The prediction caused a collective grimace among the mayors, city councilors, engineers and planners in the audience. By 2060, a Metro economist said, the seven-county Portland area could grow to 3.85 million people -- nearly double the number here now. Then Lorna Stickel, a planner with the Portland Water Bureau, stood to ask a question. Does the population projection, she asked, account for the possibility of climate change refugees?
Brains have been spinning ever since. Because what if?
What if the American Southwest dries up, browns out, and those people now misting their patios in Arizona head to the still-green Pacific Northwest? What if Californians hit the road north in numbers far surpassing the 20,000 who now move to Oregon each year? What if the polar ice melts, oceans rise and millions living along coastal areas -- or ravaged by Katrina-like storms -- have to move? What happens, Stickel later asks, "as we become more attractive and other places become less attractive?"
Back in her office at the Water Bureau, Stickel digs out graphs showing U.S. migration patterns and a projection of areas that might be affected by climate change.
"If this and this combine to this," Stickel says, gesturing back and forth, "that's the nut."
Stickel is no alarmist. The "nut" she cites is a kind of gridlock -- that moment in greater Portland when people could arrive in such numbers they outstrip the infrastructure necessary to support them. Water. Electricity. Roads. Housing. Schools. Garbage and sewage disposal. Parks and clean air. Stickel knows all the players and is particularly intense about the region's drinking water supply. Like the others gathered to hear Metro's population conference last spring, it's her job to accommodate that projected growth.
"We think it's going to be X number of people," she said. "What if it's more?"
• • •
Welcome Rebecca Niday. She was in California for the Northridge earthquake and the Malibu fires. She's been through tornadoes in the Midwest and blizzards in New Mexico. But Florida's hurricanes were the worst.
Like a freight train, bearing down on you for 12 hours, sometimes. Old-timers -- neighbors born in Florida and seasoned by 70 or 80 years of rip-roaring winds and sheets of rain -- remarked that it seemed the hurricanes were arriving more frequently and hitting harder. Scientists consider that a symptom of a warmer climate -- more extreme weather events.
Worse, Niday said, there'd been so much building in Florida, so many swamps drained, that there was nowhere for the water to go except into streets or homes.
She put up with it for five years. Three years ago, she moved to Oregon and settled in Rhododendron, near Mount Hood.
"The main factor was wanting to get out of there," said Niday, a real estate broker...
Full Story: http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2008/1
0/look_out_oregon_for_a_global_w.html
