City Breaks Ground on Major Resiliency Project to Combat Climate Change

October 29 marks the 10th anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, which pummeled the Northeast corridor and sent an unprecedented 14 feet of storm surge into the low-lying areas near Lower Manhattan’s waterfront. A string of resiliency projects have since been proposed that aim to protect Lower Manhattan and the city at large from the effects of climate change, as higher storm surges are likely to become more frequent in the coming years. On Thursday, the city broke ground on one of them.

At a press conference on Thursday, Mayor Adams and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection broke ground on the Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience, which pledges to install a combination of flood walls and deployable flip-up barriers to protect parts of Lower Manhattan from future storm surges, all while keeping the waterfront visible and accessible to the community. Adams also announced a new equitable resiliency project, Climate Strong Communities, which will be centered around underrepresented environmental justice communities that did not have access to post-Sandy funding, and called on the federal government to pledge $8.5 billion for pre-disaster mitigation.

Forty-four New Yorkers were killed in 2012’s superstorm. Nearly 40 percent of commercial buildings in Lower Manhattan were affected by the storm, more than 5,900 residential units were inaccessible and a third of the neighborhood’s retailers, including small businesses, were closed for more than a week.

photo: AECOM NYC Landscape Studio