In the battle to combat sea-level rise, the city of Norfolk, Va., finds itself on the front lines. The city, which officials say is the urban area most at risk from the looming threats of rising sea levels on the East Coast, is going beyond just conducting studies of future impacts and is taking action. In the Ohio Creek Watershed project, the city is employing a multi-layered approach to mitigating current and future flooding concerns. Design started on the $122-million project in 2016, and construction is expected to be completed in January. It aims to help mitigate both regular nuisance flooding and storm-surge flooding in the historic Chesterfield Heights neighborhood. The strategies deployed will offer city officials valuable insight for future planning while creating best practices that other flood-threatened urban centers can follow.
“By bringing all of these strategies together into one neighborhood, we are providing a test bed in Norfolk that they can work with for decades to come,” says Edgar Westerhof, U.S. flood risk and resiliency lead at Arcadis, which led the project’s design team.