With leaders from nearly 200 nations gathering to discuss climate change in Paris this week, the National Park Service continued to sound the alarm for what changing weather patterns and rising sea levels could mean for some of America’s most revered recreational and heritage sites.
On the Peninsula, two national parks are battling the effects of sea level rise on a daily basis and steeling themselves against the next big storm that threatens to wipe chunks of America’s history off the map.
A report by the National Parks Service, released in June, said more than $40 billion worth of national park infrastructure and historical or cultural resources are at high risk for damage from sea level rise.
The study looked at the potential effects of a one-meter rise in sea level at 40 of the 118 national parks considered vulnerable. The report ranged from urban areas like San Francisco and New York City to remote locations like Cape Hatteras, where a famed historic lighthouse was moved in 1999 to save it from the encroaching waves that had eroded beaches there.
Neither of the Peninsula’s national parks were involved in that study or a report released this week on efforts underway to address issues related to climate change at parks around the country, but the threats observed and lessons learned apply to both Fort Monroe and the area around Jamestown and Yorktown.
Kirsten Talken-Spaulding, the superintendent at Fort Monroe National Monument, said the fort didn’t end up in the set of 24 case studies released in September because it wasn’t actually a park when the studies began — the fort was designated a national monument by President Barack Obama in 2011 and just officially was handed the parks land this August.
Fort Monroe is slated to be included in a second round of case studies starting soon.
John Hutcheson, the Fort Monroe Authority’s operations director, said neither the park service nor the authority has done a sea level rise study. The authority has been looking for funding to do one. In the meantime, both have been involved in discussions about sea level rise through Old Dominion University and the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission — a group Hutcheson says is “long on science and short on solutions.”
“Someone needs to come up with some solutions other than moving people out and propping buildings up, because neither of those is reasonable for Fort Monroe. But neither is building an eight-foot seawall surrounding the property and blocking the public view of the water,” Hutcheson said. “It may save the properties but it would certainly hurt our tourism.”
The authority has been working from studies done by the Army in the wake of Hurricane Isabel — the storm that prompted the construction of the sea wall and breakwaters on the bay side of the fort. Hutcheson said they’ve survived several storms without major damage or incident, but the authority knows they need to come up with long-term solutions.
“One of the schools of thought is that hardened shorelines are not the right solution. That seems to fly in the face of creating higher seawalls to counter sea level rise,” Hutcheson said. “There’s still some kind of competing science here. … It would certainly be more attractive to be walking next to salt grass and migratory birds but maybe that’s not a long-term solution.”
In the short term, Hutcheson said, addressing storm surge flooding is like a game of whack-a-mole.
The authority recently installed backflow stoppers to prevent rising tides from flowing up through stormwater outfalls that drain into the bay and Mill Creek. Now, storm surges push water up the boat ramp and into the fort.
“It’s like putting your finger in the dike: you address one issue, but the water is still there and finds the weak spots,” Hutcheson said.
Hurricane Isabel also raised red flags at Colonial Historical National Park, which includes the Jamestown settlement and the battlefield at Yorktown.
Catastrophic flooding inundated the basement of the visitor’s center, which housed the park’s collections and soaked more than 900,000 artifacts dating to the beginnings of America in 1607. Officials told the Daily Press at the time that they hadn’t been prepared for such an event, which ultimately led to the condemnation of the visitor’s center.
Architect Carlton Abbot designed the new visitor’s center and the collections building that replaced the waterlogged original.
“When we designed the new visitor’s center, we designed everything to be above the 500 year flood level,” Abbot said. Both were built on high ground and above ground level to prevent a repeat of 2003.
They further elevated critical systems to keep artifacts intact.
“If you have a big flood like that, you have to have the heating and air conditioning systems, the generators, up above the water, because if you lose power, how do you preserve those collections?”
And it’s not just major storms that are a worry at Jamestown. Colonial Historical National Park’s head resource manager, Jonathan Connolly, said the site of the first English settlement in America is slowly being swallowed by the James River.
“The sea level rise is going to affect Jamestown Island pretty significantly. The models don’t tell us exactly when it will happen, but the models we look at are what will be affected with one foot of sea level rise or two feet or three feet,” He said. “It’s just going to be too much water to hold back. We’ve riprapped the shoreline in places to prevent erosion, but that’s only going to last for so long.”
Connolly said archeological sites scattered all over the island — from pre-contact Native American sites to those documenting early European settlement — are at risk of being flooded out.
“They will, at some point, become inundated if the models hold. … As far as the archaeological sites go, there’s no way to prevent (damage) as long as the sea level rises,” Connolly said.
Colonial Historical National Park is set to start an in-depth climate change vulnerability study in the spring, focused primarily on Jamestown Island, to give the staff and preservationists a solid idea of what will be affected and at what rate. Connolly said it will help determine which sites will require full-scale excavation — essentially destroying the site before the water can get to it, while keeping the artifacts intact and gathering as much data as possible — and how long the parks service has to get them out of the ground.
This summer, staff at Colonial Historical National Park are also planning to install ground-well monitors to keep track of groundwater on Jamestown Island, which Connolly believes is also rising and threatening the island’s archeological treasures.
Murphy can be reached by phone at 757-247-4760.
