Six years after Hurricane Sandy, Red Hook residents are wondering what happened to the city’s promises to safeguard their neighborhood from future floods.
The Red Hook Integrated Flood Protection System (IFPS) had its official genesis in “A Stronger, More Resilient New York,” the 438-page planning document produced by Mayor Bloomberg’s Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR) in 2013. “Flexible and adaptable, integrated flood protection systems are composed of a variety of elements that can be combined and customized in areas where critical infrastructure or vulnerable neighborhoods require a high level of flood protection,” the SIRR explained, defining a term not yet in currency. “Such systems . . . can include landscaping features, such as terraced berms at the back end of a waterfront park; benches, park walls, flood-proofed buildings or bridge abutments; drainage improvements, including valves and gates; and temporary features such as deployable floodwalls.”
“A Stronger, More Resilient New York” proposed seven integrated flood protection systems for different parts of the city, including East Harlem and Hunts Point. For Red Hook, specifically, the goal was “to complete design in 2014 with project completion by 2016.”
While most of the suggested flood protection systems quickly fell by the wayside, Governor Cuomo and Vice President Biden announced in 2014 a $200 million allocation for an IFPS in Red Hook. Subsequent presentations by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) cut this figure in half, with city officials dismissing the initial pledge as a “typographical error” or a “back-of-the-envelope” number. Later, the city acknowledged that it had diverted one of the project’s primary funding sources – its Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery money from HUD – to Build It Back, its troubled financial assistance program for homeowners’ post-Sandy repairs. Ultimately, the Red Hook IFPS would rely on FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funds from New York State and on the New York City Capital Budget, which would split the $100 million cost evenly. New York City’s capital program – which funds public improvements that cost $35,000 or more and offer at least five years of “useful life” – is financed by borrowing money, typically through selling bonds.
Consultants hired
In January of 2016, the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency and Recovery (ORR) organized its first public meeting to promote community engagement during the development of a feasibility study for the Red Hook IFPS. With a $4 million budget provided for the study by FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program-Advanced Assistance (separate from the $100 million committed to the permitting, design, engineering, and construction phases of the IFPS), the ORR and NYCEDC hired a consultancy team of nine private firms, headed by Dewberry Engineers Inc., to examine the advisability of various flood protection concepts that would protect the neighborhood from 10-year, 50-year, and 100-year floods, respectively. While a 10-year flood has a 10 percent chance of occurring in a given year, a more severe 100-year flood has only a one percent chance; however, many of the structures inundated by Sandy were located in FEMA’s 100-year floodplain, and some even in its 500-year floodplain.
Three more public meetings followed in April, October, and the subsequent June, in which officials floated ideas such as landscaped median barriers, sidewalk planters, and deployable elements such as folding barriers and sliding gates. But budgetary constraints and a desire to minimize “negative impacts on the neighborhood” led the feasibility team to a simplified plan to raise and regrade Beard Street, which would subsequently conceal a below-street-level floodwall, and to construct a similar floodwall, alongside a reinforced bulkhead and some additional regraded blacktop, at Atlantic Basin. Although no official word has been given, Beard Street is expected to lose its historic cobblestones, despite local insistence that the permeability of cobblestone can allow rain to seep into the groundwater table instead of lingering on the surface.
This IFPS concept, once built, will protect Red Hook from a 10-year flood, assuming one foot of sea level rise. According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, by 2100, “scientists project sea levels 18 to 50 inches higher than today along New York’s coastlines . . . though a rise as high as 75 inches could occur.”
“I don’t think one person was satisfied with the 10-year plan,” said Karen Blondel, a Red Hook resident and an environmental organizer for the nonprofit Fifth Avenue Committee. “That was very disappointing. We had put in a lot of work and recommendations. We definitely wanted the 100-year plan, even though we knew it was more expensive.”
Focused on defending Red Hook from storm surge, the IFPS feasibility study neglected to research drainage issues. After members of Resilient Red Hook, a local advocacy group, expressed dismay, the ORR promised a drainage study – which, however, has yet to emerge. This, in turn, has delayed the expansion to Atlantic Basin of the Interim Flood Protection Measures (consisting of inflatable Tiger Dams and sand-filled HESCO barriers, designed to reduce “low-level, high recurrence coastal flood risks” for a maximum of five years) that the New York City Office of Emergency Management installed in 2017 along Beard Street, as the ORR insists that the drainage study must be completed first.
According to John McGettrick, president of the Red Hook Civic Association, “that almost allows them an excuse, given the incredible delay involved here, saying, ‘Well, we can’t do this because of that.’ They can use the cover of the drainage study, or the lack of the drainage study, to in fact not even do minimal levels of protection.”
Sewage backups, also unaddressed by the IFPS feasibility study, comprise the third flood danger in Red Hook. Because most of New York City uses combined sewer lines for storm water and wastewater, weather events can overwhelm the system. According to PortSide New York, a self-described “living lab for better urban waterways,” “the sewer system collects water up in Park Slope, Gowanus, and Carroll Gardens and loops through Red Hook on the way to a sewage treatment plant in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.” During Sandy, Red Hook’s storm drains spat up raw sewage. Under slightly more normal circumstances, rainfall-induced sewage overflows funnel, untreated, directly into the Gowanus Canal – which also flooded Red Hook during Sandy on its southern end.
In early 2016, the ORR and the NYCEDC commissioned a Gowanus Canal Storm Surge Barrier Study, but no such project can commence until the EPA has finished its Superfund cleanup of the polluted canal, in 2027 at the earliest. In the meantime, the city plans to build two sewage retention tanks, of eight million and four million gallons respectively, in Gowanus. Blondel claims that this could help the sewer situation in Red Hook. “The more water we can capture uphill, the less we have to worry about coming into Red Hook,” she remarked. “I know it doesn’t sound like it affects Red Hook, but it does.”
Whatever its possible inadequacies or omissions, the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services submitted the ORR and the NYCEDC’s Red Hook Integrated Flood Protection System Feasibility Study to FEMA in the second half of 2017. Although the federal dollars for the project will be distributed through New York State, all spending remains contingent upon FEMA approval, which arrived in May of 2018, thus authorizing the use of a combined $12,649,003 of equal federal and city funds (taken from the $100 million overall budget) for engineering, design, and permitting. This next set of plans must be submitted to FEMA by November of 2019 in order to secure the money for construction. So far, the project has hewed to the timeline presented during the feasibility study workshops, which estimated that construction for the IFPS would begin in 2020 and conclude in 2021, but no additional public outreach has taken place since the FEMA go-ahead.
Red Hook Houses make progress
Red Hook community members who are disappointed by the scale of the IFPS may be more impressed by the flood resiliency measures expected for the Red Hook Houses. Of the $3 billion of FEMA money granted to NYCHA after Sandy, $550 million has been set aside for the public housing in Red Hook, where floodwaters inundated underground mechanical rooms in 2012, knocking out electricity, heat, and water. Now, NYCHA promises flood-proof doors at basement entrances and a new boiler building and generators that will be installed well above flood level, in addition to an “automatic flood mitigation system” that will consist of flat-lying metal panels that, during storms, will “begin to rise automatically to seal off buildings and areas from flood water. The hydrostatic pressure of the water makes the panels deploy without human intervention.”
Most ambitious of all may be the “lily pad” features designed by the architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), with the intention of transforming the housing development’s courtyards into passive flood barriers of raised earth that will double as attractive green spaces for recreation and relaxation. KPF won a merit distinction for the plan at the American Institute of Architecture’s 2017 Design Awards. Currently, only the first phase of the NYCHA improvements – a roof repair job for the 28 Red Hook Houses – has begun, but it shares with the Red Hook IFPS a targeted end date in 2021.
McGetrrick contends that the IFPS should have been planned jointly with the NYCHA effort. “I think the failure to coordinate with that is a lost opportunity, and that’s very frustrating. We’re both part of the same community. It would, I think, be far more efficient, and offer far greater resiliency, if they had been intertwined rather than operating separately.”
Blondel and McGettrick both hold a belief that future construction projects in Red Hook should be evaluated for ways that they might be incorporated into an overarching flood protection plan. McGettrick thinks, for instance, that the upcoming UPS site could be conceptualized in part as a waterfront barrier, while Blondel, who opposes the Brooklyn Queens Connector streetcar (“We’d rather walk than take some mode of transportation that would disrupt the neighborhood”), acknowledged that “if the BQX could be part of the integrated flood protection that we’re seeking for Red Hook, we would want to at least hear them out.”
For Blondel, the common goal of neighborhood resiliency in the face of climate change has the capacity to draw together disparate elements within Red Hook. “We feel we have everybody from artists to engineers to boat builders, and we want to use our human capacity to make the decisions for our community in regard to our survival as a community living on the front line,” she stated.
In fact, many in Red Hook are already looking past the IFPS to other schemes. In November, 2017, Brooklyn Community Board 6 passed a motion of support for the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative’s Schematic Design of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway as a Flood Barrier in Red Hook, a presentation put together by Dewberry (again) and SCAPE Studio that proposes an elevated path for bicyclists, runners, and pedestrians near Atlantic Basin. The Brooklyn Greenway Initiative (BGI), formed in 2004, depends on funding secured by the New York City Department of Transportation from the Capital Budget and thus far has completed only small segments of its planned route from Greenpoint to Sunset Park. PortSide director Carolina Salguero opposes the BGI plan because “it re-introduces a wall between the community and its waterfront – not to mention that it converts industrial space in Atlantic Basin into park.”
Salguero and Blondel are both enthusiastic, however, about Red Hook Island, an imaginative proposal by Alexandros Washburn, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology who has proclaimed that the best way to defend Brooklyn from storm surge is to create more of it. His plan uses, as a starting point, 1923 legislation that authorized the dredging of New York Harbor for the creation of a barrier island to protect the docks in Red Hook and Sunset Park and to allow for more piers and warehouses. The project was abandoned in favor of port expansion in New Jersey, but Washburn believes that a legal pathway still exists and that the idea makes more sense now than ever.
Others feel pessimistic that a project as grand as Washburn’s will ever get off the ground. “Where does the money come from, and how long does it take?” wondered McGettrick. “We’re six years in. What do we have to show for six years in, and how much has been spent on plans that have yet to materialize?”
It’s a question that New Yorkers may be asking all over the city. In 2013, President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force announced a design competition “to develop implementable solutions to the region’s most complex needs.” One of the winners of the competition, dubbed Rebuild by Design, was the Big U, developed primarily by the acclaimed Bjarke Ingels Group, which put forth an aesthetically beautiful vision of grassy berms, knolls, and colorful artworks that would horseshoe Lower Manhattan and garnered $511 million from HUD for installation, with New York City immediately pledging an additional $305 million. By 2016, a Rolling Stone investigation – entitled “Can New York Be Saved in the Era of Global Warming?” – speculated that, due to cost-cutting measures and engineering challenges, the plan had degenerated into “a big dumb wall.” Worse, the “wall around Lower Manhattan might actually deflect more water into Red Hook.”
Nevertheless, at the time, the city was expected to break ground on the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, the first part of the Big U, in 2017. It hasn’t happened, and more recent reports predict a spring 2020 start date.
So what actually has happened in New York since Hurricane Sandy? One person might say that we’ve seen the start of the brainstorming phase in an almost infinitely complex process to redesign America’s largest city – which for nearly 400 years didn’t think much about sea level rise or extreme weather – so that it might withstand the climate apocalypse, and a few good ideas have already sprung up. Another person might say that a bunch of architecture, engineering, and design companies have gotten paid a lot. And yet another might say: nothing.
