Norfolk HUD National Disaster Resilience Competition Application
Kimley-Horn engineers and environmental planners worked with a team of professionals to develop the grant application for the City of Norfolk as part of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s grant application to the U.S. Office of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the National Disaster Resilience Competition.
Learning Dutch Dialogue
This project included a four-day workshop in June 2015 with Dutch engineers and landscape architects, nationwide experts in community resiliency, and local officials to apply the Dutch experience and philosophy of living with water to the area. The intense workshop—entitled the “Dutch Dialogue”—represented the continuation of a cooperative program sponsored by the Dutch government which has been instrumental in developing community resilience responses to flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the New York area after Hurricane Sandy.
The “Dutch Dialog” examined regional challenges and applied Dutch flood control philosophies to several study areas that were eventually included in the HUD grant application. The focus of the workshop was “thriving with water,” focusing on ways to integrate water management into urban waterfront redevelopment and flood control programs, thus turning a potential negative into an advantage for the community.
Supporting the Grant Application Process
During the grant application development period, Kimley-Horn professionals provided key services to the team including hydraulic modeling of the storm drainage system, GIS based flooding risk assessment and flooding documentation, natural resources inventory, LID alternatives development, and utility line research. These efforts directly supported the Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA) which was essential to the project.
This effort resulted in the award of $115M in federal funds to address long term flooding effects from sea level rise.