmadford.org. So if folks want to share it with anyone after having seen it tonight, it'll be available there. Great.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for the invitation, Bob.
[Alicia Hunt]: Great to see you all. Thank you. Bye-bye.