By Jim Morrison
High tide started rising early that afternoon in Norfolk, filling the city’s decades-old stormwater pipes halfway or more as much as a mile inland. On some sunny days, those pipes rebel against their purpose, becoming conduits for water flowing up through storm drains, flooding neighborhoods even when there’s no rain.
But Tuesday, Aug. 4, wasn’t sunny. Minutes later, rain began, suddenly and ferociously, eventually totaling six inches within hours, flooding neighborhoods, major streets, and underpasses, enveloping vehicles, and spawning one funny and sad social media video after another.
Monticello Avenue, Colley Avenue, Colonial Avenue, West Olney Road, and other major thoroughfares didn’t have a chance. There was nowhere for the water to go.
The relentless march of global warming and the silent ghosts of Norfolk’s buried riverbeds and creek beds were firing yet another shot of reality. A city with the highest relative sea level rise — land sinking and waters rising — on the Atlantic coast was being warned. The time to embrace all of the above to deal with the climate crisis is now. More days like this loom just over the horizon.
Don’t take comfort in the idea that it was a “100-year-storm” or even a 60-year storm, as reported by some media. Those labels are based on the way things were. The Tuesday Afternoon Storm dropped a rain bomb that no city’s infrastructure could disarm. That kind of storm may not return for another decade. Or it may revisit next year.
Mary-Carson Stiff, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a nonprofit that advocates for resilience, adaptation, and wetlands restoration, said the flooding in the western part of the city was a compounding of three major things, which she explained in a video.
Rainfall intensity, duration, and frequency have increased 20% since 2006, yet the city’s antiquated stormwater system is designed for rainfall estimates made decades ago, she said in an interview. New stormwater systems that account for future storms may double in size, requiring money — a lot of money — and time.
“We have to catch up and then project forward what the future will bring as climate continues to change,” she added.
The second compounding factor was that the rain began as high tide hit the city. Stormwater pipes were full. The runoff went nowhere, the waters rose higher and higher, burying streets — and often vehicles.
“We can’t handle rain in this city, and in the western part of the city where the rain was the worst, in particular, during high tides, because our high tide means that the water is at the street level in our storm drains because it has nowhere else to go,” she said. “It’s pushing through all of the underground culverts and coming out the opposite direction of our storm drains. You can see this very clearly at Lake Olney.”
Lake Olney is the intersection of West Olney Road and Boush Street near downtown, which seems to flood when the weather gods spit despite efforts in recent years to dry it out. Norfolk got lucky on Tuesday because there was no wind pushing water inland and up through storm drains, she noted, something the city has monitored in recent years (see this free Washington Post story).
The third compounding ingredient is that roads in Norfolk, especially in the western part of the city where the floods raged, were built atop creek beds and riverbeds. Overlay Federal Emergency Management Administration flood maps over the highest flood risks, and they follow those roads.
“We filled in so many of our creeks and rivers in this city, to make land that we could develop on top of, and the streets are essentially conveyance systems for water to flow. Whether it’s a storm or a rain event or a high tide flood event, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “The water is going to accumulate in our streets because water has a memory and is flowing where it came from… We are living with the historical land use decisions of the past today, in the form of, well, you can’t drive down that street because it’s a river now. Literally, it became a river, and people were jet skiing on it.”
Some of those land use decisions, of course, are part of recent history. A 250-unit apartment complex was built on a corner of Olney and Boush, with the residential floors raised and parking beneath, allowed under current land use regulations. That’s where Lake Olney appears again and again.
“This is what we have to figure out how to deal with,” Stiff said. “How do we live in a place that has these compounding forces of risk safely and without major disruption?”
The Dutch came to Norfolk years ago and offered advice about learning to live with the water, according to my Smithsonian story from 2019. “Over time—and after a series of floods in 1993 and 1995—the Dutch realized raising a fortress against the inevitable invasion of water wasn’t a solution,” my story noted. “So, they moved on to focusing on water systems and ways to store the water from flooding or slow its discharge into rivers. The country created a Room for the River program to give rivers more space to flood. Next, they began working with nature, letting the water in, and creating lakes, garages and parks that transform into emergency reservoirs during flooding.”
Today’s Norfolk solutions are many, easy and hard, and expensive in both dollars and political capital. They require acknowledging the reality and then digging in to make changes and live with the water.
“The solution is not one thing, but all of the above. And the sooner that we can get our minds around the fact that this is an all of the above approach, this is an every avenue must be explored in some way approach,” Stiff said, “I think that we’ll just be so much better positioned to handle the reality of change.”
Those answers include the obvious, like investing in stormwater infrastructure improvement, something the city plans to spend $34 million on over the next five years, according to its capital improvement plan. That’s far below the $60 million Norfolk estimated in 2014 it would need to spend annually for the rest of the century on stormwater.
They include making adaptation plans for areas where storm drains flow in reverse most frequently, Stiff said. They include outreach to change behaviors and keep people safe — when storms or tidal flooding overrun streets, stay home unless it’s an emergency (how many vehicles were lost on Aug. 4?). And they include moving people out of harm’s way.
“We have to be willing to do the easy things that cost money, like bigger pipes and more drains, and the hard things that cost money and cost political will, like removing structures from specific areas and trying to help people relocate within the city to less local risk areas,” she added. “This is a yes and situation, not a we’re going to do some of these things, but we’re not ready to do some of these things.”
Calling The Tuesday Afternoon Storm a “100-year-storm” or even a 60-year storm is misleading and outdated.
First, the misnomer. The description of a 100-year-storm only means by historical definition, the storm has a 1% percent chance of occurring in any given year. Norfolk’s last 100-year storm roared through in 2016. About a decade ago, Houston had three so-called 500-year storms within three years.
The characterization of the Norfolk downpour as a century storm is based on rainfall estimates, known as Atlas 14, that are produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But Virginia data for that guide has not been updated since 2006. So, it’s looking at rainfall as it was, not as it has become, as reported in this free Washington Post story.
Storms are getting stronger and more frequent. To use the misleading titles to make an example, a 100-year-storm of the past is now a 50-year or even 25-year storm of today.
Cities like Norfolk are building everywhere, creating impervious surfaces that means more runoff faster.
Skip Stiles, the former Wetlands head and now an advisor, figures the huge parking lot at Monticello and Princess Anne avenues shed 1.5 million gallons of water when about six inches of rain fell during the storm. “Even the best New Orleans pump system would not have handled that volume of water coming that quickly,” he said. Nor will the $6.1 billion Norfolk Coastal Storm Risk Management project, with its 10 pump stations, drain that kind of volume, if it’s completed.
Some states, some agencies, and some cities, including Virginia Beach, have already created higher standards.
The Atlas 14 guide for Virginia is due to finish updating this year with a new national version, Atlas 15, due next year. Federal officials have said they will be forward-looking, considering climate change.
Atlas 14 is important because it is the foundation for design standards for roads, dams, construction regulations — and stormwater systems.
To read more of Jim Morrison’s reporting, check his Substack at https://substack.com/@jimmor12 or https://jimmorrison.contently.com/