ADVOCATE HARBOUR – Advocate Harbour residents will have an opportunity to provide input into an engineering study of the dikes that protect the community from the power of the Bay of Fundy.
Representatives from CBCL will be in the community on Thursday to participate in a public meeting at the Advocate fire hall from 3 to 5 p.m.
“CBCL will be updating the people about what they have found so far in terms of gathering up information and modeling and they will be looking for public input,” Cumberland County’s EMO coordinator Mike Johnson said Monday.
Johnson said the engineering firm has been working on the project for several weeks and a representative was in attendance at a Feb. 4 meeting when residents voiced their concerns about the status of the dike that could be breached by rising sea levels by 2100.
At that meeting, residents said they wanted a priority placed on upgrading the dike as opposed to looking for a new home for key infrastructure such as the hospital, the school and the highway that runs through the community.
Mike Johnson said that rising sea levels, brought on by global warming, are a fact the community is going to have to face eventually. He said the best data to date indicates the dike could be in 80 or so years, but, he warned there's a chance a storm surge could overcome the protective structure sooner than that.
Johnson said the county wants to know the options before committing money or other resources to a solution.
CBCL, he said, wants to get the community’s thoughts on the project so it is part of the process.
“They want to get the heartbeat of the community on this subject as well as updating residents as to what they’ve found to date,” Johnson said.
CBCL has been hired to conduct the study and has already begun its work. He's hoping the study will be complete by the end of March or early April.
Twitter: @ADNdarrell
