If the region did flood over all those towns and cities, how long would it take for the waters to be clean? I'm thinking of abandoned gas stations, industrial sites, rotting old buildings, asphalt surfaces...
...and all of the Superfund sites around here from when "Silicon Valley" meant there was a startup chipmaker on every block, with all the delightful chemicals (and budget for proper disposal of same) that that implies. About 2% of the Superfund sites in the U.S. are under the water on that map.
Silicon Valley has lots of Superfund sites but it's not all about the silicon, and the nastiest stuff is older.
The Superfund site in my neighborhood is the former ag supply business. Thy sold pesticides to the local farmers, and were not careful about cleanup. There is a thick layer of clay over the old ground and houses on top now. Disturb it at your peril.
On the other side of town where a semiconductor plant used to be, they have a little fenced off well and a pump spraying water in the air. The contaminants evaporate out and blow away. Eventually the groundwater will be clean again.
Interestingly enough, there is now housing where I used to work in Sunnyvale. It was part of a Superfund site, and the remediation started way back even before I started at AMD in '82. I was a safety coordinator for my department, and heard about the remediation as part of the task.
Assuming industrial civilization is gone, the area along the Sacramento river would probably still have enough currents to sweep stuff down to the ocean. The broad flat inland oceans would probably within a few decades have enough of a layer of silly built up that the water would mostly be OK...unless something dredged up the bottom...
Second fun fact: debris from the mining explosives of the 1849ers up in the Sierra foothills is just now making its way through the San Francisco Bay, courtesy of the slow but inexorable river currents. (source: I attended a "DredgeFest" expedition a couple years ago.)
tech level? Are we talking, alternate earth where there was never major construction there, and everybody's just moved uphill a bit? Someone trying to scavenge copper from increasingly deep water? Alien archeologists? Slow resumption of trade in wooden sailing vessels?
I don't think that's possible with the transverse faults we have here because the Pacific plate is moving northward relative to the North American plate, carrying some extreme coastal bits of land with it. Point Reyes will be in Alaska someday, though.
Then there is Isla de California, where California is an island. And depending on the sources, it's either an island up to San Francisco, or according to the Spanish explorer Juan de Fuca, an island all the way up to Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Now imagine what sort of adventures you'd have there...
As is built land, but that doesn't stop people from trying. I could see people trying a combination of dams and raised earthworks to save valuable communities or farmland from rising waters. How well it would work depends on your faith in the US Army Corps of Engineers, but catastrophic failure could make for an interesting disaster novel.
Buried somewhere in my book collection is a novel called The Wave, in which a landslip into a Canadian dam's reservoir raises a 600ft wave that destroys the dam and heads downstream. Oh, and of course there's a nuclear power plant in its path, just in case the wave wasn't going to do enough damage on its own.
Unless they are natural dams! Built by beavers. Small dams all the way down the streams flowing into the big rivers. Trap silt, fill up, beavers move, build dam ...
Looks like I can stay put; even at +7m, my home's not underwater (well, not the upper story), and at 9m, I'll just have to set up camp a parking lot in the next block.
...living on a 50x100m asphalt island is sustainable, right?
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2020-08-06 07:34 pm
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The Superfund site in my neighborhood is the former ag supply business. Thy sold pesticides to the local farmers, and were not careful about cleanup. There is a thick layer of clay over the old ground and houses on top now. Disturb it at your peril.
On the other side of town where a semiconductor plant used to be, they have a little fenced off well and a pump spraying water in the air. The contaminants evaporate out and blow away. Eventually the groundwater will be clean again.
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tech level? Are we talking, alternate earth where there was never major construction there, and everybody's just moved uphill a bit? Someone trying to scavenge copper from increasingly deep water? Alien archeologists? Slow resumption of trade in wooden sailing vessels?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_California
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2. Does there exist an RPG about dam-building?
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(Anonymous) 2020-08-08 11:03 am (UTC)(link)Paul Clarke
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http://flood.firetree.net/
Set to 60m.
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...living on a 50x100m asphalt island is sustainable, right?
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(Admittedly, one of those 30 year droughts could be troublesome).