Although the shops and taverns that line the City Dock and Main Street — some with historic pedigree, others with less — change hands frequently, it’s the tides that have become worrisome.

“When the downtown gets flooded, which has been certainly more than ever this year, everyone always complains about parking down here,” said Megan Moore, who runs the Easy Street Gallery, which markets objets d’art on Francis Street and has just enough elevation to escape the water. “People can’t get over the Eastport Bridge, and if they get downtown, they can’t park. I wouldn’t have a store down there if you paid me.”

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Fifty years ago, the downtown area was underwater for fewer than 10 days a year. Now, it’s flooded 40 times a year.

The city has begun an ambitious plan to combat the flooding, and the adjacent U.S. Naval Academy announced in December that it would raise its defenses against the tidal battering.

The sea is rising because ice caps are melting as the world grows warmer.

Some islanders in the Pacific fear they will be swallowed by the ocean. Officials in California are pondering whether to let cliff-side houses along beaches fall into the sea so that barricades can be built to contain the encroaching surf. Southeastern Virginia faces the fastest rate of sea-level rise on the East Coast, with experts predicting an increase of 1.5 to two feet by 2050.

“This past September, we had 13 days in September of flooding, six of which included Compromise Street for a period of hours,” said Lisa M. Grieco, an engineer with Annapolis’s Department of Public Works.

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There are several major streets in the city. Three of them are Compromise, Dock Street and Main Street, which is paved with brick and slopes uphill. Another main feature is the City Dock — also known as Ego Alley for the parade of boats that enter and then turn around at the head of it on weekends. Compromise and Dock streets are on either side of Ego Alley, and both have flooded more frequently in the past decade.

The city has a plan to solve the Compromise Street flooding, digging a 26-by-52-foot hole in the ground beneath what now is an outdoor basketball court to create what’s called a wet well. When it rains, all of the storm drains along that street will drain into the wet well and then be pumped into Ego Alley.

At the same time, drains that now allow tidal waters to flood the parking lot of the Fleet Reserve Club and Compromise Street, blocking the flow of traffic from Eastport, will have backflow preventers installed to stop the tides from overflowing.

That project is expected to get underway in the fall of 2020. A similar project to create a wet well linked to the storm sewers on the Dock Street side is somewhere on the horizon.

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“Unfortunately, the Dock Street side is going to continue to flood until we do the same concept of the wet well,” Grieco said. “We are actually in conversation to try to find a temporary solution for the flooding on the Dock Street side because it’s so impactful for the businesses.”

The largest of two parking lots — as well as more than a dozen bars and shops — are on the Dock Street side of Ego Alley. A study released Friday by two Stanford University students concluded what Moore already knew: Downtown business dropped by more than a third during hours with minor flooding, and major flooding cut it by almost 90 percent.

At the Naval Academy, the need to rebuild a sea wall near the sailing center led to a greater awareness of rising sea levels.

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“Taking into account the threat of sea level rise to the Yard, we will also take this opportunity to raise the elevation of the wall,” said Colleen Krueger, a spokeswoman for the academy. “The existing wall height along the Farragut sea wall section is approximately 5.4 feet. We will add 2.62 feet to the height of the existing wall now, and the design would allow for future addition of another 1.68 feet.”

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Grieco said the city and an advisory group at the academy are expected to convene to discuss the issue.

“Sea level is different depending on where you are,” Grieco said.

She said the city is oversizing its wet well and culverts with additional tides in mind. She said there are five projections of how the sea might rise.

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