The city council approved the new seawall design yesterday — higher, farther out, concrete and steel where the salt marsh used to buffer us. I was at the hearing. The engineering is sound, the cost is enormous, and it is exactly what we deserve for waiting forty years. The marshal lands are gone now. I walked them as a kid. My partner says I should be glad we're building something, and she is right, but I am not glad, I am just watching us pay interest on a debt we ran up in the 1980s. Hamburg will survive this. The places that cannot afford a seawall will not. That is the math. That is what keeps me awake more than any storm surge forecast ever will.
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