Gentle Decline 2/12: Shelter in place
In which the concept of not moving inland is examined.
Hello. This issue of Gentle Decline is about things you can do without moving inland. That is, things you can do in your current housing, whether you’re renting or you own it, to better deal with the changes in weather and climate. Some of these may be practical for you, some may not. If the place you’re living in needs changes, and you absolutely can’t make them, and you can’t move, well… contact me. I’m not saying I can help directly, but there are many, many interested subscribers to this newsletter who might be able to do something. Community is the way forward.
[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise. The spotlighted product for this issue is the Gentle Decline Chicken doing her thing on t-shirts in three nice non-black colours.]
The very first thing I’m going to say that is that some places are, at some point in the future, just not going to be suitable for people to live in. These are areas that will definitively be under water, and where wet-bulb temperatures of 35C happen frequently. So you need to take a look at where you are and assess for those two conditions.
In the case of the latter, you can, in theory, get by with air conditioning. If the power goes, and your AC stops, you are in literal and immediate danger of dying from heat. It’s not a risk I’d take, at all. The other thing about this is that it will not be gradual; if you pay close attention to weather forecasts, you might have 2-3 days warning of the wet-bulb temperature, and very little warning at all of the power going out. I don’t think any of my readers are in Pakistan or India, which are one of the big risk areas for this, but others might be near the shores of the Red Sea, the Gulf of California, or the southern Gulf of Mexico; all of these are places which will almost certainly reach these conditions at some point in the next couple of decades.
The question of whether a given place will be under water is not all that straightforward, though, and it has some knock-on effects. Some places - mostly large urban areas with relatively wealthy populations - will build dykes, dams, sea-walls, and other defences to keep the water out, as is currently done in the Netherlands. This will require a stupendous amount of money, and my confidence in it being done before there are deaths and immense property damage is low. So if you live near the sea - particularly if you’re below 5m above sea level: do your research, find out what’s being done about sea-level rise in your area, and if absolutely nothing is being done - which will be the case in most places - then you know you’re going to have to handle water. It is, however, going to arrive slowly and gradually, so it is possible for governments to come to their senses after relatively minor damage and get going on defences.
If neither of these conditions are true for you, then you can probably adapt in place. I’m not saying it’s going to be comfortable, but it’ll be ok.
The very first thing you want to do is look at how your current housing handles more extreme weather. This comes under water from above, water from below, wind, heat, and cold. I’ll go through these one by one. If you’re in an apartment, chances are high that you’ll need to get your management company to do this stuff; you won’t be allowed to do it directly.
Water from above, first: can your home cope with a lot of rain? This isn’t just “does your roof leak?”, although if it does, get on fixing that. There are other potential issues, though. Are flash floods possible in your immediate area? If so, will your house/apartment building be in their path? What are your foundations like? It’s hard to imagine that entire buildings can be destroyed by water flow where there’s ordinarily no water, but if you look up the aftermath of flash floods, you’ll see it’s entirely possible. Dealing with this kind of issue could be as straightforward as determining it can’t really happen (if you live on an actual hilltop, for example), or as complex as having your building reinforced in some way. Generally, the thing here is not to build flood walls; they’ll shunt water elsewhere and come under pressure while they do. Instead, look at planting trees (ideally in numbers, nor just one or two), removing unnecessary concrete or tarmac, and allowing normal ground drainage to happen. An area of light forest uphill from you is pretty much the best floodproofing you can have in this context.
Next, is there sufficient drainage in your back yard or access-ways to allow a lot of sudden rain to run off, or is it going to be behave like a blocked sink? A great many apartment buildings have parking areas around, near, or under them which are basically basins. They have drainage through grates, which go into sewers or open waterways. If the amount of water coming in - runoff from the roof, directly in rain, overflow from concrete or tarmac up-slope - exceeds what can go through the grate (or the grate gets blocked), you get a buildup of water. The same can happen in urban buildings, where walled backyards (or pocket spaces, in more accurate terms) don’t have other outlets. The solutions here are mostly to make better drainage (you also have the possibility of roofing over this area, and making sure there’s no way for water to get in). This could be increasing the size of an outlet, creating new outlets (in old walls, a sledgehammer can knock a few bricks out with little difficulty), or pulling up concrete or tarmac to expose bare earth (which can then be planted with ground cover plants, shrubs, etc; you probably don’t want to plant trees right by your foundations). Essentially, in the circumstance where a storm can drop 200mm of rainfall on you in less than 24 hours (as happened in New Jersey from the remnants of Hurricane Ida, for example, or in Belgium and Germany in the recent floods there), it needs to be possible for that water to drain away non-destructively, not build up in pools. And if you can’t get the water to drain away, you may be dealing with water from below.
Water from below mostly refers to unexpected-but-not-flash-flooding; the kind you get when your house is on a flood plain, or there’s a lot of rain over several days or weeks, or some idiot upriver has “improved” drainage and now a river near you is backing up at the bridge, or… look, there’re a lot of ways you can have water approaching you (relatively) slowly. In this case, things like flood gates may be useful - these are essentially metal panels that you can drop into frames in gateways, doorways, and even windows. If they’re properly built - and the walls around them are solid - they can keep a flood of a few feet at bay. Sandbags might help if you can’t get proper flood gates.
Additionally, you can make sure that none of your essentials are actually at or below ground level. Waste water probably goes underground; there’s not a lot you can do about that (and unfortunately, it’s what makes slow floods really nasty). Electricity and gas meters or access points, though, can be quite low down on the outside of a house, and it’s worth getting a contractor to move those up if they’re in potential danger. If you need to have a safe in the house, make sure it’s not at ground level. Get low-level wall sockets moved up. And if you’ve any furniture you’re really fond of, either move it upstairs or make sure you can move it easily. If you’re in a bungalow, make sure you have attic access. If there’s no attic… well, prepare a go bag and a list of valuables to take with you in case of need.
The next thing is wind. Because calm days are the exception in Ireland (and many Irish people, me included, find them a bit creepy), most of our houses are moderately windproof to begin with. Some of the older houses, with their stone walls and slate roofs that have settled over centuries, are extremely windproof. However, a number of modern buildings - particularly office and apartment blocks, public buildings like community halls, barns, sheds, and so on - haven’t been designed with wind in mind, and don’t resist it in the same way. Building codes are supposed to cover this, although my efforts to track down what I.S. EN 1991-1-4 actually covers have not met with great success. So assessing whether your house or apartment can handle wind isn’t easy.
There’s little doubt that it’s necessary, though; of the five most damaging recorded storms - mostly ex-hurricanes - that have hit Ireland, four have been since the late 20th century; three in the last decade. That’s Hurricane Charlie, in 1986, Katia, in 2011, Darwin, in 2014, and Ophelia, in 2017. The other one was the “Night of the Big Wind” in 1839, which has gone down in folk memory. And obviously, the frequency is increasing.
In buildings, mostly what’s dangerous are protruding edges of roofs, particularly on the side of the prevailing winds (south-westerly in Ireland). Wind can catch these, and if they’re not flexible, breakable or really solid, pull the whole roof off. Again, in an apartment building - which are unfortunately the most likely to have this issue - there’s not a lot you can do about it beyond speaking to the building management. Sheds, barns, and houses can be modified, or in short-term cases, have ropes put over them to help hold things down.
The main danger in Ireland for wind, though, is falling trees. Storms that arrive while trees are in leaf are much more likely to knock them, and storms that arrive after long periods of wet weather also have a higher chance. Of the three deaths in Ireland in Storm Ophelia, all of them were to do with trees. The solution here is not to remove trees, mind, no matter what some city councils seem to think. In most cases, it’s to plant more, so that the wind-load is spread, and so that there’s mutual support from roots. Trees also, as noted above, absorb rainfall, and generally make ground safer. That said, you don’t want very large trees sitting close on the prevailing wind side of your house, so some judicious removal may be in order. Plant more trees on the other side of the house instead.
Heat, then, and while it might be a bit odd to sit here in November in the Northern hemisphere and write about warmth, I’ll point out a little grimly that it is indeed November, and there still hasn’t been any frost in most parts of Ireland. But it’s mostly summer heat we need to be concerned with for this purpose. Ireland could go either way on heat; we could have generic warming, which would bring us a few more weeks every summer of hot temperatures (and high humidity), or the Gulf Stream could shut down, which would mostly make it colder here. In the short term, heat will be the issue.
Air conditioning is the obvious solution, and I’ve been very grateful for it in recent hot summers. But it doesn’t help in the long term; it’s enormously expensive in terms of energy use, it contributes to actual warming in the immediate areas around those it’s cooling, and those two in combination can lead to electrical blackouts where there’s just too much demand on the grid. Building houses and living spaces so that air can flow through them is a better solution here, and the addition of undergound spaces (cellars, basements, etc) can also provide some relief. None of these things are easy to do with existing housing, though. For that, here’s a solid thread of advice on Twitter which is from someone who has experience, which is much better than anything I can do.
Cold is, in my estimation, likely to be more of a long-term issue in Ireland. And even if ocean circulation doesn’t stop bringing us warm air, just the sheer randomness of changing climate is going to bring us occasional bouts like that of the winter of 2010-11. To handle cold, your house needs to have double (or triple) glazing, good insulation, ideally a porch or other “airlock” setup around your main-usage door, and if you can manage it at all, a source of heat that doesn’t depend on mains supply of electricity. The UK branch of Friends of the Earth provides a detailed article about eco-friendly home heating. In the US, “passive housing” is a thing. And to be fair to the designers of houses in Ireland in the mid-20th century, small rooms are easier to heat.
Having dealt with weather conditions, what else is there? Mostly, there’s energy. Solar panels on your roof, wind turbines anywhere they can go, and more water power are what’s needed here. Legislation is coming in Ireland to allow people to feed power back into the grid and get paid for it, and I think it’s very likely we’ll see even more of a leap in the installation of solar panels then. There’s already been a surge in them; I’m seeing them fitted on houses all around where I live. As of yet, it’s not viable for us to get them - grant monies only come through after installation, there’s a significant upfront cost, and it would take about ten years before we’d have evened out the actual cost in terms of benefits. But prices are coming steadily down.
For wind turbines, the main thing is to prevent idiots from opposing them. I love turbines; the hill above my father’s place in Wexford has a bunch of them, and I wish they’d been there when I lived there.
(Ballycadden, Co. Wexford, on a day of low clouds. The turbine blades disappearing into and reappearing out of the cloud layer were fantastic.)
For some reason, wind turbines have gone into rural mythology as being noisy or damaging, and you get people objecting to them in the face of all reason. I get very impatient with these people, and probably shouldn’t be allowed talk to them, as heated scorn converts very few. But if you can gently persuade people in your area not to fight progress, you’ll be doing good work. This is more in the realm of the local area than your own house, though, so I’ll deal more with that in the next issue.
That leaves water, and water-driven power, notwithstanding several excellent hydroelectric dams, is something we don’t use enough in Ireland at all. It’s possible to generate electricity at a very small scale from just about any running water. Here, as a slightly odd example, is a miniature-but-working model of the Hoover Dam. And more practically, a turbine that can work on pretty nearly any medium-sized stream. But again, water power is mostly a local-area project, and I’ll deal with in more detail again. That said, if you have a stream running right by your house, or on your property, or you’re lucky enough to live in an old mill, then it’s completely worth looking into. Even in Ireland’s worst droughts, it’s unlikely that our rivers and streams will stop running.
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Gentle Decline is on Twitter as @gentledecline, or you can visit gentledecline.org.
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