Ocean City plans for tourist season but not climate change | STAFF COMMENTARY
Memorial Day weekend marks the start of the summer season in Ocean City, but is the beach town prepared for climate change?
Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer tourist season in Ocean City each year, and businesses and property owners have spent weeks getting ready for 2024’s onslaught. The Eastern Shore town, with a year-round population of 7,000, expects as many as a quarter-million visitors on peak summer days ahead. There’s a plan to widen Route 90, and a proposal for a new sports complex as well as expanded downtown bus service. Recruiting enough lifeguards has long been a challenge, and it is again this year. New on the summer agenda are concerns over houseboats being used as short-term rentals at a downtown marina.
Yet lost amid all this planning and preparation is a serious conversation about what should be on top of the to-do list for Ocean City: addressing the growing threat of climate change and the dangers of rising tides and temperatures, and more severe storms. Traditional countermeasures — such as pumping off-shore sand to replenish the beach and build up dunes, or building stone seawalls to reduce the risk of flooding — will eventually prove inadequate to the threat.
A report released last year by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the Maryland Commission on Climate Change offered a stark warning statewide about rising waters, but few communities are on the frontline of this threat quite like Ocean City. Scientists predict the Atlantic Ocean will be 12 to 18 inches higher by 2050 and up to 3 feet higher by the end of the century. Throw in storm surge, and it’s not difficult to imagine a potential catastrophe — if not during hurricane season in the late summer or fall, then from a Nor’easter in November to March. The authors further caution that the outlook keeps getting worse as “sea-level rise in Maryland has been and will continue to be greater than the global average.”
It is extraordinary that preparing the town for climate disaster (and doing everything possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) isn’t top of the agenda, particularly given the scale of the investment in Ocean City: Its total assessable property tax base recently passed the $12.8 billion mark. We have nothing against adding circulator buses or regulating houseboats, but it remains mind-boggling that Ocean City’s elected officials continue to object to plans to build off-shore wind turbines because they find them unsightly.
Exactly why wind turbines are viewed as a problem can sometimes be hazy. Officials have expressed concerns, for example, that the vessels using sonar to map ocean bottom have harmed whales (though they appear to harbor no similar concerns about the number of whales killed by speeding boats, a much bigger threat). But when pressed, it becomes clear that they fear the appearance of manmade structures on the horizon, even though the closest would be more than 11 miles away. “The turbines will be clearly visible from our beach,” the town warns on its website. “Studies have proven that visible offshore wind turbines hurt beach tourism and reduce property values.”
And while it’s true that such projects can impact property values when they are first announced, as a U.S. Department of Energy study found late last year, they also snap back after the turbines are actually built and communities have firsthand experience with them. Less easily dealt with, however, is the possibility that rising tides and harsher storms will eventually wipe out large swathes of Ocean City from the inlet to the Delaware state line. Now, maybe talking about climate change isn’t good for property values either. But the threat is real and lasting and potentially life-endangering. It isn’t within the town’s authority to reverse the global danger, of course, but taking reasonable steps to prepare for the worst in their own backyards should not be too much to expect.
Baltimore Sun editorial writers offer opinions and analysis on news and issues relevant to readers. They operate separately from the newsroom.