This story was reported and written by our media partner the Virginia Mercury.
A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers draft feasibility study proposing scaled-down protection without structural elements like floodwalls for vulnerable portions of Hampton and Poquoson got a frosty reception from Hampton’s city manager during a recent presentation to City Council.
The $4.2 billion Coastal Storm Risk Management plan, now open to public comment, calls for elevating nearly 4,000 structures voluntarily in the two cities, something the Corps acknowledged it has little experience doing.
Mary Bunting, Hampton’s city manager, told council members during the Aug. 12 meeting that Hampton would not be able to afford the city’s share of the plan, nearly $1.5 billion, describing the cost as “pretty staggering.”
The study proposes elevating 300 homes a year. There are not enough contractors in the area to accomplish that, nor could the city afford the price tag, Bunting said, adding that the same amount of funds would be better spent on structural solutions.
But the study is a gateway to receiving federal funding and Hampton will press the Corps to do a second study examining structural solutions, as it has done for Virginia Beach and Norfolk, where the proposed projects include miles of floodwalls, Bunting added.
Study calls for nearly 4,000 homes to be raised, infrastructure to be floodproofed
The study was originally to include Hampton, Poquoson, Newport News, Williamsburg, and James City and York counties. But the Corps refocused it only on Hampton and Poquoson and only on non-structural solutions like house raisings because of a congressional requirement that the study be completed in three years at a cost of $3 million.
The provision was enacted after Hurricane Sandy as a solution to the Corps’ decades-long projects backlog and to create protections before storm damage occurred, rather than after.
“We could not put any additional money into it, nor could the federal government,” Bunting said. “And because it was capped at $3 million, (the Corps) would not be able to look at structural solutions, which we believe are absolutely necessary and warranted.”
An appendix to the study said a comprehensive examination of all solutions , including floodwalls and levees, for the six localities, including floodwalls and levees, would have cost nearly $20 million and taken about six years.
The plan includes elevating up to 3,926 residential buildings and floodproofing up to 51 nonresidential buildings and 21 critical infrastructure facilities in three Hampton neighborhoods (Aberdeen, Buckroe, and Fox Hill) and six Poquoson areas. Nearly 2,300 of the elevations would be in Hampton.
Over 50 years, the study reported total average annual benefits of $140.5 million and total average annual costs of $127 million, just topping the congressional requirement that benefits must outweigh costs.
Implementation, if approved by Hampton City Council, would begin in 2027, with construction projected for completion by 2040, if Congress appropriated funding.
Olivia Askew, Hampton’s resilience officer, said the plan will continue to be refined resulting in “an interim solution” knowing that nature-based and structural measures are needed. That refinement would focus on reducing the price tag to what the city could afford by reducing the number of buildings to be elevated.
The report noted there “remains a strong federal interest” in an expanded future study that includes such structural measures. But there is no funding and no timeline for that to happen.
Scott Smith, the city’s coastal resilience engineer, told council members that more than 45,000 Hampton “assets” were identified by the Corps as at risk, including critical infrastructure like fire stations, emergency operations, shelters, and the hospital.
But the narrowing of the study required a focus only on certain areas and only on nonstructural solutions. There were 27,000 structures in the areas considered by the study, 94% of them single family homes.
“The need didn’t get smaller,” he told council members. “The federally actionable project did.”
Federal law requires localities to fund 35% of any Corps project. Norfolk, the only local city to sign a partnership agreement with the Corps for a storm risk project, has said it cannot afford its share of the $6.1 billion project there.
The city has reached out to the state for funding help and asked its congressional delegation to explore reducing the share to 10%, so far without success.
Army Corps studies for other cities have expanded beyond the time and dollar barriers Hampton faced.
The Virginia Beach study, which is in draft form and not expected to be complete until 2028, has been ongoing since 2022.
Studies in New York and Miami, which pushed back against draft plans, were also extended, an indication that the three-year timeline for studies in cities with complex shorelines is insufficient.
A spokesman for the Norfolk district office of the Corps said going forward feasibility studies like the one in Hampton will have to meet the requirement to be completed in three years at a cost of $3 million.
“There will be very few feasibility studies with additional time or funding beyond the existing legal limits,” he added.
Olivia Askew, Hampton’s resilience officer, said the plan will continue to be refined resulting in “an interim solution” knowing that nature-based and structural measures are needed.
That refinement would focus on reducing the price tag to what the city could afford by narrowing the number of buildings to be elevated.
Environmental groups urge caution
Mary-Carson Stiff, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a local advocacy nonprofit that has worked with Hampton, described elevating structures as a “band-aid solution.”
“They are a necessary part of adaptation, but they have a time limit, an expiration date for their effectiveness,” she said. “You have to acknowledge that you are adding an additional cost to local government maintenance and provision of services that you may not be factoring into your life cycle cost of elevating a property.”
Once a property has been elevated, a locality must consider raising the street and repairing damaged electrical, sewer, and water lines after flooding, Stiff said. Keeping residents in place through elevations means they remain at risk.
Stiff said communities like Hampton should think not only about the short-term, but the mid-term and long-term, and anticipate when short-term solutions like elevating homes are no longer financially viable or safe.
“It isn’t a solution that is going to last into the future, and we’re treating it like it might be,” she said. “There’s a danger to that.”
The Corps acknowledged in the study that it has little experience with large-scale elevation projects like this, which present “unprecedented programmatic, legal, and administrative risks for the USACE,” the draft noted.
“These risks stem from the shift from centralized, large-scale civil works to managing hundreds/thousands of decentralized, voluntary residential interventions.”
The study said pilot home elevation projects were underway and could shift how such plans are implemented. Because elevations will be voluntary and require a perpetual easement, the Corps study noted it is unclear how many people will participate. But it added that the benefit-cost ratio assumed 100% participation.
Corps regulations require that any buildings elevated with government funding be structurally sound, absent leaks, mold, water damage, or other issues. Bringing a building up to that standard is the responsibility of the owner.
A spokesman for the Corps said homeowner participation in past elevation projects has been between 30 and 50%.
”The localities (Hampton and Poquoson) will play a major partnership role in the design and implementation of the future recommended home elevations,” he said, adding that the plan will be further refined.
Bunting pointed out to council members that a few days prior, 1.87 inches of rain fell over the city in 10 minutes.
“Let that sink in,” she said. “If you had extra flooding in your neighborhood or on your property, that’s why. None of the systems that were built 50 to 100 years ago to protect our city anticipated intense rain events of that nature.”
Smith said that without the storm risk project, the Corps estimated $10 billion in future flood damage to Poquoson and Hampton, with $7.6 billion of that in Hampton. These figures put the scale of the long-term resilience challenge into perspective, he said.
He also reminded council members that the study did not examine solutions to compound flooding from rain bombs, like the one Bunting mentioned.
The draft Corps plan, he added, “is one of the components of the broader living with water strategy, and not the city’s entire flood resilience program.”
The city, Askew said in an interview, will also need to update its drainage infrastructure. There’s no price tag yet for those needs, she said.
Comments on the plan will be accepted until Sept. 5 and should be sent to PeninsulaCSRM@usace.army.mil.