People passing through the eastern edge of downtown Norfolk will soon see construction for the first phase of the city’s massive floodwall project with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The Norfolk Planning Commission recently approved designs for Phase 1A of the more than $2.6 billion project, which the city calls Resilient Norfolk.
The effort aims to protect the city from catastrophic flooding during major storms and is part of the Army Corps’ wider Coastal Storm Risk Management program developed after 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. Virginia Beach and the Peninsula are working on CSRM projects but are still in the study phase.
Norfolk’s project is set to include home elevations, pump stations, surge barriers across several waterways and a nearly 9-mile seawall wrapping around downtown to Lambert’s Point.
The first piece will stretch around the shoreline from the Berkley Bridge east to the Chesterfield Heights neighborhood, including Harbor Park and the future casino.
The wall will range in height from about 6 1/2 feet to about 16 1/2 feet, according to the city.
Kyle Spencer, Norfolk’s chief resilience officer, said it will look much different than the existing floodwall that the Army Corps built around Nauticus in the 1970s.
The old one “is just a big, bare concrete slab sticking out of the ground,” Spencer said. “Ours will look mainly like an elevated walkway, bike path and have some textures and design elements to it that kind of soften it to the eye.”
The Elizabeth River Trail will sit on top of the wall and levee system from the Berkley Bridge to the Amtrak railroad tracks. Spencer said the goal is to install benches and lighting to allow people to take in the river view.
The floodwall will be more visible from the street side along Water Street, he said.
The first phase also includes two new pump stations to help drain heavy rainfall during storms, and a living shoreline along parts of the seawall.
Norfolk plans to start sitework this fall, such as relocating utilities and tearing up pavement. Contractors hired by the Army Corps would then build the actual wall, likely not until 2027.
In May, city and Army Corps officials told the City Council that the cost and timeline for Resilient Norfolk have both gone up. The new estimated end date for all parts of the project is 2037, five years later than the original timeline.
The federal government is responsible for paying 65% of the cost, with the city on the hook for the rest, or more than $930 million.
The Army Corps’ Norfolk District stated it cannot comment on a new price tag until officials conduct a formal analysis, but they expect it to rise beyond the $2.6 billion Congress approved in 2020.
Here is the status of some other elements of the project:
- The next piece of the floodwall – Phase 1B – will run from the Berkley Bridge west to Freemason, including Town Point Park. Spencer said Army Corps consultants plan to complete about a third of the design by early next year.
- Path through Freemason: The final and longest piece of the floodwall would go from Town Point Park to Lambert’s Point, including around the historic Freemason waterfront. The current alignment has gotten strong pushback from Freemason residents, who say a 16-foot wall would tank property values and community character. The city is now asking the Army Corps to consider a different path that would place the wall further out in the water from roughly the USS Wisconsin to PETA headquarters. The potential change requires federal authorization and will likely trigger additional environmental reviews, Spencer said.
- Extending to the Southside: Residents of five historically Black communities on Norfolk’s Southside, across the Elizabeth River, have been fighting to be included in the project. The current design offers home elevations to some homeowners but no structures such as a seawall. The Army Corps’ historical cost-benefit calculation often leaves out lower-income communities in favor of wealthier ones where total property values drive up the monetary benefits of protection on paper. The agency’s Norfolk District has stated it’s pursuing federal authorization to study extending the floodwall to the Southside, but has failed to gain funding to do so for the past several years.
- Surge barriers: The Resilient Norfolk project includes three storm surge barriers across entrances to the Lafayette River, Broad Creek and Pretty Lake in Ocean View to prevent surging waves from flooding neighborhoods during storms. Officials are in early stages of designing the barriers, Spencer said. The Lafayette barrier will be the largest – about a mile long – and will be the most complicated to design to maintain the river as a navigation channel.
- Individual home floodproofing: Norfolk recently launched a tool allowing residents and business owners to search whether their property is potentially eligible for voluntary “non-structural measures,” including filling in basements and elevating flood-prone homes.
