Chuck Ross first noticed a boat appear in the North Landing River more than a year ago.
Ross, who lives near the North Landing Bridge, spotted the vintage, two-mast sailboat set up alongside a vacant lot across the street from his house.
For a while, he said, the owner seemed to be working to fix up the vessel. But Ross grew more concerned in recent months as the boat started to sink into the river, which feeds into the Intracoastal Waterway.
“My concern is the pollution and blocking the waterway,” he said. “People come back here to fish. ... And if there's a boat in the way, they can't get through.”
He was even more intrigued because it’s the exact site where a similar situation unfolded about seven years ago. In that case, the city ultimately took the boat’s owner to court and removed the boat after it was set on fire.
This spot near the Chesapeake-Virginia Beach border is one of many throughout coastal Virginia that have become home to what the state calls abandoned or derelict vessels, or ADVs. The state calls part of the North Landing River in particular a “boat graveyard.”
Officials have documented at least 200 ADVs in recent years – mostly in Hampton Roads. It’s a longstanding issue plagued by cost barriers and bureaucratic wrangling.
“In the years to come, ADVs will pollute Virginia’s waterways at an ever-increasing pace if we don’t work together to solve this problem,” officials said in a public awareness video last year. “The time to act is now.”
State and local leaders recently got funding to start tackling the issue.
ADVs in Virginia
The state defines an abandoned vessel as watercraft that’s left unattended on private property without the owner’s consent for more than 10 days.
They often litter ports, marinas, estuaries and waterways, according to a report last year from a working group the state appointed to investigate the issue.
The ADVs pose several concerns. They can leak fuel and other hazardous materials, polluting the water and disturbing habitats like oyster reefs, said Jeff Flood, a planner with the Coastal Zone Management Program under the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
The vessels can also obstruct navigation, or simply become eyesores that deter recreation and tourism and attract vandals.
The state report further details economic impacts ADVs can cause. They include marinas losing revenue when a boat occupies or damages a rentable slip, decreased waterfront property values and taxpayer expense when law enforcement has to conduct search and rescue operations after a boat is reported.
“There’s not a great infrastructure right now for a fast and streamlined way of attacking the issue,” said Rachael Peabody, director of coastal policy at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.
One reason so many boats are left behind is there are simply more of them than in the past, said Karen Forget, director of the nonprofit Lynnhaven River NOW.
“When fiberglass boats really kind of took over the boat market, the boats became much more readily available to people,” Forget said. “So a lot more people owned boats.”
That started in the 1970s and ‘80s. Now those fiberglass boats are at the end of their lifespan, and owners often don’t have good options to get rid of them.
Virginia officials don’t have a lot of good choices either. It takes a lot of legwork to track down an abandoned boat’s owners.
Owners often have either intentionally scrubbed off a boat’s identification number, or the number has eroded beyond recognition, Flood said. Other times the owner has sold the boat, or died.
It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to hoist the boat out of the water and clean up any hazardous substances that remain.
Then, there are few places to take them afterward. Peabody said right now they’re crumpled up and put in a landfill, “which is obviously not ideal” and includes tipping fees.
Plus, there are bureaucratic issues over who can or should remove them in the first place.
The VMRC is the only state body that currently has authority to remove ADVs in tidal waters. But state code lets localities adopt their own ordinances in order to do so.
Steps forward
Officials are starting to get help with one of their biggest obstacles: funding.
In response to the ADV work group’s report, this year the General Assembly allocated $3 million to the VMRC for a new grant program.
Localities can apply for state funding to remove abandoned vessels from their waters.
Peabody said nearly $400,000 has been doled out so far — mostly to Virginia Beach, but also Portsmouth, Norfolk, Poquoson, Mathews County and the Nansemond Indian Nation.
Lynnhaven River NOW is also leading a new effort to combat ADVs. A partnership led by the Virginia Beach nonprofit recently received about $3 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a three-year project.
Forget said the group will remove up to 100 vessels throughout coastal Virginia.
But they are also tasked with addressing the issue’s root causes.
“We (don’t want to) remove 100 boats and then three years later we're in the same situation again,” she said. “We want to try to figure out how to prevent this problem.”
That means assessing the feasibility of solutions like creating a statewide boat recycling or buy-back program.
“The second big goal is really to address the needs of the boating community and how a statewide program could be structured that would meet those needs,” Forget said.
Another Virginia Beach nonprofit called the Vessel Disposal and Reuse Foundation has also been working persistently on the issue, helping remove sunken boats including in the Lynnhaven River.
Down in Chesapeake, Ross just hopes the boat across the street from his house is gone soon.
“I don't know whether it's going to sit here and just rot and rot and eventually fall to pieces and float down the river,” he said.
