Rising Seas Are Flooding Virginia’s Naval Base, and There’s No Plan to Fix It

by Nicholas Kusnetz (InsideClimate News) The giant naval base at Norfolk is under threat by rising seas and sinking land, but little is being done to hold back the tides. -- ... Naval Station Norfolk, home to the Atlantic Fleet, floods not just in heavy rains or during hurricanes. It floods when the sun is shining, too, if the tide is high or the winds are right. It floods all the time.

"It is an impediment to the base accomplishing its mission," Bouchard ( Joe Bouchard, a retired captain and former base commander) said.

Once or twice a month, seawater subsumes steam lines that run along the bottom of the piers where the fleet's ships are moored. It bubbles up through storm drains and closes roads. "It can actually shut down operations, or make it very difficult for people to get around," Bouchard said.

Climate change poses an immediate threat to Norfolk. The seas are rising at twice the global average here, due to ocean currents and geology. Yet while the region is home to the densest collection of military facilities in the nation, the Pentagon has barely begun the hard work of adaptation. A detailed study in 2014 by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center identified about 1.5 feet of sea level rise as a "tipping point" for the base that would dramatically increase the risk of serious damage to infrastructure. But there is no plan to address this level of rise, which scientists expect within a few decades.

The city of Norfolk, which surrounds the base, is also under siege. Sections of the main road that leads to the base become impassable several times a year. Some residents check tide charts before leaving for work or parking their cars for the night.

While Norfolk is particularly vulnerable, rising seas are threatening hundreds of other U.S. military bases around the world. READ MORE

Excerpt from Inside Climate News: Moore (Robert Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council) said the country faces two main tasks: First, we have to stop building in risky, flood prone areas on the coast. Then we need to find ways to move people who already live there. One 2010 study estimated that 8.4 million Americans live in high-risk coastal flood areas.

Currently, federal policies including the National Flood Insurance Program are designed to encourage people to rebuild where they are, even if their properties are likely to flood again.

"What we do now is we basically wait for a disaster to happen and a massive disruption to occur and then we scramble around to get people back to where they were," Moore said.

R.J. Lehmann, editor in chief of the conservative think tank R Street, said we'll have to pick our battles by focusing on what's worth protecting. "You look to a city like Atlantic City, which is on a barrier island and is highly vulnerable to floods" and which by some accounts is a failed city economically, he said. "Will we go to extraordinary lengths to save a city like Atlantic City? I think the answer is no."

"We're not in the habit of making those bloodless decisions on the cost and benefit of saving infrastructure," he said. "We're going to have to." READ MORE