Rising waters pose threat to Va. coast

POQUOSON -- Hurricane Isabel flooded Sandy Firman's house in 2003, and now routine storms drive water into the roads and marshes close by.

Several homes in this low-lying city, including Firman's, have been elevated about 10 feet to keep them above the ever-closer waters.

"We used to not have it like that," said Firman, who has lived in Poquoson all of his 46 years. "But something has changed around here."

One big thing that has changed is the sea level, which is rising -- an increase blamed on global warming.

Scientists say global warming could someday threaten Virginians' health, harm the Chesapeake Bay and imperil species from blue crabs to tiny birds.

"It's not an exaggeration to say it is the issue of our day," said J. Emmett Duffy, a marine ecologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Many of the worst effects expected from climate change are decades away. Other apparent effects -- a warming bay, changes in animals' behavior -- are happening now.

In southeastern Virginia, the rising sea is a problem now, and scientists expect it to get much, much worse.

The sea level in this region has been rising about a foot a century -- the highest rate on the East Coast. Scientists project a potentially devastating rise of 2 to 7 feet by 2100.

Assuming a midrange estimate of 3.7 feet by 2100, Old Dominion University researchers said in a 2009 "State of the Region Report": "From north to south, vast areas of Mathews, Gloucester and York counties, most of Poquoson, and much of the cities of Hampton, Norfolk, Chesapeake and the Virginia Beach oceanfront will be under water unless protected by dikes and levees."

Rising seas could pose a threat to much of the coast from Boston to the Gulf of Mexico, experts say. But Hampton Roads in southeastern Virginia is unusually vulnerable. It is flat, and its land is sinking. It has nearly 2 million residents. It is home to popular beaches, waterfront homes, military bases, a huge tourism industry and ecologically valuable marshes.

Rising seas will either inundate many of those assets or expose them to flooding when storms push big walls of water, or surges, onto land, the experts say.

"Hampton Roads is one of the most vulnerable regions in the United States to sea-level rise, in terms of population and assets at risk," said Eric J. Walberg, a former staff member for the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission.

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Rising sea levels around the world are attributed to warming. When water warms, it expands. Melting polar ice sheets also raise the waters.

In Virginia, sea levels are rising faster than the global average because the land is sinking.

During the last ice age thousands of years ago, the weight of glaciers pushed down land in what is now the northern U.S. When those glaciers receded, that northern land began to rise, and land here started sinking, as if Virginia were on the end of a see-saw after the other rider got off.

Throughout most of the 20th century, the sea level in southeastern Virginia rose about twelve-hundredths of an inch a year -- or 12 inches per century.

But over the past two decades or so, the rate appears to have doubled in places. About half of that increase seems to be due to the sinking of land, and half to global warming, said Carl Hershner, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

"And the forecast -- this is the scary part -- is for that acceleration to rise," Hershner said.

Scientists say the future increases will be caused almost entirely by climate change. "We will still be sinking," Hershner said, "but that will be a smaller and smaller fraction of the change we experience."

Hershner said a 2to 5-foot sea-level rise by 2100 appears to be the consensus. Just a 2-foot increase, with a 3-to-5-foot storm surge piled on top, would endanger "a significant amount of Hampton Roads."

Hershner was clearly uncomfortable talking about a 7-foot increase. "Seven feet has a nice alarming ring to it, but nobody's really sure. That's the upper limit of the scientific guesses that are out there."

If the sea level rose 7 feet, Hershner said, virtually everything east of U.S. 17 -- an area containing more than half the region's 1.7 million residents -- would be at risk.

That means a storm surge of a few feet from even a low-level hurricane would wreak destruction across virtually all of Norfolk, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach and large parts of the Peninsula, Middle Peninsula and Northern Neck.

In other words, Hershner said, "We're all moving eventually."

Poquoson, a city of nearly 12,000 on the Peninsula just north of Hampton, offers a stark example of the threat. Most of Poquoson is lower than 8 feet above sea level.

"That's one of those communities that, realistically, relocation of the community is going to have to be part of the [area's] long-range planning," Hershner said.

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Many of the piers at the Norfolk Naval Station were built around World War II.

During storms or even higher-than-normal tides in recent years, the water began to rise so high that it flooded low-lying areas of the base and covered utility lines, including high-voltage electrical cables, suspended beneath the old piers.

That meant frequent losses of power and other services to the base's ships.

"Sea-level rise was having a negative impact on the readiness of the combat forces at the base," said Joe Bouchard, the base's commander from 2000 to 2003.

The Navy was already planning a multimillion-dollar project to replace the aging piers at Norfolk, the world's largest naval base. To cope with the rising waters, Navy engineers designed double-deck piers with the utility lines suspended from the main, upper deck, about 20 feet above sea level.

Bouchard said there appears to be a growing concern about low-lying bases in Hampton Roads, including Langley Air Force Base on the Peninsula.

Bouchard, a former Democratic member of the House of Delegates from Virginia Beach, said "it's reasonable to project" that a base's vulnerability to climate change will be a factor should the government look for bases to close.

Cmdr. Wendy L. Snyder, a Defense Department spokeswoman, acknowledged that flooding occurs at the Norfolk and Langley bases.

The department is concerned and is studying the problem, she said. "We are going to assess the impacts of climate change for all of our installations."

As for possible base closings in Hampton Roads, Snyder said she did not want to speculate.

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Here's an example of how rising seas represent an increasing threat:

A powerful storm hit Virginia's coast in 1933. But the less-powerful Hurricane Isabel in 2003 -- which became a tropical storm about the time it entered Virginia -- caused similar flooding because the sea level by then had risen 9 to 10 inches.

Isabel gained extra destructive power by sending its storm surge inland on higher waters, Hershner said. Isabel caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

On top of all that, scientists predict global warming will cause more-powerful storms in coming decades. And in Hampton Roads, more and more people are building near the shore, putting themselves and their property at risk.

A recent analysis by First American Corp., which provides information to insurers, ranked Virginia Beach second behind Miami among East Coast markets in terms of homes and apartments vulnerable to storm-surge damage from hurricanes.

A direct hit by a Category 1 hurricane -- the least powerful type -- could cause $7.4 billion in damage, the analysis found.

Climate change will make the area even more vulnerable, said Howard Botts, First American's director of database development. "Even a lower-magnitude storm will have a much bigger impact with sea-level rise."

. . .

Low-lying parts of Hampton Roads flood now from fairly routine storms and tides, said Skip Stiles, director of Wetlands Watch, a Norfolk environmental group. "Anywhere you go, people have stories" about how the water comes up higher than it used to.

States including Maryland and North Carolina are investigating possible ways to deal with rising seas. Among other things, Maryland is encouraging people to leave shorelines wild.

Yet Virginia has no "visible, coordinated state reaction to the issue of sea-level rise," Stiles said.

The problem is catching the attention of Hampton Roads' political leaders, but that hasn't translated into long-range action.

"Nobody knows what to do," said Doug Dwoyer, a former NASA manager who lectures on climate change.

The Old Dominion report concluded: "Only those with no concern for the future can afford to ignore [rising seas]. This directly implies that we ought to be actively planning a system of dikes and levees unless we intend to forfeit huge portions of our land to the sea."

But the building of dikes and levees "is so far removed from public attention in Hampton Roads that anyone who broaches the subject is likely to elicit a quizzical look."

At a recent sea-level symposium in Hampton, Newport News Mayor Joe Frank said, "This is a very complicated kind of thing, and very expensive, and has huge impacts on people. It's going to take a reawakening of the public about what the risk they actually face is, not just for their generation, but their children's and children's children's generations."

As for Sandy Firman in Poquoson, he plans to stay put. "I love it down here," he said. "This is home."

Contact Rex Springston at (804) 649-6453 or rspringston@timesdispatch.com.