From The Boston Globe:
For concrete, climate change may mean a shorter lifespan
When climate change comes for Boston, many expect it to come by sea, in the form of rising tides and massive storm surges that will sweep Logan Airport into the Atlantic. The city is already beginning to plan its defense, with proposals for “amphibious architecture,” levees, storm baffles, and pumping stations.
But a new study out of Northeastern University suggests that for a dense coastal city like Boston, a more immediate vulnerability may lie in something we’re not even considering. It’s not rising seas that will get us first; it’s collapsing concrete.
Untold tons of concrete make up the city’s buildings, bridges, roads, and parking garages. As solid as it looks, reinforced concrete is vulnerable to long-term corrosion and decay: Over the course of decades, elements from the environment slowly work their way through to corrode the metal rods inside. Two researchers, civil engineer Matthew Eckelman and graduate student Mithun Saha, realized that new projections of rising temperatures might have implications for the lifespan of Boston’s concrete buildings and set out to calculate just what exactly those were.
Their findings, published in September in the journal Urban Climate, suggest that both this city and many others are likely to face huge repair bills long before anyone anticipated. “Starting in 2025 is when [we expect] to see the concrete cover on buildings start to fail, assuming they were built to code,” Eckelman says. With accelerated warming added to existing rates of decay, they predict that 60 percent of Boston’s concrete buildings will face structural deterioration by 2050.
All this handwringing based on a projection from a computer model that has shown to not be accurate.
