A fragile stretch of California’s famous Highway 1 reached a breaking point. After years of costly stopgap fixes, officials finally took a radical step: moving the highway inland.
What happened?
According to a book excerpt published in the Los Angeles Times this month detailing rebuilding work in recent years, waves carved away at the Sonoma County coastline for decades, eroding fragile cliffs by roughly a foot per year. By 2019, the highway had been reduced to a single lane in places. From 2004 to 2018 alone, emergency repairs cost California taxpayers nearly $10 million.
“This is what unmanaged retreat looks like, and it is quite frankly a hot mess of septic systems, old house parts, and armoring that have fallen into the intertidal zone with no real mechanism for cleaning it up,” Sonoma County supervisor Lynda Hopkins said in the book, “California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline,” by Rosanna Xia.
In response, the state’s transportation department approved a $73 million project to shift nearly a mile of Highway 1 more than 350 feet inland, Xia reported for the Times in 2020. It was anchored by a new bridge designed to give nearby wetlands and streams space to recover.
Why is this relocation important?
The overheating of the planet due to our use of dirty energy sources creates multiple threats to coastal communities such as this one. This human action supercharges extreme weather events, creating more powerful storms that pound vulnerable coastlines with increasing force…