Capstone Project: Stage 6 Instructions and Examples

So I chose San Francisco for my Capstone project. I've been to San Francisco before, and I've seen some of the engineering with my own eyes, so I thought it'd be interesting to explore San Francisco in its entirety. So this is an overview map of the entire city of San Francisco. All the most important locations that I talk about in the project are pinned on the map taken from Google Earth. On the left, starting all the way in the bottom left, we have Pacifica Beach, which isn't technically part of San Francisco, but it's important to the project. And as we move up, there's the Oceanside Water Treatment Plant, the West Side Pump Station, San Francisco Zoo, and the Great Highway and Ocean Beach, with, of course, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Embarcadero, and the San Francisco Bay. So this is a close-up of three out of the five main concerns and considerations I addressed. The Oceanside Water Treatment Plant on the bottom, and the zoo, and the West Side Pump Station. So the zoo and the infrastructure make it especially vulnerable, as it's so close to sea level. And I said, three out of the five, because there's two others, there's the Embarcadero and the Great Highway, which you'll see in the next picture. So there is the Great Highway right here. And this is actually a close-up of Ocean Beach, and I thought it was worth including a close-up here because I talk about this quite a bit in this project. But you can see there's little to no space on the beach that is not built up to protect the buildings behind it. It starts with Dunes at the bottom, and as you travel up, there's a sea wall, and then more dunes, and then another sea wall. So this is a topographic profile of San Francisco that starts directly in the center of the city and travels West, eventually ending at the Pacific Ocean. I have a topographic map of the entire city later in the presentation, but this shows you just how much change in elevation San Francisco really has. It's pretty amazing to me how quickly the elevation changes in this city. So this is Ocean Beach. So, Dune restoration is very common along the beach. The picture on the left is before, and the picture on the right is after the Army Corps of Engineers constructed a new Dune to defend the infrastructure located along Ocean Beach. The infrastructure defended, I already talked about some of it, but there's the Great Highway, the Ocean Tidewater Treatment Plant, the West Side Pump Station, and the San Francisco Zoo. And credit can be given to Thomas Pendergast here, as he took the pictures before and after the construction was done. So this is a section of Pacifica Beach, which is not technically in San Francisco, but it's close enough. And this emphasizes the need for managed retreat as erosion continues taking land away. These man-made structures or these man-made areas are very close to collapsing, as you can see on the right, and it's circled on the left. The left shows the eroded land slowly approaching the man-made structures. And on the right is a zoomed-in picture of the same section that shows the scale of the erosion. So the right picture was provided by Duncan Sinfield from a YouTube video that we watched in class, actually. So, I was unable to make this picture less blurry, so I apologize for that, but I thought it was important to include. So much of the graphic doesn't apply to San Francisco itself, but it applies to the bay, and it's important to recognize all the work being done to protect the bay, and we still have problems with flooding. So just take a look at all the various lines to get an idea for the strategies being used here. So I included the map on the left, which is brought by NOAA, to show that the places closest to sea level are not necessarily the most vulnerable in this city. The city has a really interesting topography, which you can see on the right, and it makes it super easy for humans to prepare for incoming hazards. And you can see the stretch of the beach of Ocean Beach, on the west, there, right around the middle, it's just slightly vulnerable. And then there's dark red sections, which show high vulnerability. And then the white slash light red sections that show low vulnerability. And the typography map was made by Brian Stokle. So the map on the left here shows the San Francisco city inundation upon 10 feet of sea level rise. The map was made by NOAA Interactive Sea Level Rise Viewer because I found the exact map when I was doing my research, but it's cleaned up by SF planning. And then the map on the right shows sea level rise projections provided by the state of California and the U.S Army Corps of Engineers. And by 2100, rise projections range from one foot to 12 feet, which is a huge scale. So about six to eight feet of sea level rise is expected by 2100, as said by California, and only three feet is expected, as said by the Army Corps of Engineers. So the graph does a really good job of representing the uncertainty surrounding sea level rise projections. And the graph on the right was made by SF Lifelines Council. So this is another piece of information provided by SF Lifeline Council, slide credits can be given SF Lifeline Council and not to me, just to be clear. So, assuming that there's three feet sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay, this is about how much of the Embarcadero will be inundated with water. So the vulnerability really emphasizes the need to build the Embarcadero or to rebuild a better Embarcadero Seawall, which is actually in the process of being done. So, here's the physical summary. So, San Francisco is located on an active right-lateral transform plate boundary, known as the North American Pacific Plate Boundary. And tectonic movement along this plate boundary causes earthquakes and tsunamis. San Francisco is a peninsula, and it has both Rocky coastlines and sandy beaches, so I would call it an emergent wave-dominant coastline. And hazards include severe storms and flooding, tsunamis, sea level rise, and earthquakes. And I would rate it a medium risk to hazards. So here we have the Human Social Summary. The population is a little over 800,000. I won't get into all the numbers here, but it's about 44.9 percent white, 34.3 Asian, and the biggest age group is the 22 to 24 age people, and that's about 37.5 percent of the population. The building breakdown is hotels, industrial buildings, retail, high-rise buildings, manufacturing plants. They manufacture ships, aerospace products, electronics, food, and apparel. And then there's the landmarks, of course, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, USS Pampanito, the Mission District, California Academy of Modern Science, and the list goes on. So, the Engineering and Infrastructure Summary. The infrastructure, there's the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, Embarcadero, the Great Highway, Route 101. There's a ton of piers and four ports. The water infrastructure includes the West Side Pump Station, Oceanside Treatment Plant, and the water supply from the ground, and a little bit from reservoirs outside the city. And then the engineering, there's hard structures like the O'Shaughnessy Seawall, the Embarcadero Seawall, Norwegian Seawall, and the sea dikes. And there's also soft structures. There's various plants and grasses planted on dunes to contain sand, and there's also fences that help limit erosion. And then there's dune restoration. So, the Vulnerability and Planning Summary. There's an old population of about 13.6 percent of the San Francisco population, and then there's the poverty, which is about 10.1 percent of San Francisco. And these groups are pretty vulnerable. But depending on their relation to low sea level areas, they may not be at risk. Living at low sea level or low elevation is not super common in San Francisco because much of the city is built at a higher elevation. But if they do live or if someone lives close to a low elevation, they are definitely vulnerable. And then, as far as planning, there's the Embarcadero Seawall Program, advancing living shorelines in the bay, marsh restoration, de-paving parks, building codes, planned retreat and land use plans, increase beach renourishment, and dune management. And last but not least, we have the Resiliency Recommendations Summary. Number one is beach renourishment and dune management. I would do this one first. It's pretty easy and not super expensive. It's only temporary, as erosion takes from it, but we do our best to limit erosion. Number two is expedited managed retreat in Ocean Beach in Pacifica Beach. So if we move the buildings away, we'll reduce population vulnerability and create an opportunity for flood mitigation. Number three is a focus on ecological restoration funding. So restoring wetlands, waterways, parks, and they improves flood resiliency. Number four is to begin construction on a movable flood barrier. So this is an example of a smart building technique, but something like the MOSE barrier or the Thames barrier. And I would do it right where the Golden Gate Bridge is to protect the Bay from flooding. And then number five is to increase Green Space, as this will create habitats as well as recreation, and it will reduce incoming wave energy. And then this is my reference slide. Thank you very much.

Hi, I'm Riegen Poduszlo, and this is my presentation on Shenzhen, China, for Earth 107.

Okay, so Shenzhen is in a very interesting location because it is a low-elevated level and it's right by the Pearl River and the Sea down here. The coastline is this emergent on,e and it is a tide-dominated one. There's a large amount of sediment, and this is mostly due to shore erosion, which is a major problem right now.

Okay, so for the next couple of slides, I'm not going to have my camera on so that we can see in full detail the infographics I have. So here is the topographic of Shenzhen, and it is from what can be considered like the heart of Shenzhen, which is a very densely populated area to along the shore of the Pearl River. And here we can see not much of this is above 25 meters for elevation. So at this point here, that I highlighted, it's only at nine, which is not great whenever you're surrounded by water and are at very high risk of flooding like Shenzhen.

Here we have our start of the figures. So this is a color-coded map of Shenzhen. It is color-coded by flood hazard zones. All these little red dots are hot spots of places that are likely to and have been flooded. Here's the key. So as we can see, definitely likely to flood. But there's still, you know, some areas that are like fairly low. And this is from 2016. This is real data. And we have the predicted by 2030 and it is not looking any better. In fact, it's looking fairly worse. So it can be a little hard with the hot spots, but I think it demonstrates fairly well what Shenzhen is in for.

Shenzhen is a metropolitan area. It has over 13 million people, close to 14 million. This is going to be presumed to grow due to the growing tech industry. And this industry is bringing in a lot of billionaires and tech moguls into the area. And it's creating a rather large disparity in wealth. And I think these two photos exemplify that really well, with the skyline being rather new. And these, I'm going to presume are apartments, not being the same. Speaking of apartments, apartments are the largest form of housing in the area due to the dense population. Shenzhen has a very rich history with people inhabiting the area as far back as 7000 years ago. So much to be had here.

Okay, revisiting industries. Shenzhen's industries that they've had for long before the tech industry, is manufacturing and shipping. It's a global shipping hub. It's very important to not only China but to global trading. So it's a very high-risk area. If anything were to happen, it would disrupt trade and manufacturing globally.

Shenzhen is no stranger to flooding. It has always happened, it's just gotten way worse over the years. I think this picture demonstrates that really well. This entire street here is flooded. This is actually from the 2019 flood, which really sparked a lot of people and a lot of response in citizens, to start making a change and help mitigate these floodings and heavy rainfalls. And they want to do this by implementing the Sponge City design. And it is to address issues of flood risk and chronic water scarcity. Shenzhen is a very large area, very urban area, with a lot of history. And unfortunately, with that comes a lot of pollution, especially in the water. So they export, I believe, over 60% of their water from more rural areas. They don't really have a good reservoir, so they wanted to kill two birds with one stone with this design. So I think this really exemplifies this well. The soil composition of Shenzhen is really unique, where that it can hold a lot of water. So the idea would be getting heavy rainfall or flooding, putting into these water deposits or under the ground, in this really saturated area between the urban area, the city, and the Bedrock, and taking this water and putting into aquifers and cleaning it so that it can be used later on. So it would both take in all the excess water and then reuse it.

Shenzhen's sponge city concept is really interesting, but it's still in its infancy. So it is only in trial in certain parts of the region and has not been widely rolled out. For it to be rolled out, it's going to take time. So, in the meantime, they have implemented, what I understand to be, a very limited rollout of soft engineering solutions such as rocks between land and water, planting mangrove trees, and mud flats to help mitigate.

Okay, and now we're going to be reading from our summary portion of the presentation. So I'll just go through these bullet points. Southern China is a subtropical climate located on the Eurasian plate, and it's not very close to plate boundaries, so it's not a tectonically active area. Intervention has played a huge factor over the past 40 years in reducing the erosion of the shoreline, using sea walls as well as other soft engineering methods. Shenzhen is implementing the use of a sponge city that will lower flooding and add to their water reservoirs. Over the past 30 years, the restoration of tidal mangroves in tidal mud flats are helping to reduce flooding and CO2, and these endeavors that they're doing are called nourishment projects. Unfortunately, Shenzhen only recently began setting more of a firm plan after a major flood in 2019. So they're approaching this as a response not only to flooding but as climate change as a whole. And, according to the Chinese government, policy is still in its infancy, and there needs to be more research done before policy can be implemented. So there is not much out there on what the Chinese government plans to do in terms of response for its citizens.

Okay, continuing on with our other summary slides, I'm going to continue to read bullet points and give some more information. So, a goal of Shenzhen is to make their city a smart city, and this is going to be done by implementing new Smart Water utilities, which is the sponge city concept, and it's just referring to all the moving parts that would be involved in making Shenzhen a sponge city. So there's over 13 million people, as mentioned before, and this is a major deal because a 2018 study found that most citizens are unprepared for natural disasters and are lacking proper education in this. And this can be contributed majorly to income inequalities, regarding access to information, access to vehicles to get away from the city to evacuate, as well as being afforded the luxury of having time to research and prepare for these matters. So the general advice given to people is to seek elevated areas. And I wanted to also mention again, highlight the income inequalities, because as shown before in a previous couple of slides, the housing they are apartment buildings, but they're rather low and they're not exactly very new. So, where they're seeking shelter is definitely a concern.

Okay, and now on to a summary of resiliency recommendations. Shenzhen has a large population and a lot of vital Industries, so there are a few things I'd like to recommend. The first would be to make well-known plans for both evacuation and recovery that consider both citizens from affluent backgrounds as well as those from less privileged ones. With the recent floods going so awry, it's become more or less of a wake-up call for those of Shenzhen, as well as those around the globe, how important it is to prepare, so we can ensure everyone's safety. And this would be by making safety plans and evacuations well-known to everyone in the general public. And I mentioned this as my number one because the Chinese government has not implemented a policy that's set in stone, that takes into account every Citizen's way of evacuation. So I think that would be the first thing because this is a matter of when and not if another flood this bad happens again. Continuing, I'd like to continue to build shorelines and invest in ways to reduce the effects of sea level rising and flooding. So the sponge city concept is a really interesting one, and I really hope this goes well, but they're putting all their eggs, or more or less all their eggs, into this sponge city basket. And, as mentioned before, in phase one, they've implemented soft engineering techniques that have been fairly effective. So I think instead of phasing that out, they continue to implement both the sponge city concept as well as more soft engineering ideas. And that'd be about it. Thank you.