DEVELOPING A COASTAL FLOODING RISK ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT CLIMATE-SMART WORKING WATERFRONTS IN MAINE

Maine’s working waterfronts are already prone to flooding during the highest annual tides and high-tide storm surges, with impacts ranging from minor nuisances (e.g. a few wet tires in a parking lot) to damaged utilities that halt operations. We are developing a risk assessment framework that supports climate-smart adaptation of working waterfront operations and infrastructure, which are central to the economy and identity of Maine’s coastal towns. Given the dual challenges of limited funding and the shortened lifespan of salt-exposed infrastructure, working waterfront managers are routinely faced with assessing tradeoffs between flood risk and adaptation cost. Our framework will support managers in inventorying assets, determining design elevations, and evaluating replacement options given infrastructure lifespan, elevation, code requirements, and risk tolerance. We compute design elevations by combining probabilistic sea level rise, joint tide-surge statistics, and published sea level rise allowance frameworks. With this framework, working waterfronts will be equipped to build flood resilience through their everyday management decisions.