As part of my ongoing effort to steward climate change preparation for my district, I’ve made a practice of checking in with the MBTA every couple of years on the status of their resiliency planning. I focus especially on the risk of subway tunnel flooding due to sea-level rise and increased precipitation.
In 2019, I was alarmed by what seemed to be a lack of progress on resiliency issues. Then COVID hit, and the MBTA’s service quality and staffing troubles hit, and I stepped back to let management deal with more urgent challenges.
I recently checked in again on climate resiliency and I was pleased by what I heard. The MBTA shared two slide decks — one on overall MBTA climate planning and the other more specifically focused on resiliency.
I was most interested to get a sense of whether the T’s planning efforts had gotten down from high level ideas to the very in-the-weeds engineering questions of which facilities are vulnerable to extreme flooding events — especially destructive salt water flooding due to sea level rise. We spent some time talking about several specific Red and Green line locations. I was glad to hear that the T had done the necessary inventory of all openings that could begin taking in water if flood waters rose to particular elevations. Based on that inventory and knowledge of the probability of flooding at those elevations, they have identified the most immediate and largest risks and are setting projects in motion. I was also pleased that the same person had building a team on the issue for several years. I had previously had a sense some staff instability.
I came away encouraged that the MBTA appears to be on the right track on this particular issue. It’s one that I will continue to stay in touch with.
Lovely to hear. I’m feeling better on the topic.