Facing the challenge of rising sea levels, the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project is lifting the waterfront and erecting a ten-foot wall deep-rooted in steel.
Itās New York Cityās biggest environmental work in progress.
āThe water will rise,ā Ahmed Ibrahim, senior construction manager at HNTB-LiRo, said, explaining how the wall will stop the surge of water. āItās not going to make it to the other side, so it protects the residents and the buildings on the other side.ā
With a wall, elevated parkland and moveable floodgates, this $1.45 billion project will one day extend from East 25th Street to all the way downtown on Montgomery Street. For now, however, the section under construction only covers ten city blocks.
Nine years after Hurricane Sandy claimed the lives of 44 New Yorkers, work continues all over the city.
In the Rockaways in Queens, an area increasingly vulnerable to rising sea levels, new jetties are meant to protect the beach and increase its size.
āThese layers of protection,ā Jainey Bavishi, director of the Mayorās Office of Climate Resiliency, explained, āwill basically serve as a buffer for the storm surge and will minimize and mitigate the impacts to the community behind it.ā
She thinks New York City has become a global leader in climate adaptation under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
āItās because of the mayorās leadership, combined with the fact that we have real resources to do climate adaptation work and we have such an aware constituency that is really demanding climate action, that weāve been able to get as far as we had,ā Bavishi said.
But not everybody agrees.
THE EVOLVING THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE
On August 31, the remnants of Hurricane Ida caught city officials by surprise.
Record rainfall, with an intensity of three inches in one hour, brought massive flooding and killed 16 New Yorkers, many in basement apartments.
The cityās adaptation efforts proved insufficient.
āThe threat is not just on the shoreline. Thatās how we defined it after Sandy,ā said Steve Cohen, a professor at Columbia Universityās School of International and Public Affairs. āBut now we see the threat to the whole city. It doesnāt matter, you could live in Morningside Heights, in Washington Heights, way up high, the rain comes down just as fast there as down in the Bowery.ā
Four weeks after Ida, de Blasio released a report with plans on how to face a similar storm in the future.
āThe challenge that we face is just that we live in an incredibly dense urban environment with a lot of pavement, so our goal is to try to create more spaces to store storm water and for the rain water to go, because we are never gonna be able to build big enough sewers to capture the kind of rainfall we saw during Ida,ā Bavishi said.
An artificial pond in Midland Beach, Staten Island, is one of those spaces, built on a stretch of land bought by the city.
Once completed, the so-called Bluebelt will drain and contain stormwater from the three surrounding neighborhoods in order to avoid flooding.
āItās going back to what was here before the city was settled, there were a lot of these natural ponds and streams that helped to drain the area. Itās really just restoring that,ā Vincent Sapienza, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, said.
BLOOMBERG TO DE BLASIO, AND A $20 BILLION BLUEPRINT
Mayor de Blasio took office 14 months after Sandy.
His predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, left a $20 billion blueprint filled with infrastructure plans to fortify the city. Eights years later, some of those projects are just getting started.
Daniel Zarrilli worked under both mayors as Director of Resiliency
āIn 2013, we launched a $20 billion adaptation program and you can see the manifestation of that all across the city in housing elevations and hospitals and public housing and a range of investments that have been made,ā said Daniel Zarrilli, who worked under both mayors as Director of Resiliency. āIt also means that weāve upgraded our building codes and our zoning codes, things that you canāt necessarily see, but are helping make us safer.ā
One of those upgrades is at the Coney Island Houses, where the old basement boilers were flooded during Sandy. The brand new ones in this public housing complex are built to withstand future challenges.
āThese boilers have been installed well above the flood elevation for this location, so that in any future storm that we are protected and they will be able to provide heat and hot water for the residents,ā said Joy Sinderbrand, vice president of NYCHAās Recovery and Resilience Department.
As part of the Sandy recovery program, 20 public housing campuses received new protected heat and water systems, and now the cityās housing authority is incorporating the strategy in its construction projects.
āDesigning infrastructure and especially the distribution systems that go along with it does take a lot of time, and those construction projects can stretch over years because all of the buildings we are working on are occupied,ā Sinderbrand said.
āA COMPLETE FAILURE OF MAYORAL LEADERSHIPā
But some experts believe New York City is hardly keeping up with the climate threat, and they see de Blasioās tenure as a missed opportunity.
āI think thereās been a lot of discussion and planning," Cohen said. "I think weāve had a complete failure of mayoral leadership. What I mean by that is that this has to be a priority, and it hasnāt been a priority for mayor de Blasio."
The East Side Coastal Resiliency Project started construction four years late. And work at the section at East River Park has been stopped by a lawsuit brought by community organizations unhappy with how the park will be impacted.
A sea wall for Staten Islandās East Shore has also been mired in delays.
āYou have to be willing to accept the fact that not everybody is going to love everything you do,ā Cohen said. āIf your main objective as mayor is political popularity, it may be running for president, or for governor, or whatever the next thing is, it doesnāt suit you well for the tough choices you are gonna have to make to be the mayor of a place as complicated as New York, and thatās essentially what weāve had.ā
Climate justice activists like UPROSEās Executive Director Elizabeth Yeampierre also criticize the mayorās approach, giving him only a passing grade.
āI would give him a C. I think that he had an opportunity to take the momentum that existed under the Bloomberg administration and amp that up, and what we saw was a level of passivity that was inconsistent to what we were learning about climate change.ā
And itās not only when it comes to climate adaptation. Despite de Blasioās pledges, the latest data available show greenhouse emissions are up from 2017 levels.
āI think that Mayor de Blasio needed to really prioritize fighting climate change and really making sure that we were taking actions and not just talking about it when it was convenient,ā Julie Tighe, president of the New York League of Conservation Voters, said.
The recent closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant in Westchester County might also increase emissions further in the short term, making the city more reliant on natural gas to close the gap.
āNew York City has often been a leader on the environment and on climate change,ā Tighe said. āWe need to be front and center. Whatever happens at the national level, we need New York City to be advancing change and being real leaders on this, and I donāt think weāve had enough of that over the last eight years.ā
FROM DE BLASIO TO ADAMS: WHAT DOES THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION HAVE TO BUILD ON?
Critics do acknowledge the future positive impact of Local Law 97.
Signed by de Blasio in 2019, it will mandate retrofitting of big buildings in order to reduce greenhouse emissions by 40% by 2030 and by 80% by 2050.
This would be de Blasioās top climate legacy item, according to Zarrilli.
āThe second is going to be our work to divest from our pension funds, remove billions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry and redirect those funds into billions of dollars of new clean energy investment,ā Zarrilli added.
That move was finally announced early this year.
Itās estimated to amount to $4 billion.
After years of talking about it, itās now that New York and other cities are finally taking some action and slowly divesting their pension funds from fossil fuel companies.
In its goal to reduce emissions, New York also needs cooperation from key players like Con Edison, which deliver power to millions of New Yorkers. Its president, Tim Cawley, recently announced an ambitious timeline that includes delivering 100% clean power to its customers by 2040.
Cawley defends de Blasioās record on mitigation.
āHe has put a focus on it. I would say heās one link in a series that would get us there, but I think his focus has helped push the ball forward for New York City and around the area,ā he said.
Itās not only New York thatās having a hard time reducing emissions and transitioning to clean energy sources. The international community is generally walking away from its polluting ways very slowly. And when it comes to adaptation, complex infrastructure projects always take a long time to fund, design, negotiate and get built.
āDoes more work need to happen? Absolutely,ā Bavishi acknowledged. āIāve always said resiliency is a process, not an outcome, and we will continue to do this work and build on the investments weāve made, but thereās an enormous amount of work thatās underway and plenty to build on for the next administration.ā