Adapting to our changing climate is a tall order for any community, let alone small rural towns. We recently spoke with Cheryl Lewis, the Town Manager of Oxford, Maryland, a community of 650 Maryland’s Eastern Shore, about work underway there on a range of innovative nature-based approaches for coastal resilience. Our conversation covered the challenges facing small coastal towns, the value of partnership with National Wildlife Federation, and her insights on coastal resilience as a local official.
Can you give us a bit of background on the challenges Oxford is facing with coastal flooding and what this fall’s restoration work hopes to accomplish for the town?
Oxford deals with both stormwater flooding and tidal flooding. Even without a storm element, we have days when tidal or wind-driven flooding alone is causing us problems. The north end of town, where this fall’s work is taking place, is reached by an unprotected road with unprotected electric, water, and sewer infrastructure. At best, that road is separated from the water by two or three feet of grass, and at worst, nothing at all. With a breach of that area, transportation in or out of the north end is very difficult, and we have an island of residents that’s essentially stranded.
The living shoreline and breakwaters will give us the ability to push the land out a little bit, and offer a little more resilience to the wave action and the type of destructive tidal water that would eat into that infrastructure. The dunes, too, provide an added level of protection for our onshore infrastructure.
What is the value of partnership with National Wildlife Federation to your work on the Oxford coastal resilience and shoreline enhancement project? What kinds of obstacles exist to this work in Oxford that partnerships like ours help to overcome?
This project is time consuming and overwhelming, and I am just me! You know, I have a staff member that answers the phones and handles billing, and I have another that handles building permits and planning. The rest of it is all me. So, for me—for Oxford—to be able to pull off these resilience projects, get them funded, and make them actually happen, it’s all really dependent on the support of National Wildlife Federation’s team. As we were getting this project off the ground, any time something was getting left behind or falling off the deep end, somebody like Amanda [National Wildlife Federation’s Mid-Atlantic Coastal Resilience Program Manager] would go “Hey, we need to do this next.” And without that, I don’t think we would have been that successful, because at times my job is totally overwhelming.
National Wildlife Federation has also helped piece together all these different pots of money to make this project possible. You can’t do a project of this size and think that one person is just going to raise their hand and go, “Oh, we’ll cover that cost.” Unfortunately, that’s just not how this work goes! So I think a big piece of this work going forward is National Wildlife Federation using its expertise to work with other communities like ours to pull the pieces of a project together. I think for us, doing that has really been a success story.
