Back to Dunscombes Marsh

Cork city is back to it’s eighteenth century state this weekend, with the river reclaiming the old marshes and waterways that made up the city centre.  Driving through town in the past few months, I had reflected on how global warming would force us to rethink how we use the buildings in the city, but I had not thought the city would have to come to terms with the new reality so suddenly.

There is no handy map of eighteenth century Cork online, but I did a rough overlay in Google.

C18 reclamation in City Centre (Work in Progress)

As you can see, most of the modern city centre, on the island, was only reclaimed from marsh in the Eighteenth Century.  While some other parts of the centre had previously been reclaimed, the eighteenth century saw the most extensive reclamation and reshaping of the low-lying city centre. So essentially, all of the modern centre centre, which is now flooded and likely to flood again this evening, is only 250 years old. There is more detail on the City Corporation website.

Whatever about global warming causing a gradual rise in sea levels, the reality is that there is an increasing frequency of exceptional weather events.  The past three weeks record breaking rainfall and the resulting flooding this weekend will become more frequent, and we will have to plan for and deal with them.  Insurance will cover the costs this time, but in the future, unless significant remedial action is taken, it may not.

What this effectively means is the the ground floor and basement of every building from the Anglers Rest to the sea cannot be hold anything that could be destroyed by a sudden flood.  It does not mean all that space is useless, but it does mean we need to find different, imaginative uses for it.

For the University, it isn’t hard. We just need to turn all those rooms into small teaching spaces, with hard wood floors. We don’t have enough small seminar rooms anyway, and a teaching room usually only has one fixed computer, in the lecture podium. Floors, chairs, desks and even whiteboards don’t melt if they get wet. If all the labs and offices are above ground level, we are good.

Most university accommodation is designed as apartments with single rooms sharing a kitchen living area. Some of those ground floor rooms could be converted to seminar rooms. In other cases, the blocks will have to be reconfigured, with all the bedrooms on the upper floors and all the common space – kitchens, TV, laundry – on the ground floor. If that were done, then a sudden night-time flood would not destroy student clothes, notes and laptops. That arrangement might even make it cheaper to clean the buildings in normal operation, if all the functions that generate bulk waste are on ground level.

For shops downtown, the flooding means having to think about keeping at least all their expensive stock upstairs. In some cases, they might be as well off knocking out their front windows and turning the ground floor into customer parking. For businesses, they will need to make sure that every office which has files and computers is upstairs, and the ground floor is used only for reception and meeting rooms.  There are many buildings in the city centre whose upper floors are underused, and even empty. Cork can easily become a city which lives on its uppers, and now, while people are refurbishing after this flood, is a good time to start.

For everyone, however, access is a problem. It is quite likely that the city will face, as often as twice a year, periods when it is not possible to move about the city centre or cross from North to South. Between student accommodation and people in live in the city, there may be over 10,000 people facing the prospect of being trapped in their homes for several days at a stretch and needing to be evacuated to..where?

We can’t raise all the city streets by 15 feet, but we could do with a high level river crossing, at least for pedestrian access if not for cars. Property owners could run balconies along the street fronts at first floor level. In fact, I like the idea of sitting outside a coffee shop downtown on a nice balcony in the summertime, if we ever have a summer again.  We may not get quite the weather in this picture, but we if we build it, maybe the sun will come?

Anyway, that’s my 2c this wet morning.