FLOOD BARRIERSA Decade After Sandy, Manhattan’s Flood Barrier Is Finally in Sight — Sort of
In the wake of the October 2012 Superstorm Sandy, an ambitious project, called the “Big U,” was launched, aiming to wrap the island of Manhattan in miles of berms and artificial shorelines, creating a huge grassy shield that would both increase urban green space and defend the city from storm surge. The “Big U” shows how climate adaptation can succeed. It also shows how hard it is.
When Superstorm Sandy made landfall on October 29, 2012, it pushed 13 feet of storm surge into New York City’s harbor, sweeping across the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts and wiping entire neighborhoods off the map in Staten Island. Flooding knocked out power in Lower Manhattan, plunging downtown into near-total darkness as water rushed through the streets. The storm caused $19 billion in damages in the city alone, and it was clear that future storms could be even worse unless something changed.
Less than a year later, the Obama administration unveiled a massive federal initiative to ensure that the city not only recovered from Sandy, but built back better. The initiative, dubbed Rebuild by Design, promised to funnel money toward long-term climate adaptation measures in the hardest-hit areas, supplementing the usual barrage of disaster aid with money earmarked for forward-looking projects.
To say that officials aimed high would be an understatement. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, which managed the initiative, threw its weight behind an idea called the “Big U.” The plan, drafted by the firm of Danish celebrity architect Bjarke Ingels, proposed to wrap the island of Manhattan, the financial and cultural capital of the United States, in miles of berms and artificial shorelines, creating a huge grassy shield that would both increase urban green space and defend the city from storm surge. The feds doled out an eye-popping $335 million for the first phase of the project, which soon captured the public’s imagination, in part thanks to iconic renderings from Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) that showed a green paradise enfolding Manhattan. Ingels referred to it as “the love-child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.”
If you stand in Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan today, 10 years after Sandy, it might be hard to imagine that the city is about to make the Big U vision a reality. Look a little closer, though, and there are signs of progress. Multiple pieces of the borough’s flood barrier have broken ground in the past year, and almost all the money for the system has been secured, with only a few pieces left to fund. After years of planning, design, and debate, the physical structure is starting to take shape.
