Efforts are underway to protect the low-lying areas of Port Townsend from the encroachment of rising sea levels, with one source of potential funding coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Port of Port Townsend Capital Projects Manager Dave Nakagawara explained that FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program offers a grant whose deadline for application is Feb. 29, 2024.

BRIC is a nationally competitive annual grant opportunity that replaced the pre-2020 Pre-Disaster Mitigation program, and it supports states, tribes, territories and other local communities in undertaking hazard mitigation projects to reduce the risks those communities face from disasters and natural hazards.

Nakagawara dislikes referring to these efforts as a “seawall” project, because he expects it will ultimately include a number of structural elements beyond a mere seawall, thus making the label inaccurate, insofar as it’s incomplete.

He reported that Seattle-based KPFF was retained as the consulting engineering firm through a competitive design contract in September of this year, which was advertised in the Daily Journal of Commerce.

Whatever solution is proposed to BRIC for funding, Nakagawara anticipates it will undergo government review for a period of 12 to 18 months, after which he expects it would take “at least” another three to four years to secure further permitting and permissions, from multiple other agencies, to finally proceed.

Nakagawara emphasized that the goal is to develop long-term solutions to potential levels of coastal flooding to come that will aim to make use of the most accurate and up-to-the-minute scientific data available, while projecting ahead to compensate for some of the most extreme prospective eventualities.

Nakagawara cited the king tides of recent years as evidence that such climate change is already taking its toll on downtown Port Townsend, which he described as significantly reliant upon its maritime trade.

“It’s not just rising sea levels that are the problem, although we need to take into account whatever levels they might rise to,” Nakagawara said. “It’s also the increasing impact of the tides, storms and wind in the meantime. We need to design in anticipation of changes that might take place over 50 years.”

Among the data points Nakagawara expects their proposal to consider are wave-modeling that incorporates the area’s underwater and upland geography, projections of the potential losses of property, jobs and lives that could be incurred by future flooding events, and how the overall benefits of any proposed plans would outweigh the costs of not having such plans in place.