2007-11-16 TKILGORE - Laserfiche WebLink

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you considered that in how this project was designed, and I guess the potential that impact it would have on – I don’t know – possibly wiping out your parking lot. KILGORE: Yeah, that would be unpleasant definitely. We would certainly have our civil engineering plan for worst case scenario; if necessary, possibly a pump system to back up dry sumps to keep the lower level dry in a 100-year flood condition. What transpired this last winter was quite a large series of winter storms that the State Surveyor from the DLNR came out and noted a lip of wave action that you can see in the blue line protruded into the site quite far. I’ve never been down there to see that. I mean I’ve seen where he thinks that that was where the high water mark, but in the times I’ve been down at the site which are numerable, I’ve never seen the water anywhere near there. IWASHITA: So I guess that you are addressing the essentially historical storm, storm surge and all that, and that’s how this existing line gets established. What I’m concerned about and what I’m asking is whether or not any consideration has been given to in developing these plans on what’s pretty much the world’s scientists now believe is going to be a 1-meter, a minimum 1-meter increase in sea level, and how that’s going to impact your project. KILGORE: Well, there is a little bit of leeway in our site section to push the lowest level up, maybe a foot and a half, which we could address. We are trying to minimize the height of the project as much as possible; but certainly it’s in the owner’s best interest that the property does not flood. And as architects and engineers, we will take care of that consideration, that whatever foreseeable high waterlines will be taken care of. WATANABE: Well, Mr. Yuen, maybe you can elaborate on whether we do take into consideration projected but not yet developed tides. I mean, I understand about global warming, but you know, you could have a mini freeze, too, so -. YUEN: No, I think that a possibility of sea level rise has to be taken seriously; and there are places like Kapoho which is also subsiding where you really, really have to be careful about this. But for planning purposes, I go by the IP-, there is an International, I think, International, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, which is the major scientific body that does projections and predictions on climate changes. There’s a lot of different scenarios about sea level rise with respect to global warming; some of them are plausible. But the IPCC has a consensus report on what they would expect by the end of the century, which I think as far as a planning horizon for building like this is the timeframe; and their consensus report on the high side is 2 feet, it’s a half a foot to 2 feet. So from a standpoint of a piece of property, I would be concerned that if it was actually going to be submerged. We are talking about the elevation for the tsunami event or a hurricane event, and I don’t know that a sea level rise of a foot or two is really significant for those events in this. But this is something that you have to keep, you know, in the back of your mind, and think about, particularly, in really low lying areas. And it may be that we need to revise, you know, if we have a justification, we can revise the minimum heights. For example, we looked at an SMA Permit in Keaukaha recently for a piece of quite low laying property on Kalanianaole, and we knew that the County had done, there had been some studies done of tsunamis and that there was a revision of the expected height; and so we did put a condition on that, that the building had to be built a little bit higher than the official FIRM Map line because of the scientific work that had been done. In this case EXHIBIT B 10