By Jonah Grinkewitz
In 2018, Hurricane Florence was headed toward Hampton Roads before it changed course and made landfall in Wilmington, North Carolina.
This close encounter with a major storm prompted Old Dominion 91Ƶ researchers to ask the question: What would the economic impact be if a Category 3 hurricane hit the region?
The resulting study estimates the cost would be $15.6 billion in direct damages, which is equal to 10% of the 2022 regional gross domestic product (GDP), and a temporary loss of more than 76,000 jobs.
The study was funded by the and ODU’s .
Yin-Hsuen Chen, geospatial data scientist (GIS), George McLeod, director of the Center for Geospatial Science, Education and Analytics and Bob McNab, professor of economics, authored the report.
To calculate the physical damage of the hypothetical storm, Chen and McLeod used Hazus — a standardized set of tools and data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — to build a computer model of Hurricane Florence passing over Hampton Roads.
Using data on current nuisance flooding and mean high water levels, the researchers established a 3.6-foot tidal offset — a calculated adjustment to account for higher baseline water levels — to model tide levels for a future hurricane scenario.
The cities closest to the water and with the lowest elevation — Norfolk ($3.9 billion), Hampton ($2.6 billion) and Poquoson ($1.8 billion) — account for nearly 74% of the projected water damage.
Single and multi-family residences would be the hardest hit among building occupancy types, with roughly $11 billion in overall damage, followed by commercial ($2.3 billion) and educational ($847 million) buildings.
The physical damage associated with a hurricane would have a ripple effect throughout the economy.
Jobs that provide services to households would bear the brunt of the costs, with more than 23,000 losses in the short term. These jobs include equipment and machinery repair, dry cleaning, personal care and death services. Retail and health care jobs would be next with 9,200 short-term losses.
In addition to projecting the economic impacts, the study shares recommendations for building workforce resiliency in the region.
The first step, they suggest, would be for more people to enroll in flood insurance. The report cites a 2023 survey of Hampton Roads residents by the Insurance Information Institute which points to only 17.2% of homeowners in the region having flood insurance.
“Previous research has shown that insured residences are less likely to incur significant financial damages from a natural disaster,” they write. “Increasing flood insurance uptake rates would have a preventive effect on household incomes.”
This would reduce the financial impact of water damage caused by a hurricane making landfall in the region, they continue. When consumers take a financial hit, they spend less on good and services, affecting the regional economy — so greater adoption of flood insurance would protect the region as well as individual households.
They also recommend investing in resilient infrastructure, diversifying the economy, enhancing workforce training and strengthening emergency response plans to better withstand and recover from extreme weather events.
While the study focuses on building resiliency in the present day, the researchers also projected the economic impact for the region if sea level rise continues at its current rate.
For a possible future 6.6 feet tidal offset, the water damage cost jumps to $33.2 billion, equivalent to 32.3% of the 2022 regional GDP.
“Our argument is straightforward: the 6.6 feet tidal offset represents the ‘worst of the worst’ modeling outcomes,” they write. “Costs of such magnitude would likely have a devastating impact on the region, regardless of the resiliency of the workforce to economic shocks.”
Read the full report on the .