Naval Academy to raise seawall to counter rising sea level

The Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., will raise a riverside wall to stave off the slowly rising water levels.

The Academy will add 2.62 feet to the current 5.4-foot-tall Farragut Seawall along the Severn River, the Capital Gazette reports.

The project is still in the design phase, and work will likely begin in 2020.

{mosads}The academy is also reviewing ways to ease floodwaters that come through when the harbor backs up into storm drains.

“This is a multifaceted approach you’re hearing about today,” Superintendent Vice Admiral Ted Carter said Monday when he announced the project at the quarterly Board of Visitors meeting. “We don’t have all the answers today.”

Annapolis had the nation’s biggest increase in yearly flooding between 2007 and 2013, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reviewed by the Capital Gazette.

Climate change and its repercussions have been a global topic of conversation recently following a series of United Nations reports urging for dramatic government intervention worldwide to slow rising temperatures. 

The topic has caused heated conversations in Washington, as many on the left have treated the reports as harbingers of doom, while conservatives have pointed to what they call the U.N.’s consistent history of overshooting the real impact of pollution in its climate change modeling.