|
“I would say that we have no shortage of things we need to spend money on, and so like any household, it's difficult to say we need to spend something that has a probability of happening 50 years from now, instead of spending money on something we need right now,” Allison said.
He noted that the pandemic has completely inverted BART’s funding model. Where once the agency was completely self-sufficient, the pandemic changed that. Now, it’s reliant on federal funding to stay afloat, but there's no guarantee it will be available in the future.
“We don’t have a pot of money we can just devote to climate change,” Allison said. “We’re working on it, but like anything else, it’s competing for other things that need to be funded.”
Kristina Hill, an associate professor at UC Berkeley, studies the risks sea level and groundwater rise pose to urban areas. It’s not just sea level rise we have to worry about, she stressed.
“The groundwater next to the coast is going to rise in many places as sea level rises,” she said. “That’s something a lot of people haven’t planned for. I’m going to be very surprised if that doesn’t affect pumping at BART stations and at tunnels.”
The higher groundwater rises, the more lengths of tunnel will be affected, Hill said. She noted that BART already does “a lot of pumping” at Powell Street because the tunnels are especially deep and “very affected” by the pressure of groundwater.
She also noted that as one system goes down, the rest of the systems can follow like dominos cascading one after the other.
As Feng and other experts stressed, BART is just one pawn in a massive chess game. The problem of sea level rise is so massive and threatening, it requires an interagency, multiregional response, with support from the state and federal governments.
“We're going to be better off as a region if we don't leave it up to each individual agency to try to manage sea level rise on its own or to try to manage the impacts of climate change on their own,” said Nick Josefowitz, the chief of policy at SPUR, a nonprofit public policy organization, and a former BART director. “We need an approach that’s going to identify the shared risks we face, but also the shared risks we face as an interconnected region, as a set of interconnected communities.”
Josefowitz said a coordinated response across agencies and cities to address sea level rise is essential and “involves having the state play a really active role in supporting that coordination as well as providing the funding that is needed to make our transit infrastructure more resilient to sea level rise and other climate risks.”
Those other climate risks include extreme heat, which BART has taken concrete measures to address after the aforementioned system delays, as well as excess rain and flooding.
| 
