A street scene on Staten Island Oct. 30 after Hurricane Sandy hit (Photo by Rob Gross, Creative Commons license)
Staten Island, battered during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, is in a “race against time” to protect itself from damage and deaths in future storms, writes Sarah Crean of New York Environment Report. A number of different proposals have been put forward, and Crean examines a number of them.
A month before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is due to release a draft feasibility study on a proposed “mega” sea wall that would protect over half of the East Shore, from the Verrazano Bridge to Oakwood, Crean spoke with the Borough President James Oddo about the proposal and others that have been floated.
Oddo estimated that the wall would be completed by 2020 or 2021. The city and state are also assisting with its construction, he said.
“This is a different timetable than [the initial plans] we talked about,” added the borough president. “Help has been all too slow in coming…There will be several hurricane seasons.”
What happens between now and 2020 or 2021?
Oddo said that smaller-scale protective measures were underway, such as the elevation of several hundred homes using new FEMA flood maps as a guide.
The city has also rebuilt 26,000 linear feet of dunes between South Beach and Conference House Park. But “[the dunes] were not designed to handle an historic storm,” said Oddo. “They were designed to handle beach erosion.”
In other areas of Staten Island, said New York City Council Member Vincent Ignizio, “people want to be protected but not walled off.” Protective berms, home elevations, and, in some cases, strategic retreat may be the answer.
While Ignizio credits the administration of Mayor de Blasio with being more responsive than that of former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, he nonetheless argues that the Build It Back program, designed to only pay for an elevation if half or more of the home was damaged, could be more generous. Ignizio has proposed that the city and homeowners could share the cost in cases where less than half of the home was damaged. Ignizio expressed his frustration over progress in protecting homeowners.
“The sad reality is that these projects will be extremely helpful but will take a long time.”
Concluded Ignizio: “I’m getting tired of the studies and the reviews. …I want to see shovels in the ground and hammers in the streets.”
Read more at New York Environment Report.