Sea Level in Venice Venice, Term Paper

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Total Length: 1040 words ( 3 double-spaced pages)

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1).

Again, in October of 2004, 80% of Venice flooded when the water came up to 135 cm. The Piazza San Marco was inundated with 16 inches of water in the worst flooding in the last ten years. But there have been nine floods almost as bad as this one since the record high in 1966.

The City of Venice, along with concerned international organizations, is working on solving the problem with floodgates in the Lagoon entrance, as well as raising the pavement in low-lying parts of the city. Much of the raising of pavement has been done, but unless water barriers are made permanent, turning the Lagoon into a fresh-water lake, nothing else can be done. The high water arrives about every two weeks and sometimes is higher than previous times. And some believe it is getting worse, all to the benefit of the tourist trade.

Today, tourists come to see this strange phenomenon. The tourist trade is thriving in this "sinking city." Tourists still slog around in the knee-high water with plastic bags taped to their legs or ride the gondolas through the few canals where low bridges allow for boats passing beneath them. Films of tourists visiting Venice on Youtube show them wearing either thigh-high fishing boots or colored plastic bags so they will not get their shoes and clothes wet in the high water. Films show a young woman standing near the corner of a building with water up to her calves, wearing tall rubber boots, while boats motor past her over a sea unbroken by sidewalks or anything else. People climb onto and scramble across cafe tables in a loggia in order to enter a building.

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There are scenes of the long, wooden risers between tourist sites where hundreds of visitors walk single file along the narrow planks on high water days.

Tourist films show the tide coming in over the docks where boats are tied, splashing through the openings in the docks at the edge of the lagoon, bubbling into doors where merchants assist visitors from desks sitting in inches of water; they show water lapping against plate-glass store windows behind which sits dry merchandise. Inside cafes, chairs are sitting in the water, and the Piazza San Marco, rather than being a plaza where people stroll and pigeons walk about, is called a swimming pool.

The impact on the tourist trade has been dramatic. There were 15 million visitors in 2006, swarming through a town of only 3 square miles. As the water rises the population of the city of Venice goes down. Owners of shops and those who maintain the buildings live on the mainland. It is too expensive to live in the city for the young generation, so they move away and the older generation is dying off. Meanwhile, the tourists crowding the facilities, the streets, the waterbuses and, along with the high water, render the city unlivable (Zwingle, p. 2)......

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https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/sea-level-venice-venice-30523
   

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