SAVANNAH — Before Matthew Hallett and Daniel Smith closed on their home, they dreamt up plans to outfit their 70-year-old ranch with a new kitchen, an open floor plan and a quaint deck and patio.
As they prepared to renovate five years ago, they also needed to protect themselves from a rising threat in their Habersham Village neighborhood: water.
Their house sits in “DeRenne swamp,” a notoriously soggy part of Savannah nicknamed for its propensity to flood.
The city was founded in 1733 on a bluff that rises 40 feet above the Savannah River, but many of the 300,000 residents of Savannah and the rest of Chatham County live in a tidal floodplain crisscrossed by canals, rivers, creeks and marshes.
Hallett and Smith’s home sits four miles south of Savannah’s historic downtown. The couple had six-foot-deep drainage ditches dug on three sides of the house. With some help from the city, they surrounded it with thirsty river birches, bald cypresses and oak trees.
So far, their home has stayed dry. Each year, though, it’s getting tougher to stay that way.
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
A recent study in the scientific journal Nature found about 135 square miles of land around Savannah are at risk of flooding during high tide today, the most exposed area of 32 U.S. coastal cities examined. By 2050, vulnerable acreage around the city is expected to reach about 184 square miles, worse than previous forecasts.
Along Georgia’s 100-mile-long coastline, there are few places to hide.
The problem: Not only is the sea level rising, but much of the coast is sinking. As ocean temperatures rise, hurricanes likely also will become more destructive.
Communities are scrambling to adapt. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent around Savannah on new drainage systems to protect homes. The causeway to Tybee Island has been raised to weather more “sunny day flooding,” when seasonal high tides push water above their normal boundaries. In Brunswick, rain gardens stand like parking meters along street curbs. On the Georgia coast’s southernmost tip, residents in St. Marys check the condition of kayaks and canoes as part of storm prep.
And as flood risks grow, home insurance premiums are rising.
Savannah Alderman Nick Palumbo said the Nature study only affirms what he’s long witnessed as a coastal Georgia resident.
“We are in and have been in what I call a perfect storm when it comes to sea level rise and flooding,” Palumbo said. “If we’re going to keep living here on the coast and not abandon Savannah — which we can’t — we have to keep making strong investments in resiliency.”
Local governments, homeowners and businesses on Georgia’s coast are taking steps large and small to navigate the growing threat, or as many locals say, “to learn to live with water.”
Experts warn much more will be needed in the coming years.
‘Not in my lifetime’
The rise of sea levels is accelerating globally as human-caused warming melts ice sheets and glaciers. Sea levels around Savannah have already crept up more than 9 inches since 1935. New federal projections show an increase of another foot is possible by 2050.
A lesser-known factor heightening flood risks: Coastal Georgia, like many parts of the U.S. coastline, is sinking. The peer-reviewed Nature study, published in March, found much of Savannah is sinking by nearly 1 inch a decade, and 2 inches in some pockets.
Natural processes that began about 12,000 years ago as ice sheets retreated partly explain the downward movement, said Leonard Ohenhen, the study’s lead author. Land in the northern U.S. that had been pushed down by the ice is rising, while areas beyond the sheet’s edge — like Georgia — that had bulged upward are still settling today. Excessive groundwater pumping is also to blame.
“People tend to think of this hazard as something that will only manifest at the end of the century … this feeling of ‘not in my lifetime,” said Ohenhen, a Ph.D candidate in geosciences at Virginia Tech. “But this is something that is already having a lot of impact right now and will only continue to worsen, unless there are adaptations put in place.”
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
On Tybee Island, ‘you can see it’
If there is a ground zero for sea level rise on the Georgia coast, it is Tybee Island.
The highest point on the three-square-mile barrier island east of Savannah is 14 feet above sea level, but most of its land sits only inches above the high tide line.
Fran Galloway lives on one of the island’s most vulnerable streets, Lewis Avenue, a narrow finger of land sandwiched between two tidal creeks.
The street’s modest bungalows were built in the 1950s as slab homes, constructed atop concrete pads, with no basements or crawl spaces. They were erected long before Tybee adopted a building code that requires all new-construction residences be 14 feet off the ground.
“I’m very familiar with Home Depot and I’ve killed a few dehumidifiers,” Galloway said. “They say life’s a beach at the beach. But not always.”
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Georgia has not had a major hurricane make landfall on its coast since the late 1800s, but even glancing blows from storms have caused serious damage in low-lying areas.
In 2016, when Hurricane Matthew passed 30 miles offshore of Tybee, it pushed five feet of storm surge onto the island. A year later, Hurricane Irma caused another nearly five-foot surge on the low-lying island, even though the storm came ashore hundreds of miles to the southwest, in Florida’s panhandle on the Gulf of Mexico, before traveling overland.
The water damage from Irma forced Galloway to gut everything four feet above the floor and below. She paid a contractor six figures — with the help of a $30,000 federal grant — to sever the structure from the slab, erect piers and place the house on top in 2020. Several other vulnerable homes on Tybee have been lifted.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
It’s not just major storms that cause headaches.
There is one road on and off the island, U.S. 80, a five-mile-long causeway linking Tybee to Savannah. Before the Georgia Department of Transportation raised the road eight inches in 2019, it was closed dozens of times each year due to high tide flooding, said Alan Robertson, the principal of AWR Strategic Consulting and a Tybee resident.
Since then, U.S. 80 hasn’t been submerged beneath the waves again, but Robertson said it’s once again “getting close.”
“That’s sea level rise,” said Robertson, who has been retained by Tybee’s city government to manage resilience projects. “You can see it.”
With the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ assistance, Tybee has also continued to nourish their beaches with dredged sand. In 2019 and 2020, it took another step to fortify the island when it seeded sand dunes in strategic locations.
So far, the experiment is working well, but Robertson said the next hurricane will be the real test.
Credit: Katelyn Myrick/AJC
Credit: Katelyn Myrick/AJC
In Brunswick, rain gardens for resiliency
A bit more than halfway down Georgia’s coast, Semona Holmes fears thunderstorms, not just tropical ones. She keeps her rainboots by the front door of her home in Brunswick’s Urbana/Perry Park neighborhood. When thunder rumbles overhead, she slips on the knee-high waders and peeks out the front window.
First she studies the street, then looks beyond, past a shuttered Popeye’s chicken restaurant to U.S. 17, and then the marsh some 300 yards away.
“We had neighbors who would break out their canoes — they didn’t need them to get from point to point but they’d paddle around to make a statement,” said Holmes, who has lived in the neighborhood for 24 years. “If you have a hard rain at the same time as high tide, the water is mid-calf.”
Holmes’ experience is the norm in this struggling section of Brunswick. The home next door is boarded up, and many more in the surrounding blocks show signs of neglect.
The neighborhood may have marsh views, but the proximity to the water does nothing for property values when the area drains so poorly. The neighborhood’s high spot is just 10 feet above sea level.
Holmes says the flooding has worsened in recent years. While it hasn’t reached her house, which is on higher ground than others, it has submerged her yard.
“What we do to address water now is going to determine the world that we leave to our grandkids,” she said. “I sit on my porch and look out at the marsh and it’s so beautiful. To think that could all be gone.”
Credit: Katelyn Myrick
Credit: Katelyn Myrick
Holmes and her husband Gregory installed in 2020 a rain garden, a six-foot-deep pit filled with mulch and water plants that stretches between the front edge of their property and the street.
A handful of nearby homeowners also have built rain gardens as part of a program initiated by the University of Georgia Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant in 2019. The rain gardens are meant to filter stormwater and allow it to be absorbed back into the soil.
Brunswick’s stormwater and sanitation departments have made more frequent sweeps of the neighborhood since collapsed drainage pipes were repaired earlier this year.
The more frequent flooding also prompted the city to launch a tide control project funded in part by a state grant. The plan involves installing tide gates near flood-prone areas and improving stormwater drains in several neighborhoods, including Urbana/Perry Park.
Brunswick also is elevating roadways and implementing a “Rethinking Runoff” program that emphasizes green infrastructure improvements, such as Holmes’ rain garden and rain barrels and permeable pavers in parking areas to slow the movement of water into the stormwater system.
“The acknowledgement has long been there that our system isn’t where it needs to be, but we’ve tried to get more proactive in the last few years,” said Brunswick’s city engineer, Garrow Alberson, who joined the city government in 2013.
Credit: Curtis Compton / Curtis.Compton@
Credit: Curtis Compton / Curtis.Compton@
In St. Marys, ‘a timeless struggle’
Farther south in St. Marys, the owners of Capt. Seagle’s, the historic town’s most popular restaurant and watering hole, received an unwelcome grand opening gift shortly after buying the property in 2019.
Hurricane Dorian pushed past the coast that September. Capt. Seagle’s sits across the street from the National Park Service’s Cumberland Island ferry dock, and water inundated everything within sight of St. Marys River. The flood was the third in four years.
Bartender Taylor Moody said Dorian flooded the business district so quickly he was still behind the bar when he saw a large propane tank float past in the street. Water breached the front door’s threshold soon after.
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
But Bert Guy said he and his business partner had raised the electrical outlets and installed mold-resistant sheetrock as part of the renovations upon buying the restaurant and Riverview Hotel above it. They reopened within 24 hours.
“You have to remember it’s a timeless struggle,” said Guy, a lifelong resident of the Georgia coast, over a plate of blueberry cobbler he made himself. “If you’re going to live here, you have to be willing to deal with the forces of nature.”
In a bid to keep the water at bay, pervious pavers line the streets and medians feature stone-lined water collection pools rather than soil and grass.
In Savannah, 12 feet vs. 12 inches
Don’t count Savannahians among those in denial about the soggy future.
Officials first raised alarms in the 1990s, prompting the city government to install a series of pump stations near flood-prone canals and waterways and conduct a review of drainage infrastructure.
The findings were sobering. In older parts of town, the pipes were lined with brick and clay terra cotta. Elsewhere, corrugated metal drains were slowly rusting away in the acidic soil. As for water-carrying capacity, places that needed 12-foot-wide culverts were served by 12-inch pipes.
“The historic infrastructure was very impressive given the time it was built,” said City of Savannah Stormwater Manager Zack Hoffman, “but it needed to be replaced and expanded.”
Savannah and Chatham County are investing more than $100 million in drainage improvements.
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
The plans include boring a drainage tunnel 100 feet below ground near Hallett and Smith’s home in “DeRenne swamp.” The drain, the first of its kind in Savannah, will carry water to the Casey Canal, located about a mile to the east.
Savannah’s authorities recently applied for and received a $30 million federal Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant to alleviate flooding in an area near another of the city’s flood-prone canals. Expanding the Springfield Canal will aid residents of several predominantly Black neighborhoods on Savannah’s westside, just beyond the edge of the downtown bluff.
Is it enough?
Despite efforts to manage growing flood risks, it’s an open question if those efforts are enough to handle what’s coming.
Residents and experts also worry there is another threat potentially lurking along the coast: complacency.
The Georgia coast is now five years removed from Hurricane Dorian, seven from Irma and eight from Matthew. As their memory fades, Robertson, the Tybee resident and consultant, said he hears more questions about new spending to adapt.
“‘You built the dunes, and you built the beach,’” Robertson said. “‘Aren’t we good enough? Can we stop?’ Everyone faces that issue.”
Robertson points to Tybee’s response to the destruction wrought by Irma and Matthew. Millions were spent to build dunes, replenish beaches and raise homes, and the island is now better protected than it once was. But Tybee is still trying to nail down the funding for a 10-year, $80-million stormwater system renovation through a mix of its own money and state and federal grants and loans.
At the same time, the federal government has forecast a record number of tropical storms could form this hurricane season. Fueled by exceptionally warm ocean temperatures, Hurricane Beryl reached Category 5 strength earlier in the year than any other Atlantic storm on record.
In Brunswick, planned and designed mitigation measures, such as tide gates, also await funding for construction.
Stormwater drains in St. Marys don’t include backflow preventers that can be activated at high tide to prevent rising river water from flooding back into the street.
And the pace of stormwater improvements frustrates residents in Savannah. Time-consuming upgrades must happen downstream first, before drainage capacity can be expanded upstream in other neighborhoods, meaning flood relief remains years away.
Meanwhile, some flood insurance premiums are rising after the federal government revamped its National Flood Insurance Program in 2021 to account for the growing flood risk. Homeowners’ insurers are also backing out of some areas.
Robertson, who lives in a federally designated Special Flood Hazard Area on Tybee, said his insurer pulled out last year. He was able to find a new policy, but said his premium is now about 15% higher.
Local authorities say they know they can’t rest, and that the challenges will grow.
“We are evaluating today, but designing for tomorrow,” said Ron Feldner, Savannah’s chief of water resources.
