Coastal Norfolk, VA Residents Grapple With Sinking Land, Rising Tides - NYT

[hatrack]

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If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides. For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea. As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.

But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean. Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.

Climate change is a subject of friction in Virginia. The state’s attorney general, Ken T. Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when he was a researcher at the University of Virginia. But the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level. When Ms. Peck, now 75 and a caretaker to her husband, moved here 40 years ago, tidal flooding was an occasional hazard. “Last month,” she said recently, “there were eight or nine days the tide was so doggone high it was difficult to drive.”

Larchmont residents have relentlessly lobbied the city to address the problem, and last summer it broke ground on a project to raise the street around the “u” by 18 inches and to readjust the angle of the storm drains so that when the river rises, the water does not back up into the street. The city will also turn a park at the edge of the river back into wetlands — it is now too saline for lawn grass to grow anyway. The cost for the work on this one short stretch is $1.25 million.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/science/earth/26norfolk.html?_r=1

[mediaman007]

1. Here it comes!

I doubt that this will be the last of the tidal floods along the Atlantic Coast.

After one visit to Tybee Island, Georgia, I was amazed that the beaches are constantly washing into the ocean. There were a couple of ships about a mile off shore that pump sand back to the beaches to replace the sand. There must be a lot of money in tourism, because this operations has to be pretty expensive. Anyway, I suspect that high tides will make this sand replacement more and more difficult.

[KansDem]

2. But the next possible head of the Energy Committee says, "God won't permit global warming!"

Rep. John 'God won’t allow global warming' Shimkus next Energy Committee head?

Republican Representative John Shimkus may be the next chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. He also openly claims global warming isn't something to worry about because God said He wouldn't destroy the Earth after Noah's flood.

--more--
Examiner

So relax, Hazel, God knows what's best for you car...:thumbsup:

[Yeahyeah]

3. Maybe the state’s attorney general Ken T. Cuccinelli II would allow himself to be staked down on

the shore overnight to find out if this is real.If his lungs are not full of seawater in the morning,it's not real.

[HelenWheels]

4. 20 years ago

I was in Trinidad and the Trinidadians were worried at that time about the rising tide. The palm trees that at one time were quite a ways from the ocean were now being washed into the sea. They had built some stone walls in an effort to hold the ocean back but they too were in danger of being washed away.