City Asks Red Hook Which Blocks Should Be Spared From Rising Sea

RED HOOK, BROOKLYN — Residents at Thursday's public meeting on the in-the-works Red Hook Integrated Flood Protection System were asked to consider two questions: How much protection do you want, and where do you want it?

The city is currently conducting a feasibility study to assess how much, and what kind, of flood protection can be built in Red Hook with $100 million, the amount provided for the flood system by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

At the beginning of Thursday's meeting (the third such public hearing this year), City Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who represents Red Hook, scolded members of the Bill de Blasio administration in attendance over a September report showing tens of millions in funding for the project had been reallocated to the NYC Build It Back program.

Menchaca said this lack of clarity on the matter was "disrespectful" to the community, and to him as an elected official.

Michael Shaikh, a spokesman for the Mayor's Office of Recovery and Resiliency (ORR), confirmed that the Red Hook project will still have $100 million dedicated to it. The city, he said, did use $50 million in HUD money to cover Build It Back overspending — but the administration then filled that gap using New York's capital funds, he said. Even so, Shaikh agreed that the administration should have communicate these decisions better to the public.

Regarding the flood protection plan itself, consulting engineer Rahul Prahab said the city must now decide exactly how much flood protection to provide, using a metric known as Design Flood Elevation.

The city could, for example, protect against a 10-year flood (a flood with a 10 percent chance of occurring during a given year), a 50-year flood (which has a 2 percent chance of occurring during a given year) or a 100 year flood (which has a 1 percent chance of occurring during a given year). Superstorm Sandy, for example, came mighty close to that final threshold.

Each scenario would necessitate a different flood-protection system — likely built using a combination of technologies such as walls, berms, and other water-blocking and -draining mechanisms.

For example, Prahab explained, the intersection of Bay Street and Clinton Street is about seven-and-a-half feet above average sea level. Assuming the sea level rises 2.5 feet in the decades ahead, plus an additional few inches common during storm surges, a barrier at that intersection equipped to protect against a 10-year flood would have to be about two-and-a-half feet high.

By contrast, the wall would have to be about five-and-a-half feet high to protect against a 50-year flood, and about seven feet high to protect against a 100-year flood.

At the Thursday meeting, as was the case at a September presentation before Community Board 6, the city also rolled out three scenarios for how far inland the flood barrier should be placed from Red Hook's shoreline (though all three placements were merely approximations).

Each scenario has its own pros and cons, officials said. Scenario one would involve building a barrier along the shoreline:

This scenario would provide the most protection, and would impact pedestrians and traffic the least. But it would also take the longest to build; run into the most privately owned land; be subject to greater storm surges; obstruct waterfront views; and limit waterfront access; among other downsides.

Under scenario two, the wall would be built about a block inland:

This second scenario would have limited impact on waterfront access and would require a shorter barrier. It could also be built mostly on publicly owned land. But it wouldn't provide protection to waterfront property, and would have an impact on traffic and pedestrians.

The third scenario would see the wall built about two blocks inland:

This third scenario would have similar benefits to scenario No. 2, but again would impact traffic and pedestrians, and would protect the least amount of the Red Hook coastline.

Some residents at Thursday's meeting said it was difficult for them to take a position on the various options, as they weren't being shown a precise visual representation of each scenario. However, given this limited info, most seemed to settle on scenario No. 2, and favored protection against a 100-year flood.

Jessica Colon, another mayoral staffer, said the city's current feasibility study won't produce a finalized design for residents to examine. Instead, it will focus on evaluating the feasibility of the vague scenarios above, and will also explore what other types of flood protection might be put in place that don't require walls and berms.

This study should be done early next year, she said — at which point the city can move ahead with the design process. Still, several additional public meetings — and possibly a public walking tour of the affected area — will take place between now and then, to keep the public involved in the process, Colon said.

As the project has a multi-year time frame, one resident asked what the city was doing to protect against flooding in the short term. Michael Shaikh, the ORR spokesman, said NYC officials are currently focused on resiliency — on ways to "harden" existing critical infrastructure, such as public transit and electrical systems, which residents will need to get back to their normal lives more quickly after a storm.

Meeting attendee Matt Petters, the superintendent of 79 Wolcott St. (who also favored the second scenario above), said he took a job in Red Hook just 8 months ago, and still had 25 years to go until his retirement.

"I'm not going nowhere," he said.

Editor's Note: This post has been edited for clarity.

Pictured at top: Engineer Rahul Parab speaks to residents during Thursday's meeting. Photo by John V. Santore