“The commission cannot approve a project that is not consistent with the policies of the San Francisco Bay Plan.” must be resilient to a mid-century projection of sea level rise, including risk associated with storms,” the agency said in a 2017 letter. But it didn’t account for sea level rise projections, which brought a warning from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a state agency that must approve any projects along the bay. The city drew up plans for a new levee that would meet FEMA’s criteria. Unless it was rebuilt, FEMA would designate nearly the entire city as being in a revised floodplain. The Federal Emergency Management Agency notified Foster City that new studies showed the existing levee was neither strong enough nor high enough to resist a major storm and the waves it might generate. They’ve been joined since 2000 by boxy condominiums and glassy office buildings. The city’s early development brought such suburban staples as the garden apartments and single-family homes on Ocean Beach Boulevard. This 1974 photograph shows a newly completed housing tract. Once known as Brewer’s Island, a marshy dairy farm was reborn as Foster City, beginning in the early 1960s. Whatever the payoff - including a wider levee-top path - the newly fortified wall will serve as a cautionary tale. “But we’ll definitely be getting a better levee. “I’m spending a lot more time in my parks than I did a few months ago,” admitted Sanjay Gehani, the mayor, one of many residents deprived of daily strolls with wide views of the bay. A bike lane hugs the concrete barricades of the construction zone. Until work is completed in 2023, the joggers and strollers who previously used the trail atop the levee are being steered to the sidewalk along the homes. It is being financed by residents who were warned that without a new levee they would be forced to buy expensive flood insurance. The $90 million project began last October and extends 6.2 miles in all. It wouldn’t exist except for the levee around the edge that now is being replaced by a stronger and taller one - in part to keep out the higher tides anticipated with sea level rise. The city of 32,000 people at the foot of the San Mateo Bridge dates to 1962, when 18 million cubic yards of sand were dumped into the remnants of a tidal marsh along San Francisco Bay.
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