Essay Wow!

Venice’s rising water problem.

1.The tide rising over time

2.How people handled the problem

3.how they solved the problem(Barriers)

Review of “Turning the Tide” by Joseph A Harriss from the Smithsonian

In this article Joseph Harriss takes a trip to Venice and is sharing his thoughts about the city. He goes into detail how the city is known for its canals and waterways that past through Venice. He talks about how the canals and waterways are used for transportation and from time to time are known to have a few traffic jams. As he admired the wonderful architecture of the city he began to ponder “Would we be building so much on this island if we thought Venice was going to sink?”

According to local legends the city was founded on March 25, 421, and floods have been one of Venice’s oldest traditions. The sea level around Venice has been changing over centuries. To combat the problem pavement have been raised several times, but it has been no match to the combination of sinking land and rising sea level.

During the 1930’s industries started pumping aquifers under the city, causing Venice to sink 4 inches. This set off a chain reaction; a century ago the square was covered by high tides seven times a year. That number rose to twenty times a year in the 1950’s and now occurs an average of fifty times annually. When these high tides came in the townspeople would stack their possessions on top of each other so that they wouldn’t get damaged. Then the town’s people had to wait up to eight hours to have the tide to recede. On average, it would cost a family about one month’s revenue to pay for damages and repairs to their home.

The Consorzio Venezia Nuova, a group of Italian engineers and construction companies, built a three billion dollar barrier of 79 mobile floodgates, positioned at the lagoon’s three entrances. When high tides are predicted, the barriers would pivot upward and block the rising waters. Within Venice, workers have restored 113 of the 450 bridges and are rebuilding the canal walls. The pavements around the canal have also been raised a foot, and have also added a barrier of 15.7 million yards of sand to the shore.

I personally never knew about how much the high tide have affected coastal areas, but from reading this article I see that it’s not lately the world has been having this problem. One thing that I don’t understand though is why do these people enduring this type of problem, and wait so long to fix it. Since people settled there in 421 they knew that there was a problem, the floods must have damaged their crops, villages and personal belongings. After seeing the affects of the floods they should have moved away from Venice. But I think that the reason they did stay is because the developing culture at the time. The new gained knowledge in architecture, language, art, cultural expression, etc. made people stay. If I was put in to a situation that I was living in Venice, and I was faced with the decision to move, I would choose not to. The reason why is because there is so much gilts and glamour about living in a city like that. Many people take vacation to go and visit Venice, well for me it would be like I’m on vacation everyday of my life.