A Flood-Prone City Gets Creative in Its Effort to Tame the Water Gods |
Hampton is building a sandy marsh over rocks that currently line the shore at Mill Point Park, and experimenting with protective sills to buffer incoming waves. Phred Dvorak/Inside Climate News
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Shelton Tucker is part of a novel plan to deal with the waters that are increasingly encroaching on his neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia.
Situated at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and afflicted by one of the fastest paces of sea-level rise in the United States, Hampton has long battled flooding.
But while flood-prone coastal cities have historically defaulted to levees, pumps and miles of cement-covered storm drains, Hampton is leaning heavily on rain barrels, rain gardens, declogging creeks, and fortifying shores with oyster reefs.
Hampton residents like Tucker have a part to play, too. The 67-year-old president of the Greater Aberdeen Community Coalition has a spot for a rain garden—a plot designed to collect and absorb stormwater runoff—prepared in the front yard of his father’s house.
“I got it all bricked out,” Tucker said. “I just need to know the plants to put in it.”
Hampton’s rain gardens and oyster reefs are part of a flood-management strategy heavily influenced by the Netherlands, dubbed “Living With Water.” At its core is a change in mindset about how to approach a future increasingly defined by rising oceans, more intense rains and soggier ground.
Instead of fighting water, the thinking goes, let it in. Guide it to areas where it can flow and sit safely; enjoy it while it’s there. Restore natural systems that absorb, buffer and cleanse. Take steps big and small, public and private, since every little bit counts.
In practice, that means Hampton is trying to better handle large volumes of water, dotting flood-prone areas with plant-lined storage basins, inserting low weirs in rivers to slow the flow of excess water and raising some key streets that are likely to submerge regardless.
While some nearby coastal cities are proposing billion-dollar floodwalls and surge barriers, Hampton is looking at restoring marshes and “naturalizing” miles of rock-fortified shoreline with sand and marsh grasses.
At a coastal park a few blocks from Hampton City Hall, the city is building a sandy marsh over the rocks that currently line the shore, and experimenting with new types of protective sills—including 3D-printed concrete reefs seeded with oysters.
The changes mean incoming waves will be gently buffered, rather than reflected by hard surfaces as they are now, reducing flooding and erosion, said Olivia Askew, a Hampton city resilience officer.
The water “will rise and fall in the new marsh that we’re creating, which will soften the shoreline,” she said.
Hampton’s history dates back to 1610, when a group of English colonists seized an Algonquin village and renamed it,........