Posted on August 24, 2020
High tides surging from a narrow creek destroyed the car Kathy Blake once parked in her gravel driveway here. Over the past two decades, the water has ruined half a dozen of them.
Since October, when one of those floods filled the first floor of Blake’s home with 6 inches of water, she’s been living in a camper with her husband and granddaughter, in that same driveway.
Not far away in this tiny community on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore, Chesapeake Bay waves have eaten away at the land Gary McQuitty uses to offer hunting trips. Last year, he had to move a duck blind inland. McQuitty expects to have to move it again soon, as the waves creep toward his hunting lodge.
The evidence of rising seas stretches to Dorchester County’s mainland, too, up the winding road toward the county seat of Cambridge. Across the rural southern half of the county, everything is projected to be inundated — frequently if not constantly — by the end of the century.
The signs of change are so glaring around Dorchester, they are forcing difficult decisions. In this county of 32,000 people, experts say the confrontation with rising water caused by climate change is coming more quickly than just about anywhere else on the East Coast.
And it’s coming at a time when turnover has left Dorchester without key personnel who had been guiding the problem-solving.
“Dorchester County is a good example of our canary in a coal mine,” said Michael Scott, dean of the Henson School of Science and Technology at Salisbury University, who has spent years mapping land losses in the county. “These same issues are coming to a county near you. It’s just a matter of when or where.”
Across Dorchester, shores have receded by as much as 600 feet since the 1970s, Scott said, and they continue to lose ground each day.
Source: Coastal News Today
