Rising Seas Imperil US Sites, Military Bases Worth $387 Billion
Rising tides and powerful storms turbocharged by climate change are poised to hobble federal facilities worth at least $387 billion in coming decades, disrupting everything from veterans’ medical care to military operations and space exploration, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis.
By 2050, sites such as the Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval installation in the world, and the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida, where 12,000 employees work, are likely to face one major flood a year and minor floods every week, the projections show.
Most of the costliest at-risk facilities are military installations such as the Marine Corps bases Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and Quantico in Virginia, together worth more than $30 billion, according to 2023 valuations by the Defense Department.
Other programs on the high-risk list include a $558 million firearms training range managed by the Department of Homeland Security, an aquatic research facility the Environmental Protection Agency runs in Rhode Island, and an Agriculture Department lab that studies sugarcane in coastal Louisiana.
The offices, bases, and campuses that could get swamped with water every time a hurricane spins up or a monster wave crashes over a coastal barrier would together cost more than $387 billion to replace, the analysis found. That’s more than the annual gross domestic product of Hong Kong, Greece, or Finland.
The analysis looked at federally owned or leased properties vulnerable to a major coastal flood, which typically occurs when sea level rises four feet above the normal high tide.
Oceans now typically reach that level only when a hurricane or storm hits, but those weather events are happening more often, with sea levels consistently rising, and at a faster pace than ever. Eventually, those water walls will form even during mild storms or high tides on sunny days.
The government acknowledges the threats. A spokesman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality asserted
Most on-the-ground responses have consisted of incremental fixes like building flood barriers, raising service roads, and fortifying coastal wetlands to act as buffers. In some cases, there’s been no response at all.
Last fall, the US Navy awarded a $38 million contract to raise a seawall at its Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and has plans to strengthen its storm surge berms, elevate roadways, retrofit buildings and take other steps.
Waters from the Severn River and Annapolis Harbor have already risen a foot in the last century—while the academy’s grounds have sunk—and the campus has flooded 20 or more times each year since 2016.
One climate model used by the Navy suggests the waters will rise so consistently in the next three decades that floods will swamp the academy grounds at least 200 times a year. The Navy has discussed the need to move to drier ground—but not until 2100.
As a group, the military branches have failed to devote resources to properly research and plan for the impact of climate change, both on their installations and on defense readiness, the Department of Defense inspector general concluded in a review this year that focused on southeastern US sites.
There’s also a lack of urgency, said John Conger, a former assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment in the Obama administration. “You at least have to know what you’re dealing with and then propose responses,” Conger said an interview. “They haven’t done any of that. I mean, any of it.”
Even small measures like seawalls require major investments and resources, said Zöe Brouns, a senior project associate at the Federation of American Scientists. A more muscular approach to the problem, but one that might be unrealistic, would see federal agencies abandoning their coastal homes and moving further inland.
“There’s always more they can be doing, but it all takes significant time, funding, and staff capacity,” Brouns said.
Congress hasn’t helped much either. Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act provided $369 billion for a vast range of clean energy and climate projects, but precious little to help agencies shore up their infrastructure.
“They’re avoiding the hard decisions,” said Paul Bledsoe, former director of communications of President Bill Clinton’s White House climate change task force. “In the long run, it’s going to be more expensive to stay put.”
A Problem Foreseen
The federal government has known about its flooding threat since at least the 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order telling agencies to ensure new projects are built above the height of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 100-year floodplain projections.
President Barack Obama strengthened those requirements with a 2015 executive order that required non-critical infrastructure to be built at least two feet above the 100-year floodplain. President Donald Trump repealed that order in 2017 but Biden later restored it.
The order applies to federal agencies that are either building new facilities or making substantial improvements on existing federal facilities. But “almost none” of the climate plans recently submitted by federal agencies address the need to implement the order, according to Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
One obstacle is putting a price tag on the steps to be taken. “There is currently no public or private sector climate data available to accurately estimate the cost implications of sea level rise on Federal facilities,” the administration’s Office of Management and Budget bluntly stated in an assessment to Congress in March.
Another reason for the slow pace of action is that each facility has to be exhaustively studied before any decisions can be made.
One building might be dipping down lower than expected because the ground is compacted by its sheer weight, while another might actually be lifted up by movement along fault lines, said Rachael Jonassen, director of the climate change and greenhouse gas management program at George Washington University.
“Federal agencies don’t have the leisure of just considering that global four-foot number,” Jonassen said. “They have to look at very specific instances at each specific installation and take into account all of these other things. It’s a really complicated process to sort that out.”
That the water is rising isn’t in dispute. The oceans are warming at an unprecedented rate and hotter seas provide fuel for hurricanes, supercharging their winds, rains, and storm surges.
Heat also melts the ice caps, adding more water to the oceans—a major reason the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has forecast that sea levels along the US coastline will rise as much as two-and-a-half feet by 2050. The higher the sea level, the easier it is for a routine wave to send cascades of water rushing into the streets.
Consider Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, with 14 piers, 11 aircraft hangars, and tens of thousands of workers.
The 10 to 15 high-tide floods it endures each year could surge to as many as 125 by 2050, according to NOAA projections. And those are the tamer floods, not the more powerful swells launched by intense storms. Four feet of seawater there could shut down roads and destroy vast amounts of property.
“Think of people ripping out floors and drywall and AC units—things that aren’t hardened for hurricane purposes, things that are on the ground getting wet that aren’t supposed to get wet,” said William Sweet, a NOAA oceanographer.
Flooding can also knock out the local power grid, knocking offices offline and triggering effects that reverberate throughout an agency.
“Every government facility is serving a certain function, so if you have that function disrupted, it can have an effect on the overall mission that is supported by that entity,” said
Hurricane Idalia, the Category 3 storm that slammed Florida’s northwest coast last month, offered a glimpse of the potential impact.
Its 125-mph winds and record storm surges veered north of the state’s more populous midsection, but regional disruptions still included a three-day evacuation of all non-essential personnel from MacDill Air Force Base south of Tampa, a postponed national security satellite launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, as well as airport and road closures from Tampa to Charleston, South Carolina.
The backyard of a house flooded Aug. 30 in Steinhatchee, Florida, after Hurricane Idalia made landfall. Photographer: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
A Navy spokesperson pushed back on questions about its preparedness, insisting in a statement that increasing installations’ weather resilience—through both infrastructure improvements and the shoring up of natural barriers—is “a priority.”
But simply picking up stakes and moving an entire base is out of the question, Meredith Berger, assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations, and environment, said in an interview. “Our primary mission means being near the coastlines,” she said.
Civilian agencies, whose properties are either owned or managed by the General Services Administration, generally have more flexibility to leave risky areas, especially if GSA doesn’t own the office space. Between 40% to 45% of the agency’s leases are going to expire within the next four years, according to Robin Carnahan, the agency’s administrator.
Yet GSA has no plans to walk away from any of the roughly 9,000 buildings it owns or leases “based solely on climate risk,” said Jetta Wong, the agency’s senior climate adviser.
Long-Term Planning
Existing federal buildings in high-risk areas are essentially sunk costs, which complicates agencies’ attempts to evaluate their value, said Moore, the Natural Resources Defense Council analyst.
“Agencies think, ‘We spent a lot of money to build this here, and there’s a very good reason why it’s there,’ ” he said. “They didn’t just choose this site for the view.”
In most cases, agencies only move to higher land when a natural disaster forces their hand.
After Hurricane Katrina devastated its New Orleans medical center, the Veterans Affairs Department built a 1.7-million square-foot hospital in an adjacent neighborhood, but put mission-critical electrical equipment and patient beds on the upper levels.
The military did something similar after Hurricane Michael severely damaged Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle in 2018. It relocated F-22 Raptor jets from Tyndall to Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, near Hampton Roads—a location that is still in a danger zone.
Better long-term planning is critical, said Velma Smith, a senior officer at The Pew Charitable Trusts and a former a senior adviser with the National Environmental Trust.
“If you’re going to build something new or rebuild or repair something, and it’s not just window dressing but a substantial change, you have to think through, ‘What’s the future flood risk and how can we best protect against it?’” she said. “And the first question you’d ask is, ‘Is this in the right place?’”
To Bledsoe, now a professorial lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy, government agencies rebuilding in high-risk areas “sends the wrong signal” to private landowners. “It tells people it’s safe to rebuild when it’s not.”
In a handful of other cases, federal facilities are only incidentally being moved out of harm’s way. The $348 million Plum Island Animal Disease Center is relocating from a flood-prone part of New York’s Long Island to Manhattan, Kansas, but sea level concerns weren’t a factor, according to Tod Companion, the center’s director.
Rather, the move is happening because the facility is 68 years old and the Kansas location is closer to the nation’s biggest cluster of animal health companies.
Agencies also face political pressure to stay rooted in their communities.
The Bureau of Land Management moved its headquarters two years ago from Grand Junction, Colorado, to Washington, D.C., reversing a Trump administration directive to move west. But it still kept its Colorado office open, in part to appease lawmakers like Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who didn’t want to lose a local employer.
Few sites are as critical to their region as Kennedy Space Center. Many area residents lost their jobs when its shuttle program ended in 2011. But the last few years have provided a turnaround and Central Florida has seen a population surge thanks in part to the space center, said Zach Eicholz, resilience manager for the neighboring city of Cape Canaveral.
Most everyone still recognizes the looming threat from the ocean. Barrier islands like the one where Kennedy sits “naturally like to move,” Eicholz said. “They were never meant to be solidified in one place.”
As the waters have crept higher, NASA’s main effort there has been to rebuild sand dunes.
Eicholz hopes the temporary fixes can buy the region 30, maybe even 50, years—enough time for someone to come up with a better long-term solution.
“It might sound kind of corny or naive, but I’m definitely an optimist—and I think you kind of have to be in this business to keep going,” Eicholz said. “Humans are really, really stubborn—which can be good or bad—but I think when push comes to shove, we can get our act together, especially when it starts impacting our daily lives.”
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