In danger of drowning, Norfolk faces criticism over flood-protection plan

Facing a greater degree of sea level rise than almost any other part of the country, Norfolk is on the verge of launching a $1.6 billion counterattack.

If fully funded, a flurry of construction will add about 8 miles of floodwalls, nearly a dozen tide gates and several pump stations to the aging stormwater system in Virginia’s fourth most-populous city. Outside this ring of protection, the government will bankroll buyouts of dozens of homes and elevate hundreds more.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-led project will transform Norfolk into a fortress when hurricanes and strong storms threaten to send surrounding waters surging into the city.

But the project isn’t designed to handle standing water generated by rainfall or unusually high tides. That’s a problem, critics say, because a changing climate is increasing the frequency and severity of both.

As the Norfolk Coastal Storm Risk Management Study enters a critical new phase — triggered in January when the Corps announced it is giving the city $250 million from last year’s infrastructure law to start construction — calls are growing louder to reimagine the effort.

“It’s all predicated on, ‘Hey, we’re going to protect you during a storm event,’” said Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a Norfolk-based advocacy group. “But the stuff that’s nailing us on a day-to-day basis is nuisance flooding and constant sea level rise.”

Experts say that southeastern Virginia is second only to Louisiana as the hottest spot for climate change in the United States. Around Norfolk, perched on a spit of land between the Elizabeth River and the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, water is rising at a faster rate there than in most other places, and the land is sinking. As a result, sea level in the region is expected to be 1.5 feet higher by 2075, spreading coastal flooding woes farther inland.

Besides taking issue with the project’s largely one-sided approach to the flooding problem, Stiles and other environmentalists object to its overwhelming reliance on steel, concrete and other types of “gray” infrastructure. They warn that such measures will be too costly, potentially degrade water quality and possibly make flooding worse elsewhere.

The city and the Army Corps can address those concerns and relieve more types of flooding, environmentalists say, by adopting nature-based tactics, such as creating artificial oyster reefs to knock down storm surges and giving floodwater places to collect during heavy rains.

On the project’s current trajectory, said Jay Ford, an outreach coordinator for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Virginia office, “you are going to continue pouring money down this structural-armoring hole instead of designing for how your community can coexist with the water.”

Gray versus green

The question of how to tackle coastal flood protection is gaining urgency across the country. In addition to Norfolk, the Army Corps has prepared or is in the process of preparing multibillion-dollar storm-defense plans for San Francisco, New York/New Jersey, coastal Texas and Miami/Dade County in south Florida. And in 2020, Congress authorized studies in several more regions, including Virginia Beach and North Carolina.

The Army Corps’ longstanding line of attack toward flooding — codified in its funding formulas and ingrained in its work culture — has been to pinpoint vulnerable localities with the highest economic value and wall them off. Having created what are essentially giant bathtubs, engineers build pump stations to prevent them from filling up with rainwater.

A growing body of research, though, suggests that nature-based alternatives can do the job just as well, if not better. In a widely cited 2021 report, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank, reported that 11% of the global infrastructure needed over the next 20 years could be met by green solutions. Because natural strategies often offer secondary benefits, such as providing open space for water infiltration, they deliver 28% more economic value compared with gray infrastructure, according to the paper.

Under pressure from environmentalists and racial justice advocates, the infamously slow-moving agency has taken small steps in recent years toward considering greener flood-control solutions and giving more weight in its project-ranking system to less-affluent communities. But with so many consequential projects nearing construction, many advocates are losing patience.

Last November, nearly 100 environmental groups and climate experts signed onto a letter calling on the Army Corps to implement more-comprehensive, nature-oriented strategies toward fighting climate change in its work overall. The letter also urged officials to rethink the cost-benefit method of selecting projects for funding, a process that critics say intensifies existing inequalities.

“It is a hard ship to turn,” said Emily Steinhilber, a Virginia representative with the Environmental Defense Fund, which initiated the push. Groups backing the letter with ties to the Norfolk area include the Bay Foundation, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, the James River Association, Lynnhaven River NOW, the Virginia Conservation Network and Wetlands Watch.

Steinhilber, though, sees hope in places like Miami, where pushback from residents over a Corps-designed sea wall drove local officials to lobby the federal government for more natural solutions.

Tensions persist over design

So far, the city of Norfolk is taking a measured approach to the issue — diligently supporting design work on the first phase of its flooding overhaul while working behind the scenes with the Army Corps to integrate nature, where possible, into the overarching plan.

“Where we have that space, we will design and plan with the Corps those kinds of features as well,” said Kyle Spencer, the city’s acting chief resilience officer.

Finding that space may not be easy. The city is about 95% built out, leaving little room on land for nature to be recreated or reshaped.

A top Corp official for the region said that green alternatives, which the agency calls natural or nature-based features (NNBF), appear to have a limited ability to lessen flooding from storm surges.

“On its own, NNBF does not provide the same level of risk reduction as gray infrastructure,” Michelle Hamor, Norfolk District Planning and Policy Branch chief, said in a statement. “While NNBF may reduce wave energy and slow water, it will not stop it from inundating the land behind it.”

Andria McClellan, the City Council’s most vocal member on environmental issues, said she will be watching the Army Corps closely. “They need to take the environment and equity into consideration as they score projects, something they haven’t prioritized in the past,” she said.

One of the first challenges that the city needs to overcome is funding its share of the cost.

The first segment of the citywide project will replace the existing 2,674-foot-long floodwall that prevents the Elizabeth River from overflowing its northern bank into the downtown area. Completed by the Corps in 1971, the structure mostly consists of a stern-looking, gray wall backed by slightly darker gray stones.

Spencer said the city is looking to construct a new wall about 5 feet higher to account for the latest sea level-rise projections. And it will be extended about 1.5 miles to the east to the Campostella Road bridge, protecting important sites such as the St. Paul Area public housing redevelopment project and Harbor Park, home of Norfolk’s AAA baseball team.

The project also seeks to install two or three additional pump stations, depending on the availability of funds.

The Corps’ recently announced outlay only covers 65% of the total $383 million price tag. The city is on the hook for the remaining $134 million.

McClellan said the city can’t afford that tab for now. The city has a dedicated climate tax, known as the “resilience penny.” But the fund only raises about $1.5 million per year, and most of those proceeds are already spoken for by other projects, she said. The councilwoman has set her sights on efforts in Virginia’s ongoing legislative session to create a statewide or coastal flood authority with its own funding purse.

An island of art

Spencer said the city will try to extend the wall westward, as far as Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. But with inflation and the rising costs of construction materials, officials won’t know until later in the design process whether that’s in the budget.

Erik Neil is rooting for the city to find the money. He is the director of the Chrysler Museum, an impressive showcase of ancient and contemporary art housed in a 200,000-square-foot Renaissance Revival structure. The building overlooks The Hague, an inlet that chronically overflows its banks.

Among its current exhibitions are two related to climate-induced changes: a collection of photographs taken in Florida and a display, dubbed “Waters Rising,” of local flooding scenes, including a large satellite photograph of the museum altered to depict it under a blue swath of water by the century’s end.

So far, Neil said, “we’ve never had water come up here into the museum, but what it does is it isolates you, and you become something of an island. Obviously, you can’t have visitors. And if you have staff here at a moment like that, you could have people stuck here in the museum. So, we keep an eye on the tides.”

Potential for ill side effects

Stiles, the head of Wetlands Watch, worries that new walls along shorelines and flood gates across streams may have unintended consequences.

Trapping water inside massive flood structures after strong storms has been shown to cause potentially lasting water-quality problems, experts say. The resulting stagnation can cause pollutants to build up in streams and other waterways. And the burst of freshwater can upset the fragile balance of salinity, causing fish kills.

Spencer said he’s working with the Army Corps to keep that from happening. Where long flood gates restrict the passage of water in and out of streams, they will consider adding smaller openings along the gate’s length, called sluice gates, to improve flushing.

Environmentalists, joined by at least one local climate scientist, are raising questions about what will happen to the floodwater that is deflected by Norfolk’s longer, taller floodwall.

“It will protect Norfolk, but where does the water go from there?” asked Michael Allen, an Old Dominion State University researcher.

The city and the Army Corps insist it will be absorbed by the vastness of the Chesapeake Bay, a mere drop in its 200-mile-long bucket. Still, Hamor said that on a smaller scale, wave interaction with floodwalls will be evaluated during the ongoing preconstruction engineering and design phase.

For his part, Allen is most concerned about a scenario in which the water rebounds directly southward toward the Black-majority city of Portsmouth. To him, the situation is a reminder that climate adaptation shouldn’t be reserved only for people and places with the financial means to afford it.

“Those that are able and have the most capacity can adapt and mitigate those consequences,” he said. “But there are communities that won’t have that.”