By Jugal Patel, Student Correspondent
In June 2015, Dutch experts in coastal water management and flood control offered practical insights for Virginia communities in five days of workshops at Norfolk’s Slover Library. The “Dutch Dialogues” initiative—in which the Netherlands Embassy in Washington, DC, has played an enthusiastic part—has included similar sessions in several major coastal US cities. The dialogues explore how Dutch expertise in water management can benefit coastal American communities.
As part of the program, Dutch designers used hundreds of sketches and historic maps to produce overhead perspectives of Virginia’s coastal landscape. These included entire districts of Hampton, Newport News, and Norfolk, an area they called “the urban archipelago.” Local adaptation specialists—and their Dutch counterparts—then analyzed water management strategies for Hampton’s Newmarket Creek watershed and Norfolk’s Tidewater district.
It was the first time that Dutch architects, engineers, economists, and planners have interacted with Virginia’s own flood adaptation community. Their goal was to find solutions to the region’s sea level rise challenges while also providing value to the landscape.
“Working at the neighborhood level, we could see how local changes to address nuisance flooding events could improve the quality of life for residents in many ways, making the city greener, cleaner, and more connected,” said Michelle Covi, Virginia Sea Grant extension staff at Old Dominion University and a participant in the dialogues.
Covi says she was impressed by the collaboration between the local and international experts: “The Dutch engineers and architects listened to the local aspirations and limitations carefully and yet brought their fresh, experienced perspective to the process.”
The Dutch have plenty of experience to draw on, having dealt with flood hazards for over 800 years. About two-thirds of the Dutch population lives below sea level, and water management currently accounts for 4% of their national GDP.
Throughout the dialogues, experts focused on areas where water doesn’t drain easily and pools instead. Some are former creek beds, basins, and coastal marshes that were filled in to accommodate expansion and development.
In the workshops, one group focused on Hampton and Newport News, another on Norfolk, and the third on the region as a whole, all visiting their respective sites as part of their work.
The group tasked with Hampton’s Newmarket Creek watershed found that during extreme events, the creek’s water level should be controlled at its mouth. They also brainstormed ways to reduce runoff, treat polluted storm water, and use parks, ponds, and bioretention areas to store water within the landscape.
For Matthew Smith, a Hampton city planner, the proposed neighborhood-scale modifications provided both aesthetic value and connectivity to the area.
A key idea is to restore Newmarket Creek so that walkers and bikers have other ways to get around places adjacent to the creek’s watershed, which is deep inside Hampton. Adaptation could also establish Newmarket Creek as an additional transportation link from the James River to downtown Hampton, Langley Air Force Base, and Fort Monroe.
“A restored creek would be the centerpiece around which redevelopment of the shopping centers would occur, possibly spurring the transformation of western Mercury Boulevard into a more visually appealing, multi-functioning corridor,” he said.
The Norfolk team addressed industrial, commercial, and residential shorelines, as well as areas closer inland toward St. Paul’s Quadrant in downtown Norfolk.
The group reimagined the seaboard from Harbor Park baseball stadium to the Chesterfield Heights historic neighborhood to allow for more inland water storage capacity. Participants also found that adding architectural embankments and living shorelines could protect the developed areas from tidal surges.
Behind the more industrialized areas of the Tidewater district, designers saw an opportunity to fold the land into basins in “green-scaped” parks. Pollutants in the water could be removed before its release into the Elizabeth River.
At the session’s conclusion, Dale Morris, a senior economist at the Dutch embassy, reflected on the scale of the work done. By his estimate, the design sessions among experts included 1,700 hours spent on adaptation. Looking ahead, he quoted former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu: “The land is sinking. The water is rising. And the rest is up to you.”
