Potsdam climate assessment IDs flooding, wind, winter storms as major hazards

Apr. 19--POTSDAM -- A Climate Vulnerability Assessment completed for the town and village of Potsdam is helping to identify how the communities can become more resilient to severe weather events while also making them more appealing for state grant funding.

Town Board members Tuesday voted to accept the report, which was submitted by the Climate Smart Communities Taskforce, a joint committee between the town and village, following a presentation by Clarkson University's Institute For A Sustainable Environment Sustainability Coordinator Alex French, who also chairs a resiliency subcommittee to the Potsdam Climate Smart Communities Committee.

Mr. French put together about a seven-minute Zoom Technologies, pre-recorded, slide-show presentation that he submitted to the town board and village council.

Village council members are expected to vote on whether to approve the report Monday.

"We put a group of maybe 40 or 50 honor students and Maya Cliffe, a sustainability intern, to work on climate smart communities for the town and the village for a full academic year and this section is what that group came up with," Mr. French told the Times. "It kind of sets up a foundation of 'Where do we stand? What's our climate profile? Where are we vulnerable?' and Where do we need to invest our resources and our energy to be more resilient?'"

In addition to relying heavily on a 2013 Federal Emergency Management Agency report filed by the village, Mr. French said climate and insurance data were collected from around the county and the report looks at how things have changed in the north country.

The report identified flooding, wind/microbursts and ice storms as the three climate hazards for the area with the climate profile showing the temperature is increasing, more in the winter than other seasons, the amount of precipitation is increasing, there is an increase in the variability of weather and a frequency of intense storms, Mr. French said.

"When we talk about resiliency and what we are vulnerable to, let's say there is a disruption like the Ice Storm of 1998, the performance of the community is going to drop down, but what's our ability to bounce back to a full recovery? Or will we bounce back to a partial recovery? We want to be a resilient community that can bounce back after disasters," he said. "More immediate goals are to apply for funding right through the Climate Smart Communities Program, but there's other funding sources that we could apply for that would help us."

According to his presentation to the two municipalities, stormwater flooding is considered a moderately high hazard with flood insurance claims per year increasing, with a projected 11.3 increase going forward. Microbursts and windstorms are also a moderately high hazard, with insurance claims between 1995 to 2005 equaling $5,121 per event, while from 2006 to 2018 claims rose to $19,828 per event with an expected increase in damages per event moving ahead. Severe winter storms/ice storms are also seeing an increase from 1995 to 2005, .09 storms a year at $4,652,319 per event, from 2006 to 2018 there were .23 events a year at $687,480 per event and projected for 2019 through 2029, .37 events a year are expected at $2,669,899 per event.

"Again, as the temperatures are increasing and we're not sinking down into freezing temperatures but we are hovering right around the freezing point, we are much more vulnerable to more frequent ice storms.

On the village side of the report, he said the municipality will be applying for and is hoping to get some financing to get some improvements for the cross-town canal. A multi-phase $25 million project aimed at stabilizing the century-old underground canal is underway in an attempt to handle 21st century rainstorms.

"So that canal system is dated and it can handle a 10-year storm event and one of the main things we are seeing through climate change is 100-year storms are becoming 10-year storms and that sort of thing," Mr. French said.

There has also been talks of staging areas on either side of the Raquette River in case of major flooding preventing use of bridges to cross the river.

"Just trying to think about any kind of emergency situation, you need to be able to have some kind of continuity about operations for say two to three weeks before things get put back online, so where are we vulnerable in that sense?" Mr. French said. "The whole Northeast region is getting more precipitation than it's had in the past. The freeze-thaw cycles that also lead to ice storms, they also cause more ice jams. That kind of thing is much more likely than it had been in the past."

Toni Kennedy, a Town Board member who also sits on the Climate Smart Communities Taskforce, said additional benefits in completing the assessment gives municipalities better scores on applications for the state Department of Environmental Conservation and Climate Smart Communities grants, which currently Potsdam is going to use the vulnerability assessment to apply for the CSC grants, she said.

And then you do get state-level recognition for your leadership," Mrs. Kennedy said. "We would get that state-level recognition, which would obviously give the state an idea that we are up here, working hard and give the state a red flag to pay attention to this area because they are doing all this work. So it is just an additional way to bring in funding and recognition to the community."

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