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Newport News Interim Local Resilience Plan
Executive Summary
The City of Newport News (City) is located on Virginia's Lower Peninsula in the coastal plain of the Chesapeake Bay
watershed. Many areas in the City are susceptible to periodic flooding given their proximity to the shoreline and the
low and flat topography, with land surface elevations ranging from MSL to 70 feet above MSL, with an average of 20.
31% of the population lives in the coastal zone, and FEMA has mapped approximately 10% of the land area in
SFHAs. Much of the development in the current SFHAs occurred between the 1920s and 1960s—before the City's
FIRM and BFE determinations were developed. The City’s stormwater infrastructure is also aging, with many
systems designed under older, less stringent design standards, which has made areas of the City even more prone
to flooding, including areas outside of the FEMA-designated SFHAs.
The purpose of the Virginia CFPF is to support flood prevention and protection projects and studies in areas that are
subject to recurrent flooding. Newport News is in the midst of a three-year, multi-million-dollar effort to integrate its
global resilience efforts with the most current data and information to form a comprehensive stand-alone resilience
plan. The City cannot receive CFPF grant funding for flood prevention projects until the Virginia DCR has approved a
local resilience plan. This Interim Local Resilience Plan has been developed to document how the City's current
resilience initiatives meet the nine requirements of a CFPF local Resilience Plan while the City progresses on its
more comprehensive integration project.
Specifically, the Interim Local Resilience Plan demonstrates that the City's program meets the CFPF Local
Resilience Plan requirements through
Investments in flood reduction and resilience improvement projects;
Prioritizing nature-based and green solutions;
Addressing existing flooding conditions in the City's socially vulnerable and low-income neighborhoods;
Identifying neighborhoods of repetitive loss;
Employing equitable strategies for property acquisition;
Implementing standardized policies and procedures for flooding debris management;
Requiring improvements of substantially damaged structures within the floodplain;
Coordinating flood response and resilience planning internally and regionally; and
Integrating current data and maps with planning efforts to account for the projected effects of sea level rise
and climate change.
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