BATTLE TO SURVIVE five years after Sandy, progress is real, but much more remains to be done
HURRICANE SANDY not only destroyed lives and homes, but it also ripped away a facade of security, exposing critical deficiencies that have to be fortified if New York is to survive the next big storm.
Sea levels are rising, storms are growing stronger and hitting with more frequency and the damage they leave behind is becoming more costly, experts say.
The consequences of Sandy half a decade ago sparked discussions of defenses and numerous reports and studies and forced officials to confront their inability to manage the aftermath of monster storms.
“A lot of people talk about the future with climate change,” said Bill Ulfelder, executive director of the Nature Conservancy. “We are seeing the effects of climate change right now, and there’s no question that there will be intense storms in the future.”
There is some mind-set change, and steps can and are being taken, Ulfelder acknowledged. They include cutting carbon emissions, reevaluating high-risk flood zones and implementing infrastructure measures to bolster the city’s defenses.
The state and city, in conjunction with the federal government, also have embraced several major resilience efforts.
“The bottom line is, five years after Sandy, we’ve accomplished a lot. We have a lot more to do. But we haven’t lost the sense of urgency,” said Anthony Ciorra, coastal-restoration chief for the Army Corps of Engineers’ New York District. “We understand that many areas remain vulnerable, and it’s important for us to move forward as quickly as possible.”
Two massive projects have been in the theoretical works for years — discussion of a system of levees and sea walls along Staten Island’s east shore go back to 1993, while plans to bulk up Rockaways beaches in Queens with jetties and other coastal protections date to the 1960s. But many New Yorkers first heard
about them in depth when thenMayor Michael Bloomberg rolled out a $20 billion post-Sandy flood plan that incorporated the projects.
“On the coastal side, we were starting from a position of really zero when Sandy hit, and we turned on a program of coastal protection unlike anything we’ve really seen,” said Daniel Zarrilli, the city’s chief resilience officer, who was hired by Bloomberg and kept on by Mayor de Blasio.
Part of the reason the projects previously languished was funding.
“The funds don’t get appropriated, people lose interest,” Zarrilli said. “Sandy at least focused the attention. And what was different was the city actually stepped up and said, ‘Look, we’re going to lay out the vision for what this city needs.’ ”
Sandy also brought in huge amounts of federal money — and pushed the city and state to kick in their own local matches to get projects moving.
On Staten Island, the initial study of a sea wall was almost done, after various starts and stops, when Sandy roared in on Oct. 29, 2012.
“Sandy, of course, changed everything,” Ciorra said.
It also gave the Army Corps new data, and that necessitated a new plan. The corps settled on a $600 million project to build a 51/2-mile network of levees and sea walls, from Fort Wadsworth to Great Kills. Construction will start in 2019 and should be done in 2023.
A third project is more directly in the city’s hands: In Manhattan, the city, with money allocated through the federal Housing and Urban Development Department’s Rebuild By Design competition, will create a $740 million coastal-protection system on the Lower East Side. The result of the work, dubbed the “Dryline,” will also function as a waterfront park. That project is behind schedule, but Zarrilli said the city plans to start construction in early 2019 — though officials hope they can speed things up.
“A lot of it is definitely that it’s an incredibly complex project that is first of its kind, in such a dense environment,” Zarrilli said. “So we’re working through some natural bumps and bruises to work that out.”
While the marquee coastal-protection projects have yet to begin construction, there have been other upgrades to the shoreline.
In the Rockaways, the city has integrated protections, like dunes and berms, into the Boardwalk that replaced the wooden one Sandy splintered. The Army Corps replenished tons of sand. Miles of dunes and bulkheads across the city have been upgraded, and the corps built “Tgroins” — T-shaped rock structures set perpendicular to the beach and better known as jetties to slow erosion — in Coney Island.
The Nature Conservancy, working with the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Park Conservancy and the National Park Service, is planting 30,000 trees on islands in Jamaica Bay to slow and prevent erosion.
A project to build a barrier around the South Shore of Staten Island, called Living Breakwaters, has received $60 million of a federal Community Development Block Grant disaster-recovery fund and is set to begin next year. The design uses man-made oyster beds to absorb wave energy and prevent erosion.Other plans, such as buyout programs on Staten Island meant to revert low-lying areas to natural barriers, have moved forward as well.