Most of the wharves that extend like fingers from much of Boston’s downtown coastline have been redeveloped over the last few decades, except for Lewis Wharf in the North End — but that could be about to change.
Environmentalists are fighting a proposal to build a hotel on the wharf, saying a building in that location will increase the destructive power of waves in the area. Developers, though, dispute that, and the disagreement may help determine the future of coastline development nationwide as climate change advances.
For cities like Boston that sit on a coast, the biggest problem with storms is the ocean waves they cause. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, for the first time, has mapped the coastline areas nationwide that get hit with the most powerful waves. They’re called “velocity zones,” and Lewis Wharf is one of them.
Peggy Briggs, managing principal for the environmental consultancy Epsilon Associates Inc., stands on a parking lot at the end of Lewis Wharf, pointing to old wooden poles a few feet away sticking out of the water. At mid-afternoon, just a few feet of the pilings are visible.
"You can see where the marina across on Commercial Wharf, as well as here on Lewis Wharf, is floating up and down, attached to these newer pilings,” Briggs said, acknowledging the wharf is a velocity zone.
Briggs consults for developers that want to build a five-story, 277-room hotel on Lewis Wharf. She’s working on addressing opponents' concerns that the big waves hitting the wharf will bounce off the new hotel and crash onto other buildings. Critics like the Conservation Law Foundation worry the waves may ricochet with increasing power until they hit something that can’t withstand the blow. Briggs says that doesn’t have to happen.
"We simply need to take that into consideration, design for it, and mitigate for it," Briggs said. "And that can be done."
Will Adams, a partner at the development company behind the proposed hotel, JW Capital Partners, is confident Briggs is right. Adams says the company's engineers will figure out a way to construct the building so it will absorb wave energy or redirect it back out to the ocean.
“We can’t take water energy and push it into a building next door," he said. "We’re not going to do that."
The Conservation Law Foundation, though, disagrees. It sent a letter to the Boston Redevelopment Authority opposing the hotel proposal.
“I don’t think there is engineering that would be safe in this location," said the foundation’s attorney, Peter Shelley.
Climate change means stronger storms, rising seas, and unprecedented challenges, Shelley said.
"The city of Boston is being put to a test," he said. "Is it going to prepare itself to live with the storms and the sea-level rise that are predicted? There are any number of examples where engineers have bragged that their structures are impervious to storms and regular storms have taken them down. We’re talking about storms that humans haven’t seen yet.”
That being the case, humans should be conservative about building in velocity zones, says President Barack Obama’s chief science advisor, John Holdren.
"It’s always easy to say, 'Well, there’s a technical fix that’s going to be coming along,'" Holdren said. "But in many cases it’s not prudent to count on that if we don’t yet have the fix, if it hasn’t been demonstrated, if we don’t know what it’s going to cost.”
Holdren said the insurance industry recognizes these challenges, and tries to head them off by raising premiums very high for "things that people want to build in dumb places.” Government’s role, Holdren says, is to provide independent data and tools to make sound decisions — especially in New England, since this area will be a model for other regions.
"We are actually, in this part of the world, this part of the country, experiencing sea level rise that is worse than the global average, and that puts a special burden on us to be planning for the sea-level rise, and to be prudent.” he said. "It just is not smart to build in very low-lying areas, to build in these high-velocity flood zones.”
For now, the BRA is asking the Lewis Wharf hotel developers to respond to a variety of concerns. John Dalzell, a senior architect with the BRA, says they want to see developments in velocity zones include things like parks and wetlands that break waves up and diminish their power.
"They’re really multifaceted solutions," Dalzell said. "That’s the way to go forward. And we’ve got our own learning to do on that, but we certainly see a lot of good practice unfolding here in the harbor in Boston, and see that as a way forward.”
Climate change doesn’t have to stop coastline development, Adams says. Instead, it can spur innovation and advancement. But why take the chance?
"As a developer, we take those risks," he said. "We find a site that we like, that we think can be a special place, that we can create an everlasting project that’s going to be a legacy on the site. And when you have the opportunity to do something like that, that’s why we take these risks that we take."
For Adams, that risk is worth taking, even though he expects the Lewis Wharf hotel building will take more money to design, construct, and, eventually, insure.
