[Scpg] Rising Seas, Climate Change & the Viriginia Coal/ On point Radio show NPR Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Wed Dec 1 19:33:15 PST 2010

Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 10:00 AM EST
Rising Seas, Climate Change & the Viriginia Coast
As the U.N. talks about climate in Cancun, 
coastal Norfolk, VA, is already dealing with 
rising sea levels.
http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/12/climate-seas

Norfolk, VA (Credit: Joey Sheely, Wikimedia Commons)
Norfolk, Virginia is one of the oldest cities in 
America. It's a city on the water, at the mouth 
of Chesapeake Bay.

And if you live in Norfolk, what you see is the 
water rising. Norfolk's land base is settling. 
The seas are getting higher.

The combination has put Norfolk out front in 
confronting what cities all over the world may 
face in a century of climate change: water in the 
streets; big decisions on what to save and where 
to retreat; and huge costs.

Climate change deniers hate the conversation, but 
in Norfolk, it's reality time. We look at getting 
real about high water, and what's to come. 

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Leslie Kaufman, national reporter covering the 
environment for the New York Times and author of 
the recent article "Front-Line City in Virginia 
Tackles Rise in Sea."

William "Skip" Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch.

Theresa Whibley, Norfolk city councillor 
representing Ward 2, which contains some of the 
areas of Norfolk hardest hit by flooding.

Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of Earth and 
Ocean Sciences at Duke University. He's co-author 
of "The Rising Sea

Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea

Matthew Eich for The New York Times
The city of Norfolk, Va., is spending a lot of 
money to raise Richmond Crescent by 18 inches to 
avert routine flooding at high tide.
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: November 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/science/earth/26norfolk.html?_r=1

NORFOLK, Va. - In this section of the Larchmont 
neighborhood, built in a sharp "u" around a bay 
off the Lafayette River, residents pay close 
attention to the lunar calendar, much as other 
suburbanites might attend to the daily flow of 
commuter traffic.

If the moon is going to be full the night before 
Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks 
it on a parallel block, away from the river. The 
next morning, she walks through a neighbor's 
backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep 
puddle that routinely accumulates on her street 
after high tides.

For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only 
way to live with the encroaching sea.
As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is 
increasingly disrupting life here and all along 
the East Coast, a development many climate 
scientists link to global warming.
But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of 
the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on 
three sides by water, including several rivers, 
like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal 
streams that feed into the bay and eventually the 
ocean.
Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on 
filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and 
compacting. In addition, the city is in an area 
where significant natural sinking of land is 
occurring. The result is that Norfolk has 
experienced the highest relative increase in sea 
level on the East Coast - 14.5 inches since 1930, 
according to readings by the Sewells Point naval 
station here.

Climate change is a subject of friction in 
Virginia. The state's attorney general, Ken T. 
Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a 
prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when 
he was a researcher at the University of 
Virginia. But the residents of coastal 
neighborhoods here are less interested in the 
debate than in the real-time consequences of a 
rise in sea level.
When Ms. Peck, now 75 and a caretaker to her 
husband, moved here 40 years ago, tidal flooding 
was an occasional hazard.
"Last month," she said recently, "there were 
eight or nine days the tide was so doggone high 
it was difficult to drive."

Larchmont residents have relentlessly lobbied the 
city to address the problem, and last summer it 
broke ground on a project to raise the street 
around the "u" by 18 inches and to readjust the 
angle of the storm drains so that when the river 
rises, the water does not back up into the 
street. The city will also turn a park at the 
edge of the river back into wetlands - it is now 
too saline for lawn grass to grow anyway. The 
cost for the work on this one short stretch is 
$1.25 million.

The expensive reclamation project is popular in 
Larchmont, but it is already drawing critics who 
argue that cities just cannot handle flooding in 
such a one-off fashion. To William Stiles, 
executive director of Wetlands Watch, a local 
conservation group, the project is well meaning 
but absurd. Mr. Stiles points out that the 
Federal Emergency Management Agency has already 
spent $144,000 in recent years to raise each of 
six houses on the block.

At this pace of spending, he argues, there is no 
way taxpayers will recoup their investment.
"If sea level is a constant, your coastal 
infrastructure is your most valuable real estate, 
and it makes sense to invest in it," Mr. Stiles 
said, "but with sea level rising, it becomes a 
money pit."

Many Norfolk residents hope their problems will serve as a warning.
"We are the front lines of climate change," said 
Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who 
lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. "No one 
who has a house here is a skeptic."
Politics aside, the city of Norfolk is tackling 
the sea-rise problem head on. In August, the 
Public Works Department briefed the City Council 
on the seriousness of the situation, and Mayor 
Paul D. Fraim has acknowledged that if the sea 
continues rising, the city might actually have to 
create "retreat" zones.
Kristen Lentz, the acting director of public 
works, prefers to think of these contingency 
plans as new zoning opportunities.

"If we plan land use in a way that understands 
certain areas are prone to flooding," Ms. Lentz 
said, "we can put parks in those areas. It would 
make the areas adjacent to the coast available to 
more people. It could be a win-win for the 
environment and community at large and makes 
smart use of our coastline."

Ms. Lentz believes that if Norfolk can manage the 
flooding well, it will have a first-mover 
advantage and be able to market its expertise to 
other communities as they face similar problems.
But she also acknowledges that for the businesses 
and homes entrenched on the coast, such a step 
could be costly, and that the city has no money 
yet to pay them to move.

In the short run, the city's goal is just to pick 
its flood-mitigation projects more strategically. 
"We need to look broadly and not just act 
piecemeal," Ms. Lentz said, referring to 
Larchmont.

To this end, Norfolk has hired the Dutch firm 
Fugro to evaluate options like inflatable dams 
and storm-surge floodgates at the entrances to 
waterways.
But to judge by the strong preference in 
Larchmont for action at any cost, it may not be 
easy for the city to choose which neighborhoods 
might be passed over for projects.Neighborhood 
residents lobbied hard for the 18-inch lifting of 
their roadway, even though they know it will 
offer not much protection from storms, which are 
also becoming more frequent and fearsome. Many 
say that housing values in the neighborhood have 
plummeted and that this is the only way to 
stabilize them.

Others like Mr. Schultz support the construction, 
even though they think the results will be very 
temporary indeed.
"The fact is that there is not enough engineering 
to go around to mitigate the rising sea," he 
said. "For us, it is the bitter reality of trying 
to live in a world that is getting warmer and 
wetter."

A version of this article appeared in print on November 26, 2010, on
The Rising Sea [Hardcover]
Orrin H. Pilkey (Author), Rob Young
http://www.amazon.com/Rising-Sea-Orrin-H-Pilkey/dp/1597261912
From Publishers Weekly
Veteran academics Pilkey (The Corps and the 
Shore) and Young (a geoscientist and Pilkey's 
former student) team up to offer a rational 
approach to inevitably rising sea levels over the 
next century, an unprecedented problem for human 
civilization: for the first time a densely 
developed shoreline is putting the ways of life 
of millions of people at risk." Even with a 
significant reduction in carbon emissions, sea 
levels will continue to rise and, combined with 
increasingly severe storms, force a retreat from 
the shoreline. Thus, the authors make a strong 
case for an immediate halt to high-rise 
construction "in areas vulnerable to future sea 
level rise" coupled with the relocation of 
buildings and infrastructure, to be executed 
"when major maintenance is needed." 
Simultaneously, steps should be taken to protect 
coastal marshes, mangroves and especially coral 
reefs ("the most biologically diverse 
environments in the modern ocean"). Pilkey and 
Young make short work of costly plans like sea 
walls and artificial beaches, with provide no 
long-term protection. Pilkey and Young's 
balanced, optimistic perspective on the tough 
decisions that lie ahead should garner interest 
from policy makers and real estate developers as 
well as environmentalists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division 
of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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