The Fatal Flaw of the Norfolk Sea Wall
How one man-made disaster has led to another
(I wrote this in Feb 2023 but did not publish it. I think it is still correct, and decided to publish now.)
An infrastructure project that claims to protect the city from growing threats far into the future is cursed with a glaring flaw. Neither the official study nor any of the peer review comments mention this problem.
Surfing the Potomac Aquifer
Aside from being home to the world’s largest Naval base, Norfolk, Virginia is a typical old-money east coast city. It has an average elevation of around ten feet, experiences occasional flooding, and the Washington Post in particular appears obsessed with making it into an example of what Hurricane Katrina could have done if it had hit the east coast.
Norfolk is suffering rapid relative sea level rise due to an increase in the oceans’ water mass as well as land subsidence. Both of these factors are due to a known bug in modern free enterprise society: a chronic failure to account properly for time-delayed externalities.
The first reason — the expansion of the oceans’ water mass — is widely studied and reported on. It appears to be caused mainly by pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere than terrestrial ecosystems can absorb. It sure looks like this excess carbon is heating up the atmosphere and the oceans. This supposedly causes larger storms, and therefore larger storm surge. Coastal cities like Norfolk are particularly vulnerable to storm surge.
Let’s say you want to solve this problem once and for all. You might conjure up a plan for an enormous $2.6 billion sea wall that surrounds the city. If storm surge is the enemy, a wall is the cure.
The second reason — relative sea level rise is where sinking land has the same effect as a rising ocean. The USGS estimates that approximately half Norfolk’s relative sea level rise is due to land subsidence. Norfolk and the surrounding area sit on top of the Potomac aquifer, which is far below the surface, and several hundred feet in vertical height. This aquifer is being depleted. As water is drawn from it, its vertical height shrinks much like a deflating balloon, taking the relative elevation of the surface down with it.
The city itself and the proposed sea wall share the very same surface: the one sitting on top of the Potomac Aquifer. This leads to an inescapable conclusion: unless we stop draining the aquifer, the proposed wall will be at its highest and most effective on the day construction is complete. It will begin sinking along with everything else. An infrastructure project that claims to protect the city from growing threats far into the future is cursed with a glaring flaw. Neither the official study nor any of the peer review comments mention this problem.
The wall is primarily designed to protect against storm surge, where height and strength really matter a lot. (It does not address fluvial or pluvial flooding, and might actually make those modes of flooding worse, but I will not get into that for this article).
At the same time as external threats from the sea are projected to grow, the wall will become less effective. The threat under our feet remains wholly unaddressed, and continues to grow.
International Paper
The depletion of the Potomac Aquifer is not a natural phenomenon. Much like the warming oceans, it is an invisible disaster of our own creation.
Two pulp and paper mills — one owned by WestRock in West Point, VA, and the other owned by International Paper in Franklin, VA — account for substantially all of the aquifer’s depletion over the past several decades. Their extractions form dual cones of depression which drags down the surrounding land. The same thing is happening in California’s Central Valley Aquifer, which much of the media hastens to blame on “climate change”, but the main problem is the relentless pumping of water from the aquifer below the surface. Of all the cities in this area, Norfolk is situated uniquely and terribly in geoproximity to both the ocean and the Franklin Paper Mill.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality is finally waking up to this problem, but appears to have a limited appetite for addressing the problem head on. From their 2021 Annual Water Resources Report (emphasis added):
One of the long-term water resource management challenges in Virginia is the historic over-allocation of groundwater from the Coastal Plain aquifer system in the Eastern Virginia GWMA, particularly from the Potomac Aquifer.
…growing concerns over increased water use by new or expanding groundwater withdrawals, overlapping cones of depression, and declining water levels in the Coastal Plain aquifer system…
While recognizing the issue, the Department has not rescinded or reduced the permitted withdrawals of these facilities. Instead, Virginia taxpayers are funding an experimental aquifer replenishment program called SWIFT. At considerable public expense, SWIFT will begin pumping in a fraction of 1% of the water that International Paper will continue pumping out. As best I can tell, International Paper is not paying for this public service, nor is it paying for the water it draws from the aquifer beyond nominal permitting fees.
Moral Hazard
Risk, as commonly understood, is the chance that something bad happens to you. In insurance, a hazard is something that increases that risk. Moral hazard occurs when you’ve taken some precaution to protect yourself from a risk, and because of that, forgo taking additional precautions against that same risk that you might otherwise take. A related idea, Too Big to Fail, made many headlines post-Great Financial Crisis.
Moral hazard is not abstract sociological theory — it is priced into every insurance policy that you buy. It represents an implicit transfer of risk from one party to another. One example of moral hazard is a bureaucrat bearing no personal consequences for the investment results of spending money that is not their own. Another is a firm monopolizing a shared resource and not paying for the negative impacts it has on others who share it.
Moral hazard can also result in the wholesale creation of new risks, and often does. If you feel protected by a giant sea wall that surrounds your city, you will make different decisions than you would if the wall were not there. At the margin, buyers will be more interested in properties in areas that were formerly flood-prone, but which appear to be no longer at risk. Investors will develop areas of your city that only make sense to develop if you first assume an utterly impervious wall that can never fail.
But it is a timeless fact of engineering that all single points of failure eventually fail
In the short term, this can feel good. It can create a boom, even. Properties and areas that were formerly untouchable are revitalized. Developers realize they can develop land and sell the developed properties without the stain of mandatory flood insurance. More people may move to the area enabling the city to expand its tax base, and its revenues, and may see yet more investments into its governed territory. And these new revenues no longer need to be invested so dutifully in flood mitigation, because that problem is now solved, and it is the city leaders who can be thanked for implementing that solution.
The rhyme of history, and Hyrum’s Law
In 1965, an enormous sea wall system was built around New Orleans, which included a large area of marshland and swamps in its interior. This spurred the development of new neighborhoods, including in areas that were former marshlands that were stabilized by fill. Because of the wall, these new developments appeared viable. The addition of structures to the filled land caused land to subside, depressing the elevation of many areas within the sea walls of the city. Those same areas were flooded and destroyed exactly forty years later.
As ever, it’s important to distinguish between the result that was hoped for, and the actual outcome. The professional, well-educated, and conscientious designers of the New Orleans sea wall are fine people that anyone would be happy to have marry into their family. And they did not intend to merely delay and amplify the inevitable death and destruction from Hurricane Katrina.
But, all observable behaviors of a system will come to be relied upon by somebody. If the wall seems to work for long enough, then it must continue to work. Even though the designers of Norfolk’s sea wall don’t intend this, Norfolk’s sea wall will likewise become a single point of failure that large sectors of economic activity rely on to never fail.
A few generations hence, residents of Norfolk might start to wonder why they have this wall at all. It will recede into the background fog of everyday decision-making. It will be assumed as an inviolable part of the geography, and this will be seen as a great success by its designers. But it is a timeless fact of engineering that all single points of failure eventually fail. All you have to do is roll the dice enough times, for long enough. One day, the sea wall will meet a storm surge it cannot hold back. And because of the fundamental error of building the wall itself on sinking ground, this is likely to happen much sooner than the designers predict.
A Bailout for the Wealthy
It’s a commonly observed pattern that when the government has money to hand out, the wealthy and connected tend to somehow find their way to the front of the line, to the detriment of those who would benefit most.
Properties in proximity of rail lines typically are less valuable due in part to the attendant noise and traffic disruption. A century or so ago, Norfolk and Western Railway built their tracks on the high ground. That’s right — in Norfolk, it’s the poorer and less desirable neighborhoods who are least affected by flooding. It is the wealthy waterfront homeowners who stand to benefit disproportionately from a taxpayer-funded flood wall. To call this a bailout is almost too perfect — “bailing out” literally means removing water from a sinking vessel.
Wealthier neighborhoods such as Ghent, Colonial Place, Freemason, and Larchmont, in which large swaths are designated as Special Flood Hazard Areas, stand to benefit much more from a massive flood-mitigation investment than poorer neighborhoods such as Park Place, which enjoy higher base flood elevations and less flood risk.
FEMA publishes flood risk information for every property in the United States as part of the National Flood Insurance (NFIP) program. It’s available publicly and for free. It stretches credulity to argue that wealthy, informed buyers making million-dollar investments couldn’t have known what they were doing. At the very least, when you buy a property with a view of the river, you know the river is nearby.
Solutions and Tradeoffs
Our public discourse tends to be optimized for debating and understanding problems — on these, it is often easy to agree. Few argue that the climate is static, or that relative sea rise is not occurring. Debating and understanding the tradeoffs of various solutions is less straightforward.
This is because government leaders are in the business of selling solutions. But in the real world, as economist Tom Sowell eloquently warns in his book A Conflict of Visions, “there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs”. The costs of the wall have already swelled from an initial estimate about $1.8 billion, and like all political projects, the direction of any future cost revision will undoubtedly be upward. At the same time, as the land on which it’s built continues to sink, the economic and societal value of the wall will depreciate at precisely the rate of land subsidence. As far as I can tell, this basic fact has been absent from all public discussion until this article.
There are around 70 thousand structures in Norfolk, all of which supposedly stand to benefit from the $2.6 billion project. At an average cost of around $37,000 per structure, future flood mitigation efforts are being redirected away from the individual structures and channeled toward the wall. And every dollar you spend in one place is a dollar you cannot spend in another. What could be spent on decentralized resilience is instead being spent on a single megaproject. Risk that was once distributed will soon be concentrated, and the stakes amplified. Everyone’s fate is forcibly tied together to a sea wall that cannot fail.
Often we want so badly to have a solution for something that we charge ahead before fully understanding what we’re doing. We love being sold solutions, and our government leaders love selling them. And so here we are, time and time again.
