Red Hook’s Professor at Large, By Noah Phillips

Centered, tan, and slightly scraggly, it isn’t hard to picture Alexandros Washburn as a fisherman in his mother’s native Greece. Although the Stevens Institute of Technology professor and veteran urban planner has no formal role on any of the citizen’s committees or research teams or councils of public officials attempting to guide Red Hook’s future post-Sandy, Washburn is hard at work generating ideas that defy traditional definitions of resilience here and around the world.

“I must say, I feel like I’m getting traction,” says Washburn. “On the scientific end of it, it feels as things have accelerated this summer.”

After the 2012 hurricane that devastated Red Hook and other nearby waterfront communities in New York and New Jersey, billions of dollars have poured through federal, state, city, and private coffers to both rebuild after the storm and prepare for future disasters. City and state-sponsored groups such as NY Rising and OneNYC have worked to develop plans making Red Hook resilient, and devoted resources to investigating and promoting techniques such as an Integrated Flood Protection System (IFPS).

But Washburn isn’t satisfied with these processes, and he isn’t satisfied with an IFPS. In Washburn’s view, politicians and government workers’ biggest weakness is that they don’t communicate with each other well – this presents a big problem for communities waiting for guidance and assistance.

“I don’t want to wait for politics to solve our problems, I don’t think politics will,” says Washburn, who has worked at every level of government. “The storms aren’t waiting, the weather’s not waiting, climate change isn’t waiting.”

Luckily, says Washburn, Red Hook may be able to do the work of resiliency from the ground up.

“Red Hook is the potentially world changing example,” says Washburn. “I can critique the city, I can critique the feds, and I can also come up with solutions that cut across jurisdictions and political boundaries.”

Solving the right problem

The Red Hook IFPS Project is being coordinated jointly by the Mayor’s office of Recovery and Resiliency and the NYC Economic Development Corporation. In a brochure distributed after an April public meeting at the Miccio Center, the Red Hook IFPS Project defined an IFPS as follows:

“An integrated flood protection system (IFPS) consists of various permanent and deployable features (for example: a permanent wall, deployable gates, landscape features, drainage modifications, street elevations) that integrate with the urban environment and work together to reduce flood risk from coastal flooding and sea level rise.”

The Governor’s office originally promised $200 million for this project, but, as the Star-Revue has reported, that number was recently clarified to be $100 million.

Washburn says that while effective construction of an IFPS might have been possible for the original figure, there’s “no way” it could be built for the latter. But Washburn has other problems with the IFPS.

“My problem with that from day one though is, we love the sea! We don’t want a wall that’s in our face!” says Washburn. “Yes, we may need protection, but there’s got to be a better way.”

As an example of poor planning, Washburn cites the ‘Great Wall of Japan,’ a 250-mile series of sea walls under construction along the coast of that country. The government announced the $6.8 billion project shortly after the 2011 tsunami disaster which killed more than 18,000 people and caused a radioactive meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant. But critics, including UN officials and the wife of the Prime Minister, have said that the sea walls will damage ecosystems and tourism, according to Russia Today.

“Maybe it’s going to work technically,” says Washburn, “but it’s not going to work for quality of life.” Moreover, there isn’t any guarantee that it would work technically. Sea walls can only withstand a certain amount of force, and during rainstorms could cause communities to flood from the inside.

As one alternative, Washburn suggests ‘poldering,’ a technique used around the world but most associated with the Netherlands which uses dikes to create artificial water barriers between the land and open water. The Dutch have used this technique since the 11th century to control flooding and create farmland. Washburn would alter the purpose of polders.

“I want to leave the water in it,” says Washburn. “In fact I want to turn that water into a recreational asset, I want it to be a stormwater asset. I would like that water to get cleaner by the day – eventually I would like to swim in it!”

A polder, says Washburn, would help protect Red Hook without dominating Red Hook, the way a sea wall might.

“We would have the protection of whatever device was necessary but it would be off in the distance,” he says, “and between us would be a certain amount of water that we could control the height of, we could control and improve the quality of.”

The water inside the polders could circulate with the water outside, or not.

The True Meaning of Resilience
More important than the specific solutions, says Washburn, is a neighborhood’s approach to resilience.

“Ultimately, it’s a question of getting the city, people, and water to play well together,” says Washburn. “But the first and most important part of that is people. We have to want it, we have to care about each other enough to make a decision, and then we figure out how to do it.”

Once a community has made a decision, it can devote its resources to getting the finances and engineering technicalities resolved.

“The better you do socially the easier it is to handle the technical challenges,” says Washburn. “The hardest thing to do is to decide just to do it. The first step in getting something done is deciding to do it, and decision making is democracy, it’s politics, it’s community building.”

According to Washburn, resilience is not the ability to recover from setbacks or disasters, but to learn and grow from those experiences in such a way that a person, community, or city is better than ever before. A key factor in decision-making around resilience is having the best information possible.

That means both understanding our current situation as well as possible and being able to accurately model potential changes.

“The better data you have, the more accurate your predictions will be,” says Washburn.

The New York Harbor Observing and Prediction System (NYHOPS), is one vital tool in this pursuit. NYHOPS consists of more than one hundred high-resolution sensors all along the Mid-Atlantic seaboard. While the range of the sensors in NYHOPS extends from Maryland to Massachusetts, the greatest concentration by far of the sensors are in and around New York City waterways, including one sensor in Red Hook.

NYHOPS data is available in real time and uses forecast models to predict currents, salinity, water level, water temperature, and other information pertinent to storms. The system is overseen by the Davidson Laboratory, where Washburn works, and he says that the data gave scientists at Stevens a fairly accurate forecast of how Sandy would impact Red Hook, including which streets would be flooded.

Washburn is also working to involve the neighborhood in creating a fine-grained topographical model of the area using Lidar scanning. Lidar scanning employs lasers, optics, and scanners to create three dimensional models of spaces – it’s used by both scientists and cartographers (like those at Google Maps) to generate precise information about continents, coasts, and ocean floors.

Technology for Lidar has gotten more and more compact in recent years, and Washburn has a grant to teach people how to use handheld Lidar equipment to map their own communities.

“We need to get it to the level of resolution where you can see how [the topography] effects drainage,” says Washburn. Couple the Lidar model with a bathymetric understanding, and layer them both with a hydrology model, and you can begin to see what the impact of ISPS or polders would actually be.

“Without this model, it’s basically a shot in the dark,” says Washburn. “But with this model, you can see how your beautiful idea for a waterfront permeable surface is going to help or hurt. And if it helps, we have confirmation, now it helps us decide yes, let’s do this!”

Washburn is planning a three-day community workshop in October to teach Red Hookers how to use the Lidar scanning equipment. He then hopes to take his process to a favela in Brazil, as part of a grant.

Red Hook – a local solution to a global problem
As many as 760 million people around the world are at risk of losing their homes due to rising sea levels, if climate change continues unabated. Washburn views Red Hook as a laboratory for developing tools that can be used in communities as far-afield as Brazil or Singapore.

“If we think our politics is tough, what about a village in the Philippines?” says Washburn. “This is a global problem; this is why Red Hook is exciting as a potentially global solution.”

Red Hook may be well equipped to serve as a flagship coastal neighborhood in the global resilience project, especially if Red Hookers are able to organize and implement their plans without government coordination. The amount of technical resources at our disposal, from scientific tools like NYHOPS to Lidar scanners to equipment as apparently mundane as the internet, gives this part of Brooklyn a real edge in global efforts to make our communities more equitably sustainable.

In addition, our social infrastructure is relatively developed – since Sandy, Red Hookers are relatively informed about and engaged with resilience issues and city laws give us, through our municipal representatives, a relatively large amount of control over zoning.

“We have a lot of expertise in our community. We have some people who know a bit about the subject, from shopkeepers to councilpeople,” says Washburn. “We’re pretty well informed as a community, and we’ve been through it, we know the consequences of doing nothing. So if anyone could do this from a community perspective, it’s Red Hook.”