Rockaway's long belated and selective resiliency concern

Impunity City 

 Climate change was somewhat kind to New York City this year compared to the devastation that continues to happen in other states and nations with tropical storms, hurricanes and tornadoes and the apocalyptic hell fires that are happening frequently in California;  although with the exception of the remnants of Hurricanes Henri and Ida causing record amounts of water vomiting from the sky which led to destruction and sad deaths of the city’s lower income citizens here. Mostly because of the record heat NYC has received this year, with the hottest July on record, this mild weather has also led to what will sure to be the warmest October in this city in 2021, which comes to mind the last time summer stuck around for another month in 2012 when the pleasant weather gave way to the kraken that was Hurricane Sandy a few days before Halloween.

 Sandy laid destruction and death of her own in a 24 hours across the coastal towns and areas and updated flood zones of the five boroughs, notably in Rockaway Beach where she destroyed the entire boardwalk 9 years ago. But with funding from FEMA,  it took a few years to build another boardwalk, this time with rebar and concrete to replace all the wood that was reduced to kindle and also billions of pounds of sand for dunes. This led to longer treks to find some real estate to lay your towels and coolers down on the beach, but at least it provided protection from the hostile waters of the Atlantic that has been rising and eroding the shores of the peninsula for years before that bitch Sandy arrived.

 And nigh a decade later, Rockaway Beach’s shore is in dire straits again. Most evident on the most conveniently accessed and popular beach area at Beach 98 st., the boardwalk entrance ramp to the sand is more fit for kayaking than a path for sunbathing.

 

There's a #ClimateCrisis issue going on at Rockaway Beach, where a boardwalk entrance to the sands is daily submerged by the ocean

And the dunes protecting the boardwalk and the streets have been totally destroyed

This isn't a beach, this is a pier pic.twitter.com/AioJqwuaxZ

— This is JQ LLC (@ImpunityCity) July 26, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

State approves protection system for Breezy Point

From CBS New York:

A multimillion-dollar request for a dune system and other coastal protections for Breezy Point, Queens is moving forward, New York State officials announced Monday.

Breezy Point lost 355 homes to fire and flooding during Superstorm Sandy two years ago.

The $58.2 million request submitted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency entails building a double dune on the side of Breezy Point that faces the ocean, as well as potentially constructing a seawall and groins along the bay in both Breezy Point and nearby Roxbury to prevent flooding and erosion.

The state said $1.2 million was awarded to support technical, feasibility and permitting needs for the project. Another $57 million in funds for design, engineering and construction could follow, according to the governor’s office.

Sand unswept in Far Rockaway

"Today, went to Beach 20th Street in Far Rockaway. Was oddly amused with the amount of sand on the boardwalk. As a lifelong resident of the Rockaways, I am acutely aware that at this point in time we have nothing else going for us except the beach. As you know, the city keeps dumping everything thay can imagine in the Rockaways. This particluar mound, which is one of four, is the largest and has been growing for the past two months. It's located nearby to senior buldings. The old folks have to navigate around the mounds along with the cyclists, joggers and beachgoers. I guess the parks department is too busy harassing beachgoers walking dogs and enjoying themselves than to sweep up the mess." - anonymous

Rockaway coast restoration underway

From the Daily News:

By next summer, the beaches in the Rockaways will have as much sand as they did in the 1970s, but it remains to be seen how long they will stay that way.

Officials gathered near the surf Thursday to highlight the coastal restoration program, while concerned residents complained that another tropical storm would return the beaches — along with their coastal neighborhoods — to the condition they were in last fall, after Superstorm Sandy.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has started a $36.4 million project to pump 3.5 million cubic yards of sand onto the peninsula’s badly eroded beaches, fortifying them against future superstorms and the raging Atlantic Ocean.

Rockaway residents, who lost their homes and businesses to superstorm Sandy, have been anxiously awaiting the sand replenishment, boardwalk reconstruction and other protection measures as another storm season looms.

Those who have taken an active interest in the work say the new sand is good, but they remain critical of the fact that rock jetties and other permanent structures, also important to shielding the coastal neighborhoods from the ravages of a superstorm, will not be built for at least three years.

There's also a research center at Jamaica Bay now to study the ecosystem.

New Bloomberg strategy: propose things that will never happen

From the Politicker:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlined a nearly $20 billion master plan Tuesday to shield the city from future Hurricane Sandys, complete with levees, sand dunes, bulkheads, flood walls and a proposed “Seaport City.”

The plan calls for the installation of removable “adaptable floodwalls” in riverfront locations across the city, including Hunts Point in the Bronx, along the East Harlem waterfront, the Lower East Side and the Financial District, as well as a new levee and floodwall system along the East Shore of Staten Island, with barriers that could rise as high as 15 to 20 feet.

The proposal, which the mayor is set to outline in a major speech at Brooklyn Navy’s Yard’s Sandy-damaged Duggal Greenhouse, also calls for the construction of a new dune systems in Staten Island and the Rockaway Peninsula, with a “double dune” planned for Breezy Point.

While the mayor has less than seven months left in office, he also proposed building a new “Seaport City” on the east side of Manhattan, similar to the existing Battery Park City near the Financial District. The new development, which could stretch all the way to Brooklyn, would be built on “a multi-purpose levee with raised edge elevations,” designed to protect the East River shoreline south of the Brooklyn Bridge, while creating a new mini-neighborhood.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has previously said that a sea wall plan was “not practical,” also wants to build a storm surge barrier at Newtown Creek and along Coney Island Creek, and announced plans to work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study the feasibility adding “surge barriers” across the mouth of Jamaica Bay to protect communities in Queens.

Meanwhile, people are getting creamed with insurance premiums and building costs.

Putting the "barrier beach" back into Rockaway

From Capital New York:

Walter Meyer, a surfer, sometime-Rockaway resident, and urban designer, has an idea on how to protect the Rockaways from some of the devastating impacts of the next Hurricane Sandy, and he says the city is listening.

Before Hurricane Sandy lifted the boardwalk from its moorings and sent it surging blocks inland, tearing at everything in its way, swimmers and sunbathers had to cross the broad, Robert Moses-designed four-lane Shore Front Parkway, complete with a median, to reach the boardwalk to get to the beach.

Moses intended Shore Front Parkway to link Brooklyn to the Hamptons, but his plans never quite panned out. Today, the parkway is lightly used, and some of its lanes have been converted to parking.

Meyer wants to halve the width of that parkway and turn it into a regular two-way, two-lane road, so that the city can build a dune forest on its southern half.

That dune system would host a forest of pitch pine, that, like the coconut palm tree of warmer climates, develops roots that lock together, holding the beach in place and creating a formidable bulwark against future floods. A typical dune forest would take two to three summers to become operational.

“But once it gets locked in, it’s amazing how strong and resilient it is,” said Meyer.

Closer to the edge of the water he's recommending the city create another, lower wall of dunes, these planted with a collection of fast-growing sand grasses that are naturally resistant to high wind and heavy salt water. The grasses, if planted soon, could be well-established by next summer.

“The primary dune is protecting the secondary from wind, and the secondary dune is protecting the primary dune from disappearing into the sea,” said Meyer.

In between the two sets of dunes, Meyer thinks the city should build a “beachwalk,” using a sort of glue pioneered in the aftermath of the first Gulf War to harden the sand into a crust and thereby prevent tanks from getting stuck.

The beachwalk would be wide enough to accommodate ambulances and bikes and pedestrians.

Beach replenishment starting in June

From the Daily News:

The first extra dose of sand is coming this June to storm-worn sections of Rockaway’s beaches.

The most eroded sections between Beach 89th and Beach 149th Sts. will get 1 million cubic yards of sand dredged from the East Rockaway Inlet, officials said Tuesday.

“We know the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been working hard to bring sand to Rockaway,” said Queens Parks Commissioner Dorothy Lewandowski. “We look forward to its arrival and will do everything we can to help get it in place as quickly and safely as possible.”

Portions of the beach will close while the sand is added.

Meanwhile, another 2.5 million cubic yards of sand is slated to beef up the entire beachfront from Beach 19th to Beach 149th streets. That project is not expected to start until August and could take between six and nine months to complete.

What to do?

From the NY Times:

I spent several days walking the Rockaways with Mr. Gair; Mathew W. Wambua, the city’s housing commissioner; and Marc Jahr, the president of the city’s Housing Development Corporation, for whom I worked as a tenant organizer in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, in the early 1980s.

Theirs is a complicated task, made more difficult by a judgment day that will arrive this summer, when the federal government sets new flood standards. If a home sits in Zone A — and much of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens; Coney Island and Red Hook in Brooklyn; and Staten Island will — homeowners’ insurance rates could jump crazily, to perhaps $10,000 a year from less than $500. There is a deceptively simple way to sidestep this increase: homeowners can raise homes on stilts, and some have set out to do this. But the cost is great, extending into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for some homes.

At Dayton Towers, the chief executive, Jeff Goldstein, had installed new boilers, elevators, lobbies and laundry rooms. His tab ran into the millions of dollars. Then Hurricane Sandy blew in. Swells washed across the shore road and turned his boiler room into a briny aquarium.

Mr. Goldstein’s men restored electricity and heat within two weeks. And now? Commissioner Wambua stood in the well of Dayton Towers, yelling against the roar of the boilers. “Where do you put these?” he asked. “On the roof?”

You could encapsulate the boilers, making the basement watertight, much as a battleship safeguards its engine room, but the cost is terrific.

For many decades, the federal government rebuilt Southern cities lashed by storms. Now Congressional Republicans want to change course. Talk of storms intensified by global warming sounds suspiciously like science; they insist that New York and New Jersey not use a lot of federal money to armor their coastlines.

New York has traveled this road alone before. In the early 2000s, a developer built Arverne by the Sea, a middle-income housing development in the Rockaways.

City officials told him to take account of rising seas levels. So he trucked in landfill, raising the entire development above flood level. He buried electrical lines and put in catch basins, dunes and black pines. In late October, this neighborhood was one of the few in the area that did not flood.

The trick is to extend that sleight of hand to miles and miles of coastline, and so preserve a necklace of neighborhoods.

The Rockaway recovery is just beginning

From NY1:

The Army Corps of Engineers is telling residents of the Rockaways their beach will be restored over the summer, but officials say it's just a temporary fix for the kind of storm damage that only happens once every 250 years. NY1's Michael Herzenberg filed the following report.

Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on the beach in the Rockaways with the biggest waves ever recorded there. One, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, was 32.5 feet.

The water washed away 1.5 million cubic yards of sand, more than enough to fill the Empire State Building. But the feds say they'll replace the sand before next year.

"Our task is to construct a restored beach to the original authorized design which is a beach sand and a beach berm plus 10 feet above sea level and at least 100 feet wide," said Dan Falt of the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Army Corps told a Community Board meeting packed with Rockaway storm victims the Rehab work will go from Beach 19th to Beach 149th street. Contractors will close 1,000 feet of beach at a time for three to four day stretches. The whole project will take four to six months but it can't start before June.

"We have to get environmental permits, we have to make sure that the dredge bar sites are clean and proper and appropriate. We have to do a federal contracted process which does take some time," Falt said.

From the Daily News:

But many were disappointed it didn’t include more concrete proposals for long-term solutions, such as additional rock jetties or dunes.

“I was expecting to hear more about protection and protection now, not a temporary fix, a band-aid,” said Danny Ruscillo Jr., a Rockaway Park resident and civic activist.

Falt said the Army Corps will work with the city and the community on more permanent solutions for beach’s chronic erosion issues.

Sandy slammed into Rockaway, destroying whole portions of the boardwalk. It triggered fires and flooding that left the peninsula reeling.

Residents said they feel particularly vulnerable without the boardwalk as a barrier.

Boardwalk will stay broken for a long time

From NY1:

The city Department of Parks and Recreation just spent nearly $4 million fixing damage to the boardwalk from Hurricane Irene in 2011. Then Sandy came through, and now parks officials have to start again from scratch.

The worst damage occurred in the most widely used sections. And though it seems far away, parks officials are already looking at how to accommodate the millions expected to visit when summer rolls around.

The commissioner said the department cannot do a full reconstruction by next summer, and there is no estimate of what it will cost.

She said parks officials will discuss the long-term situation with elected officials and the community, including whether to use concrete or wood for a future boardwalk.

From CBS New York:

Beach replenishment advocates in the Rockaways are calling for a jetty field off the shore of Rockaway Beach to help prevent future damage similar to what was brought on by superstorm Sandy.

“Not having rock jetties in the Rockaways is equivalent to no levies in New Orleans. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s a massive problem and they’ve been kicking the can down the road. We need this more than anything. It makes no sense for people to put boilers in their homes in Belle Harbor if the water’s going to be coming down the block next week,” said Friends of Rockaway Beach co-founder John Cori.

The issue, according to experts, is the cost. A single rock jetty costs $1 million to build. Cori estimates 50 jetties are needed to help protect the Rockaways.

Rockaway Beach a victim of its own success

From the Daily News:

About 7 million people visited the beaches in Rockaway this year, more than double the number of recent years, according to city figures.

They were lured by the waves, sand and a new batch of groumet foods available at the boardwalk concessions.

But while the crowds are good for businesss, local officials said, they are also stretching the already thin police and parks resources to the breaking point.

“We are finally getting what we want,” said John Lepore, president of the Rockaway Chamber of Commerce. “But the maintenance could not keep up. We need to clean up more often and have more security.”

Community Board 14 fired off a letter to Mayor Bloomberg last week, asking him to increase the number of police and parks workers assigned to monitor Rockaway beaches.

They pointed out the boardwalk is still battered from years of use and storms and there are not enough ramps to make the beach accessible to everyone.

“Our beaches are dirty at times due to the shortage of an adequate amount of garbage baskets,” Community Board 14 District Manager Jonathan Gaska wrote in the letter on behalf of the board. “We are also deeply concerned with the lack of adequate police staffing during the summer season.”

The board does give the Parks Department credit for working “miracles” with limited resources but said the administrative “sleight of hand” no longer works.

“Rockaway is treated like a stepchild,” fumed City Councilman Eric Ulrich (R-Ozone Park). “You would never see this in Central Park.”

From the Daily News:

Some Rockaway residents are worried that long-awaited beach replenishment plans are washing away.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has already started dredging the East Rockaway Inlet, a move that will provide sand for eroded beaches along the western sections of the peninsula.

But unlike previous years, the sand will not be piped up to the beaches. Instead it will be dumped around Beach 30th St. and then moved separately by Parks Department contractors.

“I’m concerned that if they stockpile it, it will erode away,” said John Cori of Friends of Rockaway Beach, which launched a “Demand the Sand” campaign.

This summer the city announced it dedicated $3 million for a project to move dredged
sand to fill in the battered shoreline between Beach 85th St. and Beach 105th St., centered around Beach 92nd St.

Assemblyman Phil Goldfeder said he was concerned that the dredging project moved so quickly that the Army Corps was unable to work in conjunction with the Parks Department.

In previous years the two agencies worked together on a plan to dredge and then pipe the sand to specific beaches.

Sand replenishment a short-term solution

From CBS 2:

Huge mounds of sand are at the center of a debate on Rockaway Beach. The mounds have been offering protection to a building there for the past six months, but a new plan to use the sand to shore up an eroded section of beach 30 blocks to the south has residents in an uproar.

The beach was decimated when Hurricane Irene came through last year and some say that the sand does need to be used to replace what was lost.

The city Parks Department told CBS 2 that it is pursuing funding to bring in more sand, but residents said that similar efforts in the past have failed.

Assemblyman Phillip Goldfeder said the real solution to protecting beach front property is long-term rock jetties.

Actually, the real solution is to stop building along the beach. But God forbid we use common sense.

Boardwalk coming back, but not the sand

From the Daily News:

The Rockaway Beach boardwalk — battered by Hurricane Irene — will be fixed in time for the summer season, Parks Department officials said Wednesday.

But local activists are pushing for a long-term beach replenishment and protection program, worried the shoreline will be whittled away by future storms.

“The sand is not only for recreation, it’s protection for our neighborhoods,” said John Cori, who formed Friends of Rockaway Beach last year. “It’s the first line of defense during a storm.”

The group has started a “Demand the Sand” campaign, urging people to contact elected officials and get them to focus on the issue.

While the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is slated to dredge the East Rockaway Inlet for navigational purposes in the near future, there is no current funding to transport the sand to eroded beaches.

Not a day at the beach for Rockaway man

From the Daily News:

It's the second wave for a Belle Harbor man who sued the city for building sand dunes on a four-block stretch of the Rockaways.

James Agoglia, 40, is appealing a judge's decision to toss his lawsuit, which claims the dunes restrict access to the beach and don't prevent erosion, as originally intended.

"We didn't want dunes there in the first place," said Agoglia, who lives on Beach 141st St., about 350 feet from the dunes. "All it did was shrink the beach for people who use the beach." The Parks Department constructed the dunes in 1997 between Beach 138th St. and Beach 142nd St., as an "experiment in erosion control, designed to keep sand on the beach and out of your street and yards and homes," said then-Parks Commissioner Henry Stern.

But Agoglia said the experiment has been a failure and has benefitted only the six homes directly in front of the dunes.

"The sole purpose of those dunes was to give privacy to those homeowners," Agoglia said.

Agoglia and five fellow plaintiffs sued the Parks Department and the state Department of Environmental Conservation in Queens Supreme Court in 2006.

Justice Janice Taylor tossed out the case in March 2009. In her ruling, Taylor wrote that the plaintiffs failed to show "that they have suffered a different harm than the harm allegedly suffered by the public at large."