During high-water events like last week’s king tide, Marin County’s densest neighborhood begins to drown.
Near the harbor, saltwater trickles out from under an apartment building and swamps a restaurant patio, finding cracks in foundations and cement walls put up to staunch it. It inches up the tires of parked cars and pools over evacuation routes. Multistory buildings loom like islands.
This San Rafael neighborhood, home to 12,000 people, is the Bay Area’s most vulnerable to sea level rise, for a multitude of reasons. It perches over a canal leading to the San Francisco Bay, and parts of it were originally built on soil added to fill in the wetlands and bay itself — a topography that is causing it to sink even as the ocean and bay rise. Even in the immediate term, a large earthquake or a huge, 100-year storm combined with a high tide could create inundation by several feet, experts say…