By State › Virginia

Virginia: Overview

Download all of Virginia as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Virginia exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Virginia go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

Hampton Roads: the fastest-rising coastline on the East Coast

The Hampton Roads region in southeast Virginia, home to Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and the world’s largest naval base, has the highest relative sea level rise rate anywhere on the U.S. East Coast. Norfolk’s own flood-day count has risen 325% since 1960, from 1.7 days of tidal flooding a year to 7.3, and the city now ranks as the second most vulnerable community to coastal flooding in the entire country, behind only New Orleans. See the Risks page for the full projections.

The 2012 derecho: a hazard type new to this site

A derecho is a long-lived, fast-moving line of severe thunderstorms capable of hurricane-force winds over a huge area, and Virginia took a direct hit from one of the most destructive on record on June 29, 2012. The storm traveled roughly 700 miles in 12 hours, and Dominion Energy still ranks it as the third-worst storm to hit Virginia, causing the largest non-hurricane power outage in the state’s history. This is a genuinely different hazard mechanism from the hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes covered elsewhere on this site, a severe wind event that arrives with far less warning than a hurricane and covers far more ground than a tornado. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Virginia: coastal and Hampton Roads-area households need real, standing flood planning that accounts for a rising baseline, not just occasional storm surge, and this manual’s backup-power guidance (Chapter on Fire/Generator Safety) carries extra weight here given how long derecho-related outages have already lasted in Virginia.

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