Transcript
GIFF JOHNSON: We have pretty significant gusting winds blowing up from the south and combined with the high tide, Ejit Island which faces south, they got hit with tides, I mean not much damage but just the island was inundated, sea wall damage, things like that, other houses along other islands facing that south wind, the high tide just rolled in to people's backyards and over seawalls and damaged whatever structures are built right by the lagoon.
DANIELA MAOATE-COX: Were people able to prepare for it?
GJ: It's hard to prepare for these things because most houses are built so close to the lagoon or ocean and there just isn't much space so generally people have or a lot of people have sea walls, but in the case inundations we've seen in the last couple of years, the water often just washes right up over and it just depends if the high tides are combined with a storm like we had yesterday, that's when we see more damage, because it just gets these storm surges pushing the already high level of water right up onto the island.
DM-C: How far in did the water reach?
GJ: Well on Ejit, I was talking to one of the residents there and he took a picture of a guy standing in the middle of the island so it's probably close to a hundred metres in. Fortunately he said not too many houses were flooded, but it was just mostly water damage and of course that plays out with damaging trees, coconut trees, pandanus trees which are food crops here and that's a long term issue which begins to show up a few weeks after the inundation happens.
DM-C: So is there anything that can be done to mitigate those effects?
GJ: It's hard to say, I suppose more shoreline protection, you know the existing sea walls can be improved. A big part of the challenge is that people, because of the demand for housing in Majuro the capital, and on Ebye the other main urban centre in Kwajalein is people have essentially built on every available piece of land in the downtown area of Majuro and if you go back 60, 70 years, almost nobody lived in this area, they lived on the other end of the atoll which was more stable but it's how urbanisation and development goes so so many people have built out of necessity on rather precarious pieces of property that are prone to flooding so yeah, it's a real challenge on a low-lying atoll to work out good shoreline protection from these events.
