Columns penned this week by Ed Risse and Norm Leahy offer supplementary perspectives on one of the great environmental crises of our time: the overdevelopment of precarious waterfront land. Ed and Norm highlight different aspects of this national folly.
In “Castles of Sand,” Norm describes the futility of building million-dollar houses on sandy spits of land lining the Atlantic Coast. Sand migrates with the currents and storms. The foundation of thousands of beach-front houses is eroding, exposing property owners to potential losses of billions of dollars. This phenomenon is as pronounced in Virginia Beach as it is in the South Carolina communities that Norm writes about. When the next Category 3 hurricane hits, the impact will be devastating.
Not only will property be lost, but tens of thousands of Virginians (and residents of the Outer Banks) will be stuck, hard pressed to evacuate. We learned from New Orleans what happens when citizens are unable to flee a hurricane. Unfortunately, by personalizing the disaster — it was all George Bush’s/Ray Nagin’s/Kathleen Blanco’s fault — we have not absorbed the systemic problems underlying the Katrina disaster. Ed provides a much-needed update in his piece today, “A Second Stroll with Katrina.”
My take-away from Ed’s column was this: Louisana and New Orleans tried to protect everything, and, in so doing, protected nothing. Blaming the federal government for failing to provide enough funding, or faulting the local culture of corruption that wasted much of the money that was made available, misses the larger point: There wasn’t enough money to build levees high enough to protect all the low-lying land that developers built upon. A rational strategy, Ed argues, would be to build higher, stronger walls around a smaller, more defensible area.
I can’t help but wonder if Hampton Roads is following the same path as New Orleans. Instead of building levees, though, Hampton Roads authorities have spent multi-millions on replenishing sands that continue to wash away. Instead of limiting development on low-lying, flood-prone land, they propose to spend multi-billions to build massive road-and-bridge projects to expedite “hurricane evacuation.”
Incredibly, one new highway, the $2.5 billion Southeast Expressway, would skirt Stumpy Lake and the Great Dismal Swamp, displacing wetlands that would help absorb a storm surge. The highway could help evacuate Virginia Beach residents crowded along the coast in the event of a hurricane — but only if the hurricane doesn’t raise water levels enough inland to inundate the road.
I’ll confess, I don’t know what the specifications of the road are — they probably haven’t even been written yet. But someone had better make sure the darn thing sits high enough above sea level that a storm surge pushing water inland won’t take it out while thousands of Hampton Roadsters are using it to evacuate!
(Photo credit: The Schlatter Family Website.)