A decade ago, a group of engineers and water experts from the Netherlands visited Hampton Roads and helped reshape the region’s approach to rising tides.
The group met with local leaders in a series of summer 2015 workshops known as the Dutch Dialogues, sharing lessons learned from managing water in the low-lying country.
The event helped inform and inspire numerous flood control projects across Hampton Roads, such as stormwater parks and reconstructed wetlands.
“The original Dutch Dialogues challenged us to see water not as an enemy to defeat, but as a neighbor to live with,” Scott Smith, coastal resilience engineer with the city of Hampton, said Wednesday at a conference in downtown Norfolk.
“That shift from resistance to relationship has transformed plans, projects and partnerships across the region. We've made real progress.”
This week’s event, Dutch Dialogues: Life at Sea Level, celebrates the 10th anniversary of the landmark event and charts a path forward.
‘Living with water’
The Netherlands has been battling water for centuries.
About a third of the country along the North Sea is below sea level, and the rest is not much higher.
Victoria Elema, who works for the country’s Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and the Netherlands International Water Ambition, said they used to focus on “gray” infrastructure – hardened, manmade structures such as large storm surge barriers.
“Gradually, we also saw that just fighting water wouldn't be sufficient, so we changed our approach a little bit to also living with water,” she said in an interview at the conference. “Give the river more space, give water more space, show people that it's nice to have water in your surroundings, and water is not your enemy, things like that.”
The Dutch have become renowned for extensive water management techniques, including a series of dikes and dams, canals, floating houses and windmills that pump water.
“We're in the process of looking forward to the years to come, because we are facing increasing sea level rise,” Elema said. “So we're not done yet. Water is part of our DNA in the Netherlands, so we will always work with that and think of new solutions.”
They also want others to learn from their mistakes, she said. That’s how they ended up in Norfolk, which is also deeply tied to and threatened by water. (Even the Hague water body in Norfolk has connections: Two Dutchmen helped develop Ghent in the late 1800s.)
David Waggonner, founder of the New Orleans-based architecture firm Waggonner & Ball, helped develop the Dutch Dialogues program. After the city’s levees failed during Hurricane Katrina, he tagged along with a group looking at flood defenses in the country.
The Dutch Dialogues were first held in New Orleans before coming to Norfolk and later Charleston. Waggonner said the goal was to keep spreading lessons learned.
“You can’t maintain awareness if you’re inside your own bubble,” he said. “You have to look outside.”
The 2015 event focused on boosting Norfolk’s application to the federal government in the National Disaster Resilience Competition.
Working with the nonprofit Wetlands Watch, students from Old Dominion and Hampton universities had been working in the Chesterfield Heights neighborhood to identify potential solutions to chronic flooding.
Their ideas helped inspire Norfolk’s grant application and the Dutch Dialogues helped refine it, leading to the $112 million Ohio Creek Watershed Project completed in 2023.
Smith said the discussions shaped the last 10 years of his career in the resilience field, including the Resilient Hampton initiative. Hampton’s City Council codified the “Living with Water” concept as a strategic priority.
“We realized the threat and now we're working to see how we can adapt,” Smith said.
For example, Hampton is working on the Big Bethel Blueway, transforming an existing drainage canal into public green space while adding storage capacity.
At this week’s conference, local leaders acknowledged challenges, such as how to effectively and equitably move people out of harm's way and how to fund investments.
Moving forward
Much of Virginia’s resilience work has relied on money and leadership from the federal and state governments, said Ben McFarlane, chief resilience officer for the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission.
“That model is no longer going to work anytime soon,” he said. “The impacts that we're already seeing in terms of flooding on our communities demand that we model new approaches to decision-making, to planning, to designing, to building infrastructure to help our communities deal with these issues.”
Protecting Hampton Roads is not just a local issue, he said. The concentration of military facilities also makes it a matter of national security. Officials have worked regionally on resilience, such as agreeing to regional stormwater design standards that incorporate sea level rise.
But more needs to be done, “piloting new solutions to old problems,” McFarlane said.
Carol Considine, director of applied projects at ODU’s Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience, said the Dutch Dialogues prompted many flooding projects.
To maximize time and money, the region needs to prioritize projects with broader advantages, she said, such as greenery that protects people from extreme heat, buffers pollution and absorbs excess water.
“Hard conversations will hopefully happen here about how we need to be getting multiple benefits out of solutions, and not addressing one piece of climate change, which is flooding,” Considine said.
Smith said he hopes this week’s event will “re-energize” local officials.
“We don't want to become complacent,” he said. “We want to advance.”
