Rising tide of sea-level warnings drowned out by wave of shoreline development

By Tom Horton
January 2012 Sea-level around the Chesapeake Bay is rising. Larger-than-ever storm surges are a certainty. Land is sinking further. The time has come to plan an orderly human retreat from more development along the watershed’s low-lying edges. The science that backs this advice gets drowned out when developers wave big money at county officials craving revenue. A classic “lose-lose” – for the environment and for taxpayers – results. The most recent example comes from the Northumberland (VA) County Board of Supervisors. They have tentatively approved a massive home-resort-marina complex on Bluff Point, a marshy, wooded peninsula jutting into the Chesapeake from Virginia’s lovely Northern Neck. The rural county – four stoplights, 13,000 residents – acknowledges rising sea level in its master development plan, placing Bluff Point in a “conservation” zone; but after consulting experts paid for partly by developer Tom Dingledine of Charlottesville, VA, the supervisors granted an “exception.” The developer may put some houses on poles as high as eight feet in the air if needed; and that might seem reasonable, given sea level could rise about three feet in the next century, according to Virginia’s Climate Change Commission. But this ignores that a foot of rise, with the Chesapeake’s flattish edges, can move the Bay inland as much as 180 feet, and you can’t put roads and sewer lines on eight-foot poles. Then there are storm surges. In 2006, Tropical Storm Ernesto caused surges along Virginia’s Bay shore of four to five feet-with six to eight foot waves rolling atop that. And while there’s no proof the global warming that’s driving sea levels up will cause more storms, it’s a matter of physics that warmer water will fuel bigger ones. Even without bigger storms, surges high enough to cause flooding at Bluff Point will occur three times a year by century’s end – and that with just a two-foot rise in sea level. Those predictions come from Northrop Grumman, contractor for the U.S. Navy in Newport News. They are concerned about flooding while ships are being built, a process that can take six years for an aircraft carrier. With a three-foot sea-level rise, major floods would become 20 times as frequent. The Bluff Point development is only one example of how our thinking about the Bay’s edges must adapt to the new reality of rising seas, says William A. “Skip” Stiles, Jr., director of the Virginia nonprofit Wetlands Watch. “If sea level is constant, your coastal region is your most valuable real estate; but with seas rising it becomes a money pit,” he says. Wetlands Watch regularly challenges places like Bluff Point on both ecological and fiscal grounds. […]