Since 1931, Tweed New Haven Airport has sat on a spit of what was once salt marsh and wetlands straddling the East Haven border. It is wedged between New Haven Harbor where the Quinnipiac River empties, the Farm River mouth separating East Haven and Branford, and Long Island Sound. It is transected by other waterways — Tuttle Brook and Morris Creek.
And it floods.
Recent morning thunderstorms left water rimming the runways and pooling in adjacent residential roads.
It will only get worse.
No matter what predictive model you use, this piece of Connecticut is destined for inundation from sea level rise. Throw in a tropical storm like Irene in 2011 or Sandy in 2012, nevermind a replay of the Hurricane of 1938, and it’s all under water.
Yet as the legislature wrestles with a bill designed to allow expansion at Tweed including, most critically, an extension of its main runway, the dispute has largely landed on the well-worn arguments about the airport.
Opponents argue against expansion for all the predictable reasons: the airport is in a residential area, traffic will be a nightmare, noise and pollution will increase. Fans of expansion say these factors are outweighed by the need for the airport to serve as an economic driver for the region.
But there’s been almost no mention that the land itself may well be underwater by 2050.
Jim O’Donnell, executive director of Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation (CIRCA), whose new interactive modeling system — use it here — shows risk to the site even now, points out that many U.S. airports are built along vulnerable coasts — JFK in New York, LAX in Los Angeles. In Connecticut, in addition to Tweed, Groton and Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford both experience flooding.
“They’re all built...
from News https://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Sinking-land-could-ground-Tweed-airport-expansion-13803490.php
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