Hampton officials’ vision for the future of their city is to transform it to adapt to rising seas and rainfall driven by climate change.
The city’s long been working on strategies and projects to that end. This week, they took another step.
City Council approved an update to Hampton’s long-term Comprehensive Plan to adopt a natural infrastructure plan.
“This is looking at considering water from two different aspects: both the challenges that come with water and our flooding that we experience, and also to treat water resources as an asset,” interim resilience officer Olivia Askew said at Wednesday’s meeting.
People often use the word infrastructure to refer to man-made elements that support modern living, like roads, bridges and pipes.
Natural or green infrastructure means instead leveraging nature to suit our own purposes, like constructing rain gardens to strategically absorb water or planting trees to provide shade and lessen heat.
The Charlottesville-based nonprofit Green Infrastructure Center prepared Hampton’s new natural infrastructure plan using grants from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The city also worked with local organizations like NASA Langley, Hampton University, Langley Air Force Base and the Fort Monroe Authority.
The document is the latest element of a larger approach the city calls Living with Water, as Hampton faces severe threats from sea level rise.
Back in 2015, Hampton officials went to a regional flooding workshop including experts from New Orleans and the Netherlands, and it changed their perspective on the topic.
The goal of Living with Water is to work with the city’s water systems and natural landscapes, instead of trying to engineer the water away, then-resilience officer Carolyn Heaps previously told WHRO.
A few years later the city came up with a more specific initiative called Resilient Hampton. Several projects under that banner are already underway, including stormwater improvements and a “resilience park.”
The city is also in the midst of a massive, Peninsula-wide effort to study flooding solutions with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – under the same program that led to Norfolk’s planned floodwall project. (You can weigh in on that plan at upcoming public meetings on Nov. 18 and 20.)
The natural infrastructure plan adopted this week recommends boosting existing landscapes to capture stormwater, filter pollution, reduce heat, adapt to rising seas and improve residents’ access to nature.
Take trees, for example. When nearly 3 inches of rain falls in Hampton, trees absorb about 42 million gallons within 24 hours — roughly equivalent to 64 Olympic-sized swimming pools, officials said in the report.
They highlighted areas throughout the city that are best for protecting trees and planting new ones.
The report also suggests using oyster reefs and marshes to bolster shorelines from erosion, transforming abandoned lots into meadows with native plant species, installing “living roof” gardens on buildings and keeping open areas free from development.
In some cases, the city could incentivize private landowners to allow space for wetlands to migrate inward – or even abandon living in certain risky areas, officials wrote.
Askew said the plan will be used to inform city code and zoning ordinance amendments brought to city council in the future, as well as provide guidelines for incorporating resilience into new developments throughout the city.
