Multi-Million Project Has Fascinating Back Story

2/28/2020. Norfolk, Virginia. Today we celebrate at a ribbon cutting for the Ohio Creek Project, a $115 million federally funded resilience project that aims to address flooding/sea level rise issues in one Norfolk neighborhood.

Lost in the celebration is the back story on this project.

In October 2014 a group of Hampton University architecture students and Old Dominion University engineering students gathered with representatives of the Chesterfield Heights neighborhood in the Stanhope Center to begin a year-long effort to develop resilient adaptation designs for the community.

Wetlands Watch had wanted to see if nature-based adaptation designs could be devised in a community before the storms hit. We turned to our partners at Virginia Sea Grant who provided us with a grant to fund the work and then we contacted Mason Andrews of Hampton University and Mujde Erten-Unal of Old Dominion University to see if they would be interested in using the community for a combined student design effort.

What resulted were designs that reduced the flooding impact and when the staff from the City of Norfolk were briefed, they rolled the student concepts into a larger design effort and offered them as part of a proposal to the National Disaster Resilience Competition, a post-Hurricane Sandy project.

The student-based proposal won a $120 million award, of which $115 million went to the actual design and construction of the project in the Ohio Creek basin, which centers on Chesterfield Heights. (The other $5 million funded the RISE program which awarded a grant to Wetlands Watch!) Some of the students are working on this project, having been hired by firms because of their expertise.

As we celebrate this milestone, we should also celebrate the innovation and vision of those students who first envisioned a new future for shoreline communities.