Norfolk VA & Naval Station Norfolk Are Slowly Sinking, And There Is No Plan

[hatrack]

EDIT

Even if the Norfolk base got all the money it needed, and hoisted everything out of the floodplain, it would be worthless if the surrounding cities weren't protected too. Just to the south, on the far side of the Lafayette River, a tiny corner of Norfolk's Larchmont-Edgewater neighborhood shows how difficult that will be. The area is home to many military families and is bisected by Hampton Boulevard, the main route between downtown and the naval station.

Beginning in 2010, the city gave in to the relentless creep of the water by converting a tiny park at the end of a finger-shaped inlet into a wetland. The project also raised a stretch of road that runs along the park. All told, the work cost $1.25 million. It worked, and on a drizzly May morning with a full-moon high tide, the new road was clear. But the elevated section is only five houses long. Where the road curves along the sides of the inlet, the river had spilled over its banks, reaching past the street and up to the front lawn of a small brick house. Dark green wetland plants sprouted in the lawn. Just to the right, a nearly identical home sat jacked up on cinderblocks, the main floor at eye level, raised three feet above the base flood elevation, a requirement for any new construction.

Along its 144 miles of shoreline, Norfolk has to raise homes and roads, revamp drainage systems, build seawalls and replace concrete bulkheads with living shorelines and earthen berms. And these are not projects for later in the century. "It's a now problem," said Skip Stiles, who runs a nonprofit called Wetlands Watch and is a leading advocate of adaptation in the region.

Norfolk is trying to embrace its extreme vulnerability as an opportunity, to become "the Silicon Valley of sea level rise," said George Homewood, its planning director, whose business card is stamped with the city's mermaid mascot. Norfolk received $120 million in federal funding last year to reshape another vulnerable neighborhood by elevating roads and erecting berms and floodwalls.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10252017/military-norfolk-naval-base-flooding-climate-change-sea-level-global-warming-virigina

[lapfog_1]

1. I am so f'ing tired of every podunk town or region

wanting to be the "Silicon Valley" of something or other.

The ocean is rising... your town is going to drown... stop wasting my taxpayer dollars to try to save it for another 10 or 20 years. And quit voting for climate change denying morons.

[planetc]

2. One of my favorite science fiction writers has a character visit earth some centuries in the future

And the character visits New York City "behind the great dikes." Sea levels will rise, and coastal cities will have to make up their minds: whether to try to stay put, and how many dikes that will entail, or whether to move out to higher ground. Both options sound expensive. Perhaps, ironically and justly, transport by car will finally give way to transport by ferry and smaller watercraft. The possibilities are endless. Someone on DU once asked whether it was even possible to have a good life without a car. Abraham Lincoln would not have understood the question.

[Kaleva]

3. The Navy ought to think about relocating.