City officials are betting on rain gardens to stop floods from the next hurricane

 

 Queens Chronicle

As the city marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Ida, the effects of which have some displaced families still living in hotels, Mayor Adams warns that climate change could lead to intermittent weather abnormalities becoming the norm.

“Thirteen New Yorkers died in their basement apartments due to flooding,” Adams said. “This traumatized our city. But climate change is bringing longer droughts, stronger storms and heavier rainfalls to places all over the globe.”

To help mitigate the effects of the next colossal rainfall event, Adams and other elected officials and department heads were in South Ozone Park last Thursday to announce the creation of an additional 2,300 rain gardens, the continued expansion of the city’s Bluebelt program and other green infrastructure initiatives aimed at relieving some of the burden on the city sewer system that was overwhelmed by last summer’s rainfall.

The city’s sewers were built to withstand rainfall at a rate of 1.75 inches per hour, according to Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala. Last summer alone, the city experienced two separate instances of rain falling at a faster rate: Hurrican Henri, when per hour totals reached 1.94 inches, and Ida, which dumped 3.75 inches per hour.

“Our path to resilience requires us to look to nature, to augment our sewer system, to build green infrastructure that will compliment our gray concrete infrastructure,” Aggarwala said. “Separately, neither would do the job, but the combination of well-maintained sewers and extensive green infrastructure can make New York City resilient in the face of the storms to come.”

While the city will continue to build out traditional “gray” infrastructure, including the installment of sewers in areas of Southeast Queens that had previously been overlooked, an Ida-level event cannot be contained by sewers alone. Aggarwala says the creation of green infrastructure initiatives eases the burden on the traditional drainage system by redirecting or storing excess rainwater until a storm passes.

Rain gardens — like the one at 135th Avenue and 127th Street where the officials spoke — are designed to absorb water into the ground and help keep the sewer system from being overwhelmed. Bluebelts, a program initiated on Staten Island that has expanded into Queens and the Bronx, involves the adaptation of naturally existing streams and wetlands into stormwater filters, bringing the water away from city streets and into larger bodies of water.

Also announced was a pilot of the city’s Cloudburst program, aimed at redirecting stormwater from city streets into specially targeted public places.

The program’s first run will take place at the New York City Housing Authority’s South Jamaica Houses. Construction is set to begin in 2023, with two grassy areas and a basketball court that will be rebuilt at a lower elevation targeted for water storage.

Similar projects are in planning stages in the St. Albans/Addisleigh Park neighborhood and in East Harlem.

Adams also announced an expansion of the city’s Floodnet sensors, designed to provide real-time flooding data to city agencies, residents, emergency response teams and researchers, along with “daylighting” plans to bring previously covered streams back to the surface in the Bronx.

“This is more than just infrastructure,” Adams said. “This is how we’re going to protect our city and people from rising sea levels and stronger storms. This is how we can create good jobs because it’s about also using one solution to address a multitude of problems.”

“We’re going to continue to be prepared for whatever challenges that we have to face. We will pivot and shift and adjust,” he added.

In a phone conversation with the Chronicle on Tuesday, state Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Jackson Heights) offered a blunt assessment of the city’s current plan and its response, as well as the federal and state responses, to last summer’s storm.

“A lot of what was released in the current plan is kind of a recount of things that are already being worked on or projects that have been completed,” she said. “Rain gardens are great, bioswales are great, but, I mean, how many are we really going to build and is that going to be enough?”

“It just feels like everyone remembered hurricane season was rolling around again only lately,” she added. “Little has been done since Hurricane Ida last year.”