The Shoreline That Was Promised

Danielle Mieler knows where the water will come from. She has spent years mapping exactly where the San Francisco Bay will overtop Alameda's shoreline, in what order, and how fast. Eight inches of sea level rise already measured. Another foot projected by 2050. Satellite datashowing Bay Farm Island sinking more than 0.4 inches per year, which means local sea levels could rise at more than double the regional estimate. The planning numbers she works with may already be too generous.

In January, the bay confirmed her maps. Storm drains on Bay Farm Island reversed themselves, pushing water up instead of carrying it away. Brackish water poured across trails and into streets. The spots that flooded, Mieler told KQED, "were places that we know need to be addressed."

She had built a plan to address them. And then the plan's funding was redesigned out of existence.

Alameda is an island city of roughly 79,000 people, much of it built on fill, its highest point 39 feet above sea level. "It's all a bit man-made," Mieler has said. "We like to think that this is what Alameda is, but this is not what Alameda was 100 years ago, and it's not what it's going to be in 100 years either." Mieler is a licensed Professional Engineer and the city's Sustainability and Resilience Manager. She co-chairs the Oakland-Alameda Adaptation Committee, a coalition of more than 30 partner organizations she helped assemble: Caltrans, the East Bay Regional Park District, the Port of Oakland, community groups.

In February 2024, the committee applied to FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program for $55.5 million to fund levees, earthen berms, habitat enhancements, and Bay Trail upgrades across six project areas on Bay Farm Island's northern shoreline. The project area includes Oakland International Airport, which sits within a FEMA-designated Community Disaster Resilient Zone. That meant a 90% federal cost share instead of the typical 75%. The local match dropped to just 10%. It would have been, Mieler said, "a huge benefit to the whole community."

The mechanics of disappearance

The application was submitted through BRIC's FY2023 cycle but had not yet reached formal obligation, the stage at which FEMA legally commits funds. Between FY2020 and FY2023, FEMA obligated roughly $1 billion out of approximately $4.6 billion in selected BRIC awards. The remaining $3.6 billion, including Alameda's application, existed in procedural limbo: selected but not legally committed. When the administration issued its cancellation memo in April 2025, calling BRIC "wasteful and ineffective," those unobligated applications were terminated without review.

FEMA's advisory laid out tiers. Fully obligated projects that had started construction could continue. Everything else would end. Applications that hadn't reached obligation simply ceased to exist.

For Mieler, it was back to the drawing board. A collaborator described what happened next: she started making phone calls to everyone she could think of. Michael McCormick of the Bay Area Climate Adaptation Network told KneeDeep Times, "That's great that 'no' is not an answer she is willing to accept."

Twenty-two states sued. A federal judge in December 2025 ordered FEMA to restore the canceled funding. In March 2026, FEMA announced it was reopening BRIC with $1 billion available.

The restoration, on paper, looked complete.

At an April council meeting, Mieler told elected officials that the reopened program is "a very different program" from the original, and that it remains unclear whether Alameda can continue its original application or must start over. "Until FEMA stabilizes," the council was told, "key details remain unresolved."

Stitching what's left

At that same April meeting, Mieler requested approval to accept $2.64 million from the State Coastal Conservancy to advance the project from 30% to 60% design. A prior congressional earmark funded the initial 30%. California's Proposition 4, a $10 billion climate bond, includes $1.2 billion for sea level rise projects, and Alameda will compete for a share. Construction is now tentatively targeted around 2030.

"Probably, there's nothing to replace the size and scale of what federal funding can provide," Mieler told the Alameda Post last October. "So we're going to be breaking the projects down into smaller phases and pieces."

Sit with that sentence for a moment. A $55.5 million integrated shoreline adaptation plan, engineered as a system, is being disassembled into fragments small enough to fit through whatever funding windows remain open. The near-term shoreline adaptation bill for Alameda totals $295 million. The Bay Area regional estimate runs to $110 billion. "It's gonna be a big dollar amount," Mieler told KQED in April, describing it as a cost that will require residents themselves to pitch in. She called it a multi-generational problem.

Every community that built a resilience plan around federal commitment now faces the same inheritance Alameda does. Mieler spent years assembling a coalition, mapping the risk, designing the intervention, navigating the application. The program she applied to was canceled, restored by court order, and reopened in a form that excludes her project. Federal resilience funding was structurally withdrawn even as it was formally restored, and the next resilience officer in the next coastal city will plan accordingly. Which means planning smaller, or planning alone.

The season ahead

The 2030 construction target means no physical protection will be in place for the 2026-27 winter storm season. Or the one after that.

Some forecasters are watching for a possible super El Niño developing later this year. California's worst Bay Area flooding historically coincides with El Niño winters, when coastal sea levels run elevated. If a strong El Niño materializes in fall 2026, it would amplify exactly the king tide and storm surge conditions that the Bay Farm Island project was designed to address.

Without shoreline protection, Mieler has said, water could engulf streets, homes, businesses, and the Posey and Webster Street tubes connecting Alameda to Oakland. With just one foot of sea level rise, a significant number of homes and businesses face inundation. By 2070, with three feet, more than 3,400 homes.

The design work advances. The coalition holds. The water keeps coming on the schedule Mieler mapped, to the places she predicted, against shoreline that will not be raised before the next storm. "We need to raise the shoreline," she told KQED this spring. Six words. Years of engineering behind them, and no clear way to pay for what they require.

The island waits.