Urban planner Jim Stickley watched as a creek “just barely” contained swelling king tide waves on the edge of downtown Redwood City on Jan. 2. Redwood Creek runs along two major thoroughfares in the bayshore city, Main Street and Veterans Boulevard, and is flanked by multistory apartment complexes and a Kaiser Permanente Medical Center. The near-flooding event served as a sobering reminder to the city consultant that water levels like this will likely be the norm by 2050, and by 2100, tides could be 3 to 6 feet above that.
Planners are keeping the bayshore city’s elevated flood risk in mind as they formulate a vision for what downtown and the surrounding area will look like over the next quarter of a century.
“Very soon, we’re going to be overtopping the banks,” Stickley, whose firm WRT has a $3 million consulting contract with the city, told the City Council during a January meeting. “… That is going to start changing quite rapidly as we move forward into the next decade.”…