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  #61  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2013, 10:25 PM
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If the "New Orleans" appraoch is taken, the two best examples of large barriers constructed post Katrina are the following:

Inner Harbor Navigation Canal Surge Barrier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHNC_La..._Surge_Barrier

It is just under 2 miles long, and cost right over a billion. It is not set in very deep water except for the intracoastal waterway crossing, which is maintained at roughly -30 ft.




Gulf Intracoastal Waterway West Closure Complex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_In...losure_Complex

This complex is much shorter than the previous one, but contains the largest sector gate in north america and the largest pump station in the world. A serious concern NY would have to address is that if a gate was constructed and closed to keep surge out, there is no switch to turn the Hudson river "off." It will continue to flow, potentially back flooding gated off areas, making massive pumping capacity necessary. Additionally, since NY handles large cargo ships, the gates required would need to be some the biggest and deepest in the world.



A final major consideration that we have dealt with here and that will surely be a concern in NY is the constriction of the tidal prism. Tidal exchange will cause massive currents through the open gates during normal days and tides unless nearly the entire structure is composed of operable gates. In New Orleans, the Army Corps actually damaged the brand new gates they constructed the first time they went to close them due to extreme currents in excess of 20 knots rushing through the gates and slamming them closed. I believe we could engineer and construct whatever we set our minds to, but there are massive environmental trade offs and always unintended consequences of redirecting surge to places that previously haven't flooded due to new flood protection structures.
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  #62  
Old Posted Jun 18, 2013, 2:40 PM
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  #63  
Old Posted Jun 18, 2013, 3:28 PM
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http://therealdeal.com/blog/2013/06/...ed-by-critics/

Critics scoff at Bloomberg’s SeaPort City plan





June 18, 2013


Quote:
Though experts have praised many components of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $19.5 billion plan to protect New York City from Hurricane Sandy, his proposal for SeaPort City has been widely panned, the Wall Street Journal reported.

City officials envision a neighborhood modeled after Battery Park City – which fared relatively well during Hurricane Sandy — that would rise partially on reclaimed land and would jut into the East River. But experts are saying the city has no use for another waterfront district and that it could mar the character of the historic Seaport neighborhood along the East River.

“In the midst of a brilliant plan that is innovative, this piece is a clunker,” Roland Lewis, director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance in New York, told the Journal. “There are other ways to protect downtown that would not involve massive land fill and would not harm one of the city’s most historic districts.”

For its part, the city says SeaPort City could help protect the Sandy-ravaged historic area from destructive storm surge in the future, as well as drive economic activity and affordable housing to the area. “Waterfront development is not the problem,” Seth Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, told the Journal. “The problem is waterfront development not to the right elevation.”

The cost for the project was not included in the $19.5 storm resilience plan unveiled by Bloomberg, but city officials said it was still too early to estimate a total cost.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...NewsCollection
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  #64  
Old Posted Jun 20, 2013, 1:50 PM
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All you need is three ocean barriers. One by the Verrazano Bridge, One by the Goethals bridge and one blocking off the Long Island Sound. Unfortunately, this would be a good idea, which means it likely won't ever happen.
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  #65  
Old Posted Jun 20, 2013, 4:03 PM
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Originally Posted by Barbarossa View Post
All you need is three ocean barriers. One by the Verrazano Bridge, One by the Goethals bridge and one blocking off the Long Island Sound. Unfortunately, this would be a good idea, which means it likely won't ever happen.
That'd be great at protecting Manhattan and along the Hudson and East rivers but it'd be a disaster for extra tidal build up along Staten Island, NJ south of the Goethals, southern Brooklyn and Queens, and communities outside a barrier at say Hell's Gate. Plus, the Hudson has a huge flow and some sort of never done before pumping system would be needed to keep it from overflowing it's banks.
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  #66  
Old Posted Oct 10, 2013, 4:27 PM
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http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/...icle-1.1480729

New Rockaway boardwalk to loom large over the beach
Dunes and baffle wall will fortify higher walkway against future storms. But residents are upset that wood planks will be replaced by concrete.





Mr. Obama! Build up this wall! So-called "baffle walls" are part of an Army Corps of Engineers plan to fortify the boardwalk in the Rockaways.


By Lisa L. Colangelo
October 9, 2013


Quote:
The new post-Sandy boardwalk in the Rockaways will be higher and better fortified against the raging Atlantic, city officials promised on Tuesday night.

The city hopes to start reconstruction as early as this winter and plans to begin near Beach 88th St., where the old boardwalk was washed away by the superstorm one year ago. But the government shutdown could delay those plans, since federal agencies need to approve several parts of the project.

A concrete “baffle wall” is planned for under the walkway to help keep sand from washing into the streets. And the boardwalk itself will rise much taller above the sand.

It will be about six to 10 feet higher,” Greg Clancy of the city’s Economic Development Corp. told Community Board 14, prompting cheers from the crowd.

Dunes bolstered by grass will provide a line of defense in front of the boardwalk.

“What we’re designing is a system of many elements that can work together to resist the storm,” said Clancy.

Large sections of the boardwalk were destroyed by last year’s storm, allowing the ocean, sand and debris to pour onto local streets and into homes.

The Army Corps of Engineers recently finished one wave of sand replenishment and is set to place 2.9 million cubic yards of sand along the entire stretch of beach in the coming months.

Clancy said the Parks Department recently decided to put additional money into the project to raise the protective dunes even higher.

“By bringing this beach back out 200 feet and then raising the dune to a level as far as we know it’s never been, this is the number one primary mechanism for coastal protection,” said Clancy.

Locals say they are happy with the preliminary designs for the boardwalk, but remain disappointed that the traditional wood will be replaced with concrete.

“In our hearts we wanted wood,” said Dolores Orr, a Rockaway resident and chairwoman of Community Board 14. “We had to pick our battle and we won the biggest — the baffle wall.”

Orr said many details remain to be worked out, such as how a higher boardwalk will fit in between Beach 110 and Beach 126th Sts., where the beach runs close to homes and apartments.





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  #67  
Old Posted Dec 28, 2013, 4:21 PM
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Big insurers are brought into discussions on how to protect NYC against future storms
Evan Lehmann, E&E reporter
ClimateWire: Friday, December 13, 2013

Quote:
Some of the world's leading insurance companies assembled in a room on Wall Street this fall to hear the opening pitch for a massive undertaking, constructing a chain of coastal barriers to defend the New York City region from future flooding.

The ambitious vision differs from the $14 billion system completed recently by the federal government to protect New Orleans from hurricanes that might mimic Katrina. The East Coast project, a potential network of walls, gates and dunes, would be financed largely by corporations.


Organizers envision that investors would earn a return through fees collected from residents, businesses and city governments that benefit from the project's "protective services." Their hope is that the insurance industry would be among the investors, having collected $4.6 trillion in premiums worldwide last year.
Storm defenses

Engineers from the Army Corps of Engineers inspect the seawall defenses of the New York City region after they were battered by Superstorm Sandy. Photo by Dan Desmet, courtesy of the New York District of the Army Corps.

Insurers would have another incentive to see the system built: It stands to lower their exposure to climbing disaster losses as sea levels go up, organizers said in interviews. Seven companies attended the private meeting Sept. 25 at the Louis Berger Group, an engineering firm that designs public infrastructure projects. Among the participants were industry giants Swiss Re and Zurich.

"The main part of the discussion was if you're going to build a flood barrier, for example, either on the tip of Manhattan or maybe even from Sandy Hook, N.J., over to the Rockaways [in Queens] to protect the entire New York Harbor from surge, who's going to benefit from that?"
said Tom Lewis, a vice president with the Berger Group.

"Some of the biggest beneficiaries include the insurance industry because the amount of claims they would have to pay would go down. Significantly."

Lewis added, "OK, well, if they're going to benefit from it, why can't they contribute to building that barrier?" He recalled that insurers were asked, "What do you think, guys, does this have legs?"

Lewis and other organizers said industry representatives seemed open to the idea: No one said no, but no one committed to it, either. Several insurance officials familiar with the proposal expressed more caution. The industry invests a huge amount of money each year, but it's often in predictable bonds and more liquid investments -- in part to make that cash available during a disaster.

"To put direct cash in is very different," said one executive. "There's no mechanism that I know of to ask for that."
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  #68  
Old Posted Jan 16, 2014, 5:41 PM
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Smile NEW YORK | Rockaway Boardwalk



Renderings Revealed for Rebuilding of Rockaway Boardwalk
Thursday, January 16, 2014, by Zoe Rosenberg



Quote:
The Parks Department's final design for Rockaway Boardwalk, unveiled on Tuesday, was met mostly with enthusiasm by the public and won unanimous approval from Community Board 14, the Daily News reports. The new boardwalk, stretching from Beach 126 to Beach 19, won't be complete until Memorial Day 2017, but it attempts to responsibly account for future storms and other natural shifts by using both wood and concrete. The rebuilt walk will feature a 40-foot wide boardwalk that is elevated above the 100 year flood level, and it will include designated bike lanes, as well as stairs and ramps built out of wood salvaged from Hurricane Sandy-damaged parts of the boardwalk. Not the least of these improvements is the proposed bright yellow welcome mat of R-O-C-K-A-W-A-Y spaced over the boardwalk for all flying in to JFK to see. One neighbor said, "It will be just like the Hollywood sign." Uh, sure.

The first phase of building, from Beach 86 to Beach 97, will wrap up around Memorial Day 2015, with completion dates on following stretches rolling in steadily on July 4th 2015 and Memorial Day 2016. The whole project is estimated to cost about $250 million.


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  #69  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2014, 11:13 AM
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UPDATE: New York City’s Head of Superstorm Sandy Recovery: Three Most Likely Picks
Quote:
NEW YORK—Almost three months into his administration, Mayor Bill de Blasio has yet to appoint the head of Superstorm Sandy recovery. Though de Blasio’s other appointments have ranged from public affairs staff to heads of agencies, there’s been no mention of who might run the city’s more than $3.2 billion worth of Sandy recovery work.

There are a few likely choices, some more obvious than others.

Dan Zarrilli, who has served as the director of resiliency for the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency since 2013, is the most obvious choice. Zarrilli is a holdover from the previous mayoral administration. He is well-regarded among his colleagues and peers in the recovery, resiliency, and waterfront arenas and is skilled at interacting with the public.

He is also a diplomatic and polished professional who is adept at working with the city’s Economic Development Corporation, a key partner in the city’s long-term resiliency and recovery efforts. Zarrilli has often presented to and interfaced with the community on a number of potential projects in the past year, notably the controversial Seaport City, which would create multi-use levees along Manhattan’s Lower East Side down to the tip of the island.
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  #70  
Old Posted Oct 8, 2014, 6:11 AM
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http://www.gothamgazette.com/index.p...s-climate-safe

Are New York's High-Risk Neighborhoods Climate Safe?



Quote:
....Red Hook and the Lower East Side (LES) were targeted because they were among the worst hit by Sandy in 2012 and remain among the most at risk for future climate-related damage from extreme weather and sea-level rise.

Uncertain future worries many

Many residents in both neighborhoods expressed concerns about whether they were, in fact, safer now. "Mother Nature has its own ideas," said Carlos Rosario, one middle-aged LES resident.

Rachel Goldberg, also of the LES, told our reporters she worries the city is less prepared because people think the storm is done and won't happen again. And another LES woman, Laura Pagan, 65, said she believes New York lacks the resources to deal with another storm of Sandy's magnitude.

Even The Big U, a several-hundred-million-dollar, federally funded project meant to prepare Lower Manhattan with a 10-mile series of preventative levees, didn't assuage residents' concerns. The project aims to further protect 29,000 public housings apartments, 150,000 residents and a Consolidated Edison substation from future storms.

But according to 39-year-old Rob Weber, while the Big U may make Lower Manhattan more resilient to coastal flooding, it won't prevent what he sees as the catastrophic effects of rising global temperatures. And Lilah Mejia, a climate activist who lives in the LES, said she won't feel climate safe as long as large corporations dominate the economy.


Some New Yorkers were reassured by steps they've seen to curb damages done by future storms. Said Carmelo Quinones, a 53-year-old LES resident, "They're repairing in a way to prevent any other floods in the future."

But many respondents couldn't say with certainty whether or not they believed themselves safer.

Patricia Nardone, a resident of the Knickerbocker Village since 1977 who was present during the entirety of Hurricane Sandy and left without water and power, said she likes that her building is constructing flood walls, but doesn't see any real protection from the river. And Jenny Chang, a Smith Healthcare Center employee, said she felt safer, but that the future was unpredictable.

....Most waterfront residents seemed keenly aware of their vulnerability, as knowledge of climate risks outstrip actual physical preparations. Their bond is strengthened, some suggested, but not their infrastructure.

So while they said precautions like gas-operated generators are much more commonplace now than two years ago, that doesn't mean barriers or drainage has been improved.

And while some have flood insurance or have repaired their homes and are hopeful that they'll never have to face the trials and tribulations of another Sandy, others haven't taken any measures at all.

Jamie Lynn, bartender at Fort Defiance restaurant in Red Hook, said of her climate safety, "I'm not overly concerned. I'm not living in fear." (photo by Jessica Bal)
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  #71  
Old Posted Mar 19, 2015, 7:52 AM
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New York in 2080: 9 Degrees Warmer, 39 Inches of Sea Level Rise

John Metcalfe
Feb 18, 2015

Quote:
And because it's never too soon to dream of the warm season, the report drops this bomb: "It is more likely than not that the number of the most intense hurricanes will increase in the North Atlantic Basin, along with extreme winds associated with these storms." (The changing climate's effects on wintry nor'easters is uncertain, it adds.)

"Mean annual precipitation has increased by a total of 8 inches from 1900 to 2013. Future mean annual precipitation is projected to increase 4 to 11 percent by the 2050s and 5 to 13 percent by the 2080s, relative to the 1980s base period."

"Future mean annual temperatures are projected to increase 4.1 to 5.7 degrees F by the 2050s and 5.3 to 8.8 degrees F by the 2080s, relative to the 1980s base period."

"Sea levels have risen in New York City 1.1 feet since 1900. That is almost twice the observed global rate of 0.5 to 0.7 inches per decade over a similar time period. Projections for sea level rise in New York City increase from 11 inches to 21 inches by the 2050s, 18 inches to 39 inches by the 2080s, and, 22 inches to 50 inches, with the worst case of up to six feet, by 2100."

It is "virtually certain" swollen seas will ratchet up the frequency and ferocity of coastal flooding, warns the panel. The New York of 2100 could have double the amount of land vulnerable to historic floods than currently outlined in FEMA's proposed flood-insurance rate maps. (By 2016, people living within the FEMA zones will be required to buy flood insurance if holding mortgages from government-backed lenders.)
Now would be a good time (even though yesterday would have been better) to get started in protecting the infrastructure of New York City.

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Old Posted Mar 19, 2015, 11:36 AM
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Bjarke Ingels on the New York Dryline: 'We think of it as the love-child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs'


After the High Line park, and the planned underground Lowline, comes the Dryline: an uncompromising seawall cum green space. Photograph: BIG

Oliver Wainwright
Monday, 9 March, 2015

Quote:
There aren’t many architects you would believe could hold back seas and save the world from being drowned by Biblical floods. But when you meet Bjarke Ingels, anything seems eminently possible.

At the age of 40, a mere teenager in architectural terms, the sprightly Danish architect has built a career on making unlikely feats appear effortlessly doable, and madcap schemes look perfectly logical. He has summoned mountain-shaped apartment blocks from the suburban flatlands of Copenhagen, designed a waste-to-energy plant down whose sloping rooftop you will be able to ski and proposed a cage-free zoo in which visitors will be held captive while the animals roam free. He’s even convinced Google to build a pastoral utopia beneath an enormous glass tent.

A few blocks from his New York office he is building a giant pyramid of apartments, wrenched askew to limbo beneath the neighbours’ viewing corridors, with a big courtyard scooped out of the middle. Now at its full height, rearing up beside the West Side Highway, it is one of the most arresting buildings Manhattan’s regimented grid has ever seen, as well as one of the most commercially illogical: it tapers up to a tiny point, leaving only a handful of flats at the most lucrative upper levels. The architects can barely believe they found someone brave (or mad) enough to pay for it. Yet once again the cartoonish diagram, of the wilful form generated by the forces acting on the site, has come true.

In the hands of his practice BIG (the Bjarke Ingels Group), which now numbers 220 people between Copenhagen and New York, even chimneys can be turned into wellsprings of creative possibility. In London they want to install a gigantic Tesla coil between the smokestacks of Battersea Power Station, so that an electric bolt may strike on occasion, sending a streak of lightning fizzing across the sky. Back in Denmark, the chimney of their power plant will be the coolest flue around: it is designed to blow smoke rings, puffing 30-metre wide halos towards the heavens. So what’s the trick to selling these harebrained comic-book dreams? There must be more to it than Bjarke’s boyish charm alone.

“I call it bigamy,” says Ingels, sitting in his New York office, where two floors of architects are busy twisting new typologies into shape, while a widescreen TV streams activity of his Copenhagen office doing the same some 4,000 miles away. “Why have one when you can have both? We find that seemingly contradictory things are not always mutually exclusive.”

On a quick dash through the office we see a pair of twirling towers under construction in Miami, a whirlwind of a watch museum planned for Switzerland, a honeycomb block of seaside apartments for the Bahamas, with a swimming pool lapping up to the balustrade of each balcony, and a model of something alarmingly tall in the corner of the office – from which my gaze is quickly averted. “If a factory has to exhaust gas,” says Ingels, distracting me with a video of the power-plant chimney test-run on his phone, like a child showing off his latest app, “then why not transform its emissions into a thing of beauty? If you’re going to do something anyway, then you might as well give it a public benefit as well.”

BIG’s latest conjuring trick awaits in the next room. Hanging on the wall is a plan of Manhattan with a thick green line running around the island’s tip. It gets fatter and thinner as it traces around the coastline, swelling out into an occasional bulge, like a snake curled up after a meal. Then comes the bigamist proposition, told with the seductive spiel of a TED talk. If New York has to build 10 miles of flood defences to protect the city from another Hurricane Sandy, why not conceive the barrier as a brand new waterfront park? Climate security as leisure amenity. You can almost hear the standing ovation and all-American whooping in the background.


Quote:
In the city that transformed a rusting railway track into the elysian High Line, and which is planning to turn an underground trolley-bus terminal into the atmospheric Lowline, now comes the latest snappily named linear park: meet the Dryline.

It is a vision as ingenious as it is elementary, a why-didn’t-they-do-it-already no-brainer of a plan. An animation produced by London studio Squint Opera shows the 10-mile long strategy being unrolled like a magic carpet along the waterfront, leaving safe leisure-loving citizens in its wake. With a sprinkling of fairy-dust, the shoreline becomes furnished with undulating berms and protective planting, flip-down baffles and defensive kiosks, promenades and bike paths, bringing pedestrian life worthy of Lisbon or Barcelona to the gritty banks of Manhattan.

“We like to think of it as the love-child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,” says Ingels. It is a project that is at once tyrannical and touchy-feely, as if the bullish highway builder and the people’s urban activist had sat down to draw up a plan over tea: an uncompromising seawall that also wants to give you a hug. “I think they would have agreed on a lot of things if only they had worked together,” Ingels adds cheerfully. “Our project must have Moses’ scale of ambition, but be able to work at the fine-grain scale of the neighbourhoods. It shouldn’t be about the city turning its back on the water, but embracing it and encouraging access. By taking it one conversation at a time, with the principle that everyone can get their fantasy realised, you end up getting there.”

It is the most ambitious product of Rebuild by Design, a $1bn federally-funded programme to restore the northeastern seaboard following the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, introducing new infrastructure to guard against future inundations. Ten schemes were selected to be taken forward from an international competition, addressing everything from new breakwaters along Staten Island’s South Shore, to flood prevention and drainage in Hoboken, New Jersey. BIG was the only team to look at Manhattan itself. “It was a bit like going to a big dance,” says Ingels. “No one picks the prettiest girl because they’re too shy.” His office evidently suffers from no such impediment. Its website is named http://big.dk/ after all.

The harbour baths, part of the proposed New York Dryline flood defences. Photograph: BIG

Quote:
Originally called the BIG-U, but recently rebranded so as not to promote one office alone (the team includes 10 other consultants, from engineering to landscape), the Dryline imagines a landscaped buffer stretching all the way from West 57th Street, looping down to the Battery and back up to East 42nd Street, bestowing Manhattan with a protective green cushion. Hurricane Sandy shocked New York into facing up to quite how vulnerable it is – and opened the city’s eyes to the realities of climate change. It provided violent and tangible evidence, if ever it were needed, that extreme weather is here, sea levels are on the rise and that cities must adapt more urgently than ever before. It also changed locals’ perception of the city’s physical geography overnight.

“The storm really made people aware of the geological map of Manhattan,” says Kai-Uwe Bergmann, BIG’s partner in charge of the Dryline project, when we meet across town at the East River Park where basketball courts and soccer pitches lie under a deep layer of ice. To the north, the chimneys of the Con Edison power plant chug wispy white tendrils into the frozen blue sky, from the very plant that exploded during the superstorm, plunging lower Manhattan into darkness and leaving 750,000 residents without power.

“It returned to water everything that had originally been water,” says Bergmann. “Canal St became a canal again and all the reclaimed land was totally submerged, essentially taking the city back to its 1640 coastline.”

The hurricane caused $19bn of damage and saw 305,000 homes harmed or destroyed, many of which were here in the vulnerable Lower East Side, a low-lying, low-income district where rows of public housing blocks sit as modernist “towers in the park”. Only it’s the kind of park that actually means car parking, and swathes of tarmac and concrete did little to alleviate the floodwaters.

As the most vulnerable area – and the district least likely to attract private investment, mostly consisting of New York City Housing Authority blocks – this first section of the Dryline has received $335m from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to go ahead. The two-mile long stretch focuses on building a “bridging berm”, a snaking green mound that will rise to 15 feet (4.57m), the once-in-a-hundred-years flood level which Sandy almost reached, and provide a landing point for footbridges across the FDR Drive, the roaring six-lane highway that effectively severs residents of the Lower East Side from the waterfront. The existing bridges, which are narrow and intimidatingly caged, will be replaced with open landscaped bridges three times the width, bringing people across to the top of the sloping berm, which will also seclude the new park from traffic noise.

A rendering of the New York Dryline flood defences. Photograph: BIG

Quote:
As the berm weaves its way along the highway, it will take on the character of different areas, curving around existing sports pitches, morphing into grandstand seating and providing a level at which the road might be permanently covered over in future. There are plans for fishing piers as well as wild swimming pools in the spirit of Copenhagen’s harbour baths, which came out of one of the first consultation meetings, when an enthusiastic group of East River swimmers turned up.

Further south, beyond the first funded compartment, the Dryline adapts to bring existing infrastructure into action against the rising waters. Between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, it’s proposed that the underside of the elevated highway is kitted out with flip-down panels to form a defensive wall in the event of a storm warning, while providing a decorative soffit above a new public space the rest of the time. A stepped 4ft-high bench snakes its way alongside skate park structures and tai-chi platforms, catering to the large elderly Chinese community. As Ingels puts it: “The beauty of the High Line is that it’s a piece of decommissioned infrastructure that is now enjoyable – but why wait?”

In the third compartment, at the lower tip of Manhattan, a series of pill-shaped pavilions have been designed with sturdy central flood walls and doors that slide out to plug the gaps, forming a continuous vertical barrier, while retaining views through to the river the rest of the time. As the Dryline meets Battery Park, the berm is planned to return, forming a series of grassy knolls that slope down to a potential new multi-fingered waterfront building, like a blocky claw extended to baffle the tides. It is imagined – with a dash of implacable BIG optimism – as a new Maritime Museum, featuring a spectacular “reverse aquarium” from where visitors might observe the rising waters beneath dangling whale skeletons.

As ever with BIG’s bold visions, it can all seem too good to be true, too glib to withstand the battering from both the elements and the public sector bureaucracy now charged with building it. Revisiting their most substantial completed landscape project to date, two years on, brings mixed feelings. The Superkilen park, which weaves its way through one of the most deprived parts of Copenhagen, is still a joyful, well-used strip of surreal undulating mounds, with furniture and play equipment sourced from around the world to reflect the ethnic diversity of the area. But it requires a huge amount of maintenance that the local authority is in no position to keep up, now a scene of flaking paint, broken equipment and the forlorn air of an Expo site left to rot. Whatever gets made in Manhattan will have to be built of sturdier stuff.

Others fear the Dryline will give New Yorkers a false sense of protection, leading the city to become blasé behind its new defences. “The city should be proud of the project,” says Klaus Jacob, an esteemed climate scientist at Columbia University, who predicted the impact of a major storm just a year before Sandy arrived. “Except it has a fixed height. As the sea level rises, you need ever smaller storms to overcome it. It’s exactly New Orleans’ problem during Katrina. People think, ‘We have this Big U, we’re safe.’ But you’re building up risk behind the U until it becomes dysfunctional.”

“I’m not saying it will leak during the first 10 years,” he adds, “but the sea-level rise calculated is out to the 2050s. What about the 2080s? 2100? You just postpone the problem for future generations.”

A section of the Dryline’s bridging berm. Photograph: BIG

Quote:
The arrival of a new green leisure magnet has also sparked fears of gentrification among Lower East Side residents, having seen what effect the High Line has had on the meat-packing district the other side of town. A real estate gold mine wrought in gravel and shrubbery, the planted walkway has attracted over $2bn in private investment since it opened in 2009, seeing local property prices more than double. “It would be terrible if people were against their own interests from this kind of gentrifying fear,” says Ingels, assuring the area in question is protected from such forces, given its designation as New York City public housing.

But concerns have also been raised about detailed development happening behind closed doors, now the general ambition for the Dryline has been accepted and handed over to the city to deliver – with BIG’s team subcontracted to corporate engineering consultancy, AKRF. At a public meeting last autumn, community spokeswoman Damaris Reyes described it as a “slap in the face” that local residents “are not even part of the discussions beyond this public setting”. “We don’t want you to come to us at the 11th hour,” she added. “We need to be involved in the planning process.” A task force has since been set up, says the mayor’s office, to ensure that “all of the appropriate people are at the table”.

The bigger question remains how the rest of the 10-mile green necklace will be funded, and quite what form it will take. Like many of New York’s major parks, it will likely have to rely heavily on private investment. Seventy-five percent of Central Park’s annual operating budget is now covered by private money through the Central Park Conservancy, a privately bankrolled non-profit that, along with the likes of the Battery Park Conservancy and the Friends of Hudson River Park, now does the work of the hollowed-out public sector.

Meanwhile some philanthropists are splashing out on entirely new parks of their own, of a very different kind. Media mogul Barry Diller and his fashion designer wife Diane von Furstenberg, both major donors to the High Line, have recently unveiled their scheme for a magical “pier park” nearby, planned to sprout from the Hudson River atop great toadstool columns. Designed by miracle mushroom maker Thomas Heatherwick, it will cost $170m – compared to the $130m that mayor Bill de Blasio has committed to spend on upgrading 35 parks in poor neighbourhoods across the entire city. Critics suggest the project will be just another playground for tourists and those who can afford lunch in the Meatpacking district.

Part of the New York Dryline at Battery Park, featuring a school and ‘reverse aquarium’. Photograph: BIG

Quote:
Henk Ovink, the Dutch water management expert who has headed up the Rebuild by Design effort for the last two years, says potential private donors were approached for the first stages of the Dryline in the Lower East Side, with little success.

“We tried to see if they might be interested to help on a more supportive level,” he says. “But they’re not. Simply because there’s no return on investment. There’s a total prohibition on private development in that area.”

For the forthcoming stages, where the Dryline runs into the well-heeled districts along the prow of Manhattan, up to Tribeca and the West Village, BIG is starting to look at what is known, in the US philanthropy trade, as “plaque-able entities”, ie things you can slap a funder’s name on. There are early sketches for artist-designed barriers along the highway’s central reservation and suggestions of what a Jeppe Hein flood wall might look like. There’s a danger that these things are merely more baubles for Diller and Furstenberg’s big-hearted chums, but the ambition seems genuine, in the architects’ eyes at least, while mindful of needing to play the American funding game. Perhaps the billionaire benefactors will be persuaded to stump up cash for useful infrastructure after all. Barry’s Berm has a certain ring to it.

But for now, all efforts are focused on making the first publicly funded stretch as good as possible to set the bar high. “We’re trying to make the initial phase as adventurous a manifestation of the fundamental idea,” says Ingels. “We will have failed if, in the end, it’s just a good-looking green slope.”
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Old Posted Jun 1, 2015, 1:32 AM
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Old Posted Jun 6, 2017, 3:59 PM
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Cuomo Announces Plan For Seawall To Protect East Shore Of Staten Island
May 30, 2017
Quote:
A plan is in the works to make Staten Island more resilient, should major storms strike there in the future.

As WCBS 880’s Peter Haskell reported, the storm surge from Superstorm Sandy devastated the East Shore of Staten Island. Now, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is proposing a seven-mile seawall.
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Old Posted Nov 5, 2017, 1:32 PM
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What If an Irma-Like Hurricane Hit the New York City Metro Area?

By Christopher Flavelle and Henry Goldman
September 19, 2017

Quote:
The NY-NJ Metropolitan Storm Surge Working Group is pushing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to approve a $30 billion system of retractable sea barriers at the mouth of New York Harbor and in the Throgs Neck narrows north of the East River. Similar engineering projects now protect cities including New Orleans; Rotterdam, Holland, and St. Petersburg, Russia.

The system could protect about 800 miles of coast from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the Bronx, and as much as $1 trillion in assets
, said Robert Yaro, former executive director of the Regional Plan Association, a policy-research group.

“We in New York are far behind, and among the cities on Earth we have the most to lose,” Yaro said.
Even a "mere" category 3 hurricane making landfall in or close to the Tri-state area would likely be the most expensive natural disaster in history, 30 billion is a drop in the bucket.
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Old Posted Jul 9, 2018, 2:04 PM
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Army Corps Proposes Giant Hurricane Barrier Across New York Bay

Jul 9, 2018
by Matthew Schuerman

Quote:
The proposal will undoubtedly be controversial, given that such a barrier could cost $20 billion or more, and will take years to plan and build. Environmentalists meanwhile fear that the barriers, even with movable gates, would seriously impede the flow of sea life and water. (Riverkeeper says the proposal "threaten[s] the very life of the Hudson River.") But others argue that barriers are a more secure and centralized way of protecting the metropolitan region than the piecemeal approach undertaken so far.
Quote:
In a series of public information sessions this week, the Army Corps is presenting five options for protecting the area's waterfront, four of which involve storm surge barriers:

*a five-mile long barrier at the southernmost border of the lower bay, between Sandy Hook, N.J., and Breezy Point in the Rockaways;

*a smaller barrier between Staten Island and Brooklyn, across the channel that the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge spans, accompanied by gates across the mouth to Jamaica Bay and Arthur Kill;

*a series of berms and sea walls along low-lying portions of the New Jersey and New York City waterfront, along with small gates across some waterways;

*and an option that would only use berms and sea walls.
Scroll to the bottom to see more: link
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Old Posted Jul 9, 2018, 2:56 PM
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Originally Posted by NYguy View Post
There's still the matter of the Rockaways, which had some major devastation, not to mention the barrier islands of Long Island (like Long Beach which was devastated).
That’s why people shouldn’t really live on barrier islands. Just let them act as the barrier. Or be prepared to rebuild every 50 years.
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Old Posted Jul 10, 2018, 8:46 PM
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They've talked about this for so long, but the problem isn't just protecting the harbor, as you can see from some of these photos...
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...6&postcount=81
Unfortunately I do not think the coastal communities built on natural sandbars (like the Rockaways) are possible to save. We should have never built on them. They are a natural defense barrier during storms and thus they face the brunbt of storms with no protection themselves. It's sad, but in the future they may have to be returned to nature. For an example, Cape May was once twice the size it is today.
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Old Posted Jul 18, 2022, 10:23 AM
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Vulnerable to climate change, New York constructs seawall


DECEMBER 14, 2021
by Ana Fernandez



Quote:
After major storms highlighted New York's weaknesses in the face of climate change, the city is erecting a $1.45-billion system of walls and floodgates to protect it from rising sea levels.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 was the trigger for establishing the East Coast Resiliency Project (ESCR), running 2.5 miles (four kilometers) along the shoreline of Lower Manhattan. Hurricane Ida, which ravaged parts of the city this year, added further urgency.

During Sandy, which killed 44 city residents while impacting 110,000 more and leaving $19 billion in damages, water levels rose upwards of eight feet, according to Tom Foley, New York's acting Design and Construction Commissioner.

The completed wall will reach as high as 16.5 feet, Foley said. The project will also include gates to prevent water from seeping into Manhattan, home of the densest population in the United States.

The wall between 23rd and 20th streets is already constructed, an area where the East River and residential housing are at their most narrow.
Seems that the fortification of manhattan against the sea is advancing, glad to see some concrete steps being finally taken.
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