BY BRETT ANDERSON / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA
Disparate but urgent efforts to address sea-level rise in the Virginia Tidewater, one of the country?s most important strategic centers, are striving to keep up with visible realities.
Editor’s Note: Norfolk, Virginia, is both highly vulnerable to sea-level rise and a critical center of military and government infrastructure. As Hurricane Florence bears down on Virginia and the Carolinas, the risks associated with storm surge flooding are intensified by the region?s strategic importance. As Brett Anderson reported in the magazine?s December 2017 issue, this isn?t a new story, and landscape architects, academics, municipal officials, and residents are collaborating to find ways the region can respond to the inevitability of rising tides. The first question that sprang to Ann C. Phillips?s mind soon after she moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in 2006 was, ?Why, when it rains, does the whole place submerge"?
She wasn?t referring only to dramatic weather events, although Phillips, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, landed in Norfolk during a bumper crop of those: Norfolk saw more major coastal storms and hurricanes in the 2000s than in the four previous decades combined, according to the city government.
Harder to fathom were the floods caused by light rains and ?blue sky floods? triggered by lunar tides. Tidal flooding affects low-lying areas of Norfolk nine times per year on average.
These more...