Red Hook's $100M Flood Prevention Plan Moves Forward

Pictured: These swaths of Red Hook, in blue, are at particular risk of flooding during a major storm. Second thumbnail: Red Hook residents attend a meeting on the city's flood prevention plan.

RED HOOK, BROOKLYN — City officials held their second public meeting Thursday on a $100 million flood mitigation plan for Brooklyn's Red Hook peninsula.

It's called the Integrated Flood Protection System (IFPS) project, and it could involve a series of permanent technologies — such as gates, walls and raised roads — that city officials hope will protect the Red Hook neighborhood from extreme floods like the ones that destroyed homes, closed businesses and crushed the city power grid during Superstorm Sandy.

Red Hook's new flood-proof infrastructure will be funded with $50 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and $50 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

An exact design for the new system is currently being hashed out in the halls of the Mayor's Office of Recovery and Resiliency (ORR) and the New York Economic Development Corp.

The departments hope to present a joint design proposal by October 2016.

Until then, Red Hook residents are being asked to weigh in.

Their comments from a previous community meeting, back in January, largely guided Thursday's discussion. City staffers outlined the specific challenges of protecting a jutting sea port like Red Hook from coastal waters — then presented a list of technologies that could possibly meet those challenges.

Many approaches, officials said, are already being tested by other flood-prone cities around the world. Among them: different types of seawalls, elevated street planters and bike lanes; landscaped berms; and retractable gates that can be raised or swung into place in the event of a storm.

As a visual aid, info boards and neighborhood maps were arranged around the gym at the Joseph Miccio Community Center on Thursday.

The maps showed Red Hook to be a tight mix of commercial, industrial and residential buildings, constructed at various elevations. Its high points — such as areas near the Gowanus Canal and Ferris Street — are less susceptible to flooding than lower points, such as the land adjacent to the Atlantic Basin, officials explained.

Another priority for city planners is securing the four roads running in and out of Red Hook in the event of a storm: Van Brundt Street, Court Street, Smith Street and Clinton Street.

The IFPS project is still in a flexible enough stage, though, for more public input. A third public meeting will be held sometime in June, officials said.

Residents at Thursday's meeting were encouraged to comment on how the flood plan might protect and enhance — rather than detract from — their quality of life.

Tim Gilman-Seucik, a displaced homeowner who said he was still rebuilding his Sandy-damaged home at 129 Pioneer St., raised concerns that the city was focusing too heavily on building "binary" flood protection — in other words, technologies that keep water out instead of those that could effectively channel and absorb it.

During a breakout discussion session Thursday, Gilman-Seucik's comments segued into to a back-and-forth between him and a Department of Transportation (DOT) official. The two discussed whether new, absorptive road surfaces could endure the heavy truck traffic common in Red Hook — a small taste of the technical complexity of the problem at hand.