Sea level rise caused by climate change could cause thousands of toxic sites in the U.S. to flood in the coming decades, according to new research.
Under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, more than 5,500 hazardous sites across the U.S. will be at risk of a 1-in-100-year flood by the year 2100, according to a paper published Thursday in Nature. These sites include facilities that handle sewage, toxic waste, oil and gas and other industrial pollutants as well as formerly used defense sites, according to a paper published Thursday in Nature.
Of the the at-risk sites, at least 3,800 locations are projected to flood by 2050, the study found.
Many of the U.S. coastlines are heavily industrialized for a variety of reasons, including access to raw materials and proximity to open seas transportation, Lara Cushing, an associate professor of environmental health science at the University of California Los Angeles and lead author of the paper, told ABC News.
In the past several decades, extreme flooding events caused by storms like Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 flooded industrial facilities, releasing toxic chemicals into the floodwaters and air, Cushing said.
Researchers at UCLA put together a database of industrial and contaminated sites, such as sewage treatment plants, active oil and gas refineries and other types of industrial facilities — a total of nearly 50,000 sites across 23 coastal U.S. states and Puerto Rico, Cushing said. They then estimated flood risks at those locations for the years 2050 and 2100 under greenhouse emissions scenarios: high emissions and moderate emissions.
The findings indicate that the states at most risk of flooding at toxic sites include Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts and Texas. Those seven states account for nearly 80% of the hazardous sites at risk by 2100, according to the paper.
Thousands of toxic sites in US at risk of flooding in coming decades due to sea level rise: Study
