Virginia

Waterlogged in Southeastern Virginia

Published

2 years ago

July 6, 2023

For the nearly two million people in Norfolk, Newport News, Virginia Beach, and the surrounding communities that make up the Hampton Roads region of southeastern Virginia, the Atlantic Ocean is not only the cultural lifeblood of the area, it is an economic driver. Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval facility, hosts more than 330,000 active-duty personnel, military retirees, families, civilian employees, and others and spends billions in the state.

Yet for an area inextricably linked to water, the water is now a serious problem. Climate change is bearing down on Hampton Roads. The bowl-like shape of the Chesapeake Bay, and the way the James and Elizabeth Rivers flow into that depression, means that the region has the dubious distinction of dealing with both rising seas and sinking land. Norfolk has the highest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts the sea level will rise between one and three feet in the region by 2050. According to a new Virginia Tech Earth Observation and Innovation Lab study, sections of land along the Chesapeake Bay shoreline are sinking at rates of nearly a quarter of an inch a year. Hampton Roads is sinking at a relatively high rate, with the Navy’s assets in some of the most at-risk places.

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This rate of sea level rise is faster than local planners had previously anticipated. Local maps are now seriously out of date, especially when it comes to charting and preparing local communities for rising waters. The region’s municipal officials have been well aware of this problem and have gone to great lengths to come up with fortification strategies, building seawalls, retrofitting old buildings with climate-resistant infrastructure, and elevating roads. Sometimes, however, mitigation is not enough, and communities must consider how to accurately communicate to residents that certain areas are just plain risky areas to live and that they’ll have to plan for the previously unthinkable: moving out of harm’s way.

Managed retreat is the purposeful movement of people and infrastructure away from risky areas prone to repeating natural disasters. The most common type of managed retreat is a buyout program funded by either the local, state, or federal government. Virginia state officials have indicated that relocating people away from those areas is one option in the state’s 2021 Coastal Resilience Master Plan. The state intends to work with communities to “plan, implement, and support successful and lasting adaptation and protection strategies,” while also instituting buyout programs for the most flood-prone areas. Auctioning off of carbon credits created through Virginia’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative was intended to provide partial funding for these efforts. However, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin recently announced plans to withdraw from the cap-and-trade agreement. (The state has until the end of 2023 to formally leave the pact.)

Newport News, Virginia, which sits on the James River north of Naval Station Norfolk, leads the state with the highest number of buyouts at 80. The city’s annual budget allocates about $200,000 to buy out properties that repeatedly flood. The city uses FEMA maps to determine the riskiest areas and then offers to buy out the riskiest properties. If the owners accept the buyout, the city then does its own mitigation projects like turning the vacant lots into parks that can better soak up floodwaters.

Funding climate change mitigation projects is costly no matter how a community does it.

While Newport News officials have had some success in persuading people to accept buyouts, nearby municipalities like Norfolk and Virginia Beach have been slower to adopt managed-retreat strategies. They’ve opted instead to fund resilience measures like elevating homes and roads. In 2021, the residents of Virginia Beach voted to approve a $585 million bond, one of the largest in the country, to finance infrastructure projects that will help fortify the area against sea level rise.

Funding climate change mitigation projects is costly no matter how a community does it. But managed retreat, unlike funding seawalls and elevating roads, is likely cheaper in the long run since seawalls and roads are constantly getting damaged by rising seas. Buying a property and removing costly infrastructure is a large up-front cost but means future fixes to that infrastructure are no longer needed. Relocating people away from risky properties should therefore be considered in a town’s climate strategy.

Communicating to residents what managed retreat is and the options it can provide for the region’s residents can go a long way in helping residents address the negative climate impacts the region faces. Americans have relocated away from risky areas for at least a century. In 1881, the town of Niobrara, Nebraska, was flooded under roughly six feet of water. After the waters receded, town residents decided to relocate a mile and a half away to higher ground.

Moving is a decision that is usually left up to residents. “Sometimes people hear managed retreat and they think, ‘I’m going to be forced out of my home,’ which is not the way that 99.99 percent of the programs work,” says A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center.

Almost every managed-retreat program in the United States is voluntary, with the exception of Harris County in Texas (which instituted mandatory buyouts in seven Houston neighborhoods after Hurricane Harvey decimated the region in 2017). In 2020, Harris County mandated buyouts after receiving Housing and Urban Development relief funding. County officials noted that the area of Allen Field in Houston had flooded 12 times in the past four decades and felt that there were no infrastructure projects that would keep the area safe from future flooding.

In almost all these cases, the state or town will offer to buy a home and the owner has the option at every stage of the process to decline offers. In fact, in most areas where managed-retreat programs are in effect, there is not enough funding available to reimburse all the residents who want buyouts.

Local officials should also let people know that managed retreat is not a decision that happens in isolation. “We tend to think about [managed retreat] as a one-time process. But with managed retreat it very rarely is,” says Siders, one of the country’s leading experts on managed retreat. “Don’t think about it as you’re going to take the buyout or you’re not and then that’s it.” Siders believes that it’s better to think about the move as a “change of footprint.”

“We know that the boundaries of towns shift over time,” she says. Framing these moves as a shift in where people live rather than an erasure of a community is much more palatable, and better reflects what it means for residents to relocate to safer places.

Every type of climate mitigation, of course, has trade-offs. Communities lose property tax revenue from homes in a floodplain, and buyout program trade-offs certainly require robust evaluation and debate. Relocating to higher ground challenges residents to form new and lasting communities. But in an area like Hampton Roads, these conversations need to be happening. The 2021 Virginia Coastal Resilience Master Plan estimates that in the next six decades, the number of residential, public, and commercial buildings exposed to extreme coastal flooding risk will rise 150 percent to roughly 340,000 structures. The projected cost of annual flood damage is $5.1 billion.

For a crisis as multifaceted and complex as climate change is, our public policies need to be creative and diverse. Managed retreat may not be the best option for every resident living on a flood-prone lot in Newport News, or Norfolk, or Virginia Beach. Some people may continue to prefer fortification strategies. But at the very least, managed retreat should be an option for some severe repetitive-loss properties. The number of properties a state or local buyout program can buy in a given year is mostly dictated by the available funding, but even buying out a few properties every year “opens up a lot more space to be creative,” Siders says.

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Virginia

Snowstorm bears down on Virginia, will hit Petersburg, Tri-Cities hardest late Friday

Published

3 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

Snowstorm bears down on Virginia, will hit Petersburg, Tri-Cities hardest late Friday

PETERSBURG – Winter is coming. Again.

A massive winter storm encompassing a large swath of the central and southern U.S. should be arriving here sometime after 7 p.m. Friday. Precipitation is expected to be light but steady until around 11 p.m. That is when the snowfall will pick up, and we will see most of the anticipated 4-6 inches that the National Weather Service office in Wakefield expects for us.

Snow will start to taper off after dawn Saturday and should be out of here completely by Saturday afternoon.

NWS said snow began falling around 5 p.m. in far southwestern Virginia.

Getting ready

Around the area, state and local officials prepped for the storm’s arrival. In Petersburg, a city statement said the main roads through town were treated in advance Friday. Petersburg’s first-responders and public-works department will be on duty all through the storm to keep the scene as safe as possible.

The city also issued the typical advisory for citizens to stay off the roads as much as possible, and travel only if necessary.

“With less traffic, road crews can better cover the streets,” the statement read. “Residents are also asked to use off-street parking when available.”

Central, southern Virginia expected to feel brunt

Unlike last weekend’s storm that dumped as much as a foot of snow on northern Virginia, this weekend’s storm appears to be targeting central and southern Virginia.

The dividing line between 3-4 inches of snow and 4-6 inches of snow is between Richmond and Petersburg, maps from NWS indicate. The further north you go, the less accumulation you can expect.

Snow bands stretch from Louisa County to the Virginia-North Carolina line. The largest of those bands extends from Farmville through Petersburg and on up to Accomac on the Eastern Shore.

Projected totals fall off a bit as you move toward Tidewater and down into North Carolina.

If you must drive, the Virginia Department of Transportation recommends checking 511Virginia first, either online or through the app.

This is a developing story.

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Virginia

Virginia Tech Football: Where do Hokies Finish in Final ACC Power Rankings?

Published

13 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

Virginia Tech Football: Where do Hokies Finish in Final ACC Power Rankings?

Just a few months ago, before the 2024 season ever officially kicked off, Virginia Tech seemed like a program that was trending up. They finished the 2023 season strong and were returning a ton of starters from that team and seemingly had a favorable schedule in front of them. They were talked about as the dark horse to win the ACC and make the college football playoff, but it wasn’t long before that was proven to be false.

The Hokies started the season with an upset loss to Vanderbilt, lost to Rutgers a few weeks later, and had the controversial loss to Miami to drop them to 2-3. After rallying to win three straight to get to 5-3 and still have a shot at the ACC Championship, the Hokies collapsed, losing four of their last five, including the bowl game to Minnesota last Friday. Not only was this season very disappointing, but the Hokies are losing most of their contributors from this team to the transfer portal or the draft. RB Bhayshul Tuten, OL Xavier Chaplin, Braelin Moore, and several members of the secondary. They are working to fill those holes in the portal and quarterback Kyron Drones is coming back, but there is not as much optimism heading into this offseason as there was for last season

While all eyes might be on moving forward to the 2025 season, where did Virginia Tech finish in the final ACC Power Rankings From 247Sports analyst Grant Hughes?

“Bowl Result: Lost Duke’s Mayo Bowl to Minnesota, 24-10

“Virginia Tech entered the 2024 season with ACC championship aspirations but failed to live up to expectations after dropping three of its first five games. A 1-4 finish to the campaign secured the Hokies’ fourth losing season in the last five years. The good news is that starting quarterback Kyron Drones is returning for the 2025 season, and the Hokies have already replaced star running back Bhayshul Tuten via the portal with former top-100 recruit and Tennessee transfer Cameron Seldon.”

Aug 31, 2024; Nashville, Tennessee, USA; Virginia Tech Hokies head coach Brent Pry watches from the sideline against the Vanderbilt Commodores during the second half at FirstBank Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Steve Roberts-Imagn Images / Steve Roberts-Imagn Images

All of that has led to speculation about head coach Brent Pry being on the hot seat going into 2025. Pry has gone 3-8, 7-6, and 6-7 in his three seasons in Blacksburg. Earlier this week, ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg listed Pry as a coach on the hot seat going into 2025 and listed him in the “Don’t backslide” category alongside Arkansas head coach Sam Pittman, Florida’s Billy Napier, and Cal’s Justin Wilcox:

“The hot-seat talk bubbled up around Pry in November, and if the Commonwealth Cup had gone differently, Virginia Tech could have had a decision to make after a disappointing fall. Pry’s second consecutive 6-6 regular season got him to a bowl game, but he will enter Year 4 with a new defensive coordinator and a staff that will include former longtime Hokies DC Bud Foster as an advisor/analyst.

Pry is halfway through his contract and Virginia Tech isn’t in the best position to eat a seven-figure buyout. Virginia Tech should be more competitive in a very winnable ACC, especially with quarterback Kyron Drones back. The Hokies have eclipsed seven wins just once since 2017.”

Will Pry need to improve upon his record in 2025 to be ensured of another season in Blacksburg? Virginia Tech opens the season against South Carolina in Atlanta and the Gamecocks are likely going to start the season with a lofty ranking. They also face Miami, Georgia Tech, Florida State, and Louisville next season, but it is not a murderers row of a schedule. Needless to say, the Hokies need to see some progress next season.

Virginia Tech Football: Hokies Get Commitment From New Mexico Safety Transfer Christian Ellis

Virginia Tech Football: PFF Grades and Snap Counts for every Hokies player in the 2024 Season

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Virginia

Virginia Tech grads living in LA share wildfire experiences

Published

22 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

Virginia Tech grads living in LA share wildfire experiences

ROANOKE, Va. (WDBJ) – Firefighters are continuing to battle the devastating fires in Los Angeles that have destroyed thousands of homes and led to the evacuations of over 180,000.

While the fires are thousands of miles away those flames have connections to our hometowns. WDBJ7 spoke with two Virginia Tech Alumni living in Los Angeles on Thursday. While neither of them have had to evacuate their homes, they shared what it’s like to be in LA during the fires and how people there are handling the destruction.

“It definitely feels like a little apocalyptic, just the sky being somewhat black and grey. Here it’s more like the sun is covered by the smoke so it’s just very eerie,” said Jillian Ostick, a 2017 Virginia Tech graduate who lives in Los Angeles.

Ostick lives in the South Bay area of Los Angeles about 10-15 miles from where the fires are.

“It’s close by but in terms of being evacuated or anything we’re very safe down here. We’re really just affected by the air quality and being worried about other people,” she said.

Ostick works in residential real estate and says many of her clients have lost their homes or evacuated and her team is currently working to help them find rentals.

“People have lost everything and they’re just scared but I think people have a place to stay and have resources. Our team is collecting blankets and clothes and is just messaging out to everybody ‘If you need help, no questions asked just fill out this form’,’” she said. “A lot of people did have to just pack up quick last night if they were in an evacuation area.”

Leah Gay is a 2014 Virginia Tech Graduate who is from the Blacksburg area. She lives in the West Hollywood area of LA and hasn’t had to evacuate yet but says she is prepared to do so if needed.

“Everything so far in our area has just been super smokey, there’s been ash on the ground, on the car, everything like that but in terms of actual fires our area is safe,” said Gay. “Last night we got a new fire that was in the Hollywood Hills. It’s since been contained so that’s good but we could see those flames, the second you open the door it smelled like you were right in a fireplace. It was super close to us so we could see it, especially with the night sky it was super illuminated with all that fire.”

Gay said that she is remaining alert and closely following the latest updates on the fires.

“There’s an app called Watch Duty that pretty much everyone in LA is using for updates. It gives you real-time information about where first responders are being placed and where needs to be evacuated, where the flames are even if they’re moving in a certain direction. It’s a really great app, it has an amazing map in it so you can see in real-time who is being affected and what you need to do next,” she said.

Gay said that she does know several people who have had to evacuate. She said that it is an emotional time in Los Angeles.

“It’s super heartbreaking, so many people’s lives have been affected by this. It feels almost like COVID outside how there are so many less people out on the streets, many people are wearing masks to stay safe from the smoke, so it’s kind of feeling like a completely different Los Angeles,” she said.

Both Gay and Ostick said that people are already doing everything they can to help those who have lost everything to the fires. They both noted that there are many places where people can donate to help those in need.

While not everyone in L-A has had to be evacuated from their homes, the smoke from the fires is causing major air quality problems that can be harmful to people. The air quality is being adversely affected as far as 100 miles from the fire.

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