Zimmer To Make Hoboken a Model City for Flood Defense

Pay attention, folks.

Our mayor, Dawn Zimmer is about to lead a national conversation on how American coastal urban centers prepare for the next Hurricane Sandy.  And under Zimmer, Hoboken will become a model for other American cities on how to avoid disaster, rather than just manage it once we're hit.  Zimmer is proposing policy, engineering and infrastructure initiatives to prevent the paralysis and destruction Sandy brought in October, that we have yet to recover from.

That's right, we know recovery is far from over; some businesses are (still) closed, residents displaced, others are renovating, remediating, some are waiting for insurance checks as others fight for coverage.

Including yours truly. This is GA's house; the pics were taken yesterday, day 2 of renovations. The nice fellas took my kitchen floor and sheet-rock (up to 4') in the living/dining space.  Check out that frigging mold on the stair; you can see the water line.  Mold, mold, everywhere.

Folks, we need to put politics aside and face the common enemy together: global climate change and Hoboken's proximity to WATER.

Let's face it, America is not the cutting edge of protecting our coastal cities from the increasingly extreme weather events we've seen since Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992. We have much to  learn from the success of others such as the Dutch:

In recent days, the Netherlands’ peerless expertise and centuries of experience in battling water have been widely hailed in the United States as offering lessons for how New York and other cities might better protect people and property from flooding. 

Dutch engineering companies are already pitching projects to fortify Manhattan against storms, stressing that the Netherlands has experience with a coastline and cluster of river estuaries that resemble New York’s, and pose similar flooding risks. 

But Dutch officials and hydrology experts who have examined the contrasting systems of the two countries say that replicating Dutch successes in the United States would require a radical reshaping of the American approach to vulnerable coastal areas and disaster prevention. 

The Dutch “way of thinking is completely different from the U.S.,” where disaster relief generally takes precedence over disaster avoidance, said Wim Kuijken, the Dutch government’s senior official for overall water control policy. “The U.S. is excellent at disaster management,” but “working to avoid disaster is completely different from working after a disaster.”

The Dutch response to New York’s events, he said, “would be to build big barriers,” but a better, cheaper answer may lie in “local solutions like flood-proof entrances” to subway stations and parking garages. “You need to be careful not to just copy Dutch solutions,” he added.

For New York, Arcadis, a Dutch engineering consulting company, is proposing a movable barrier near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. But, said Mathijs van Ledden, who works for the Dutch company Royal HaskoningDHV, “the big challenge in the U.S. is how you get a big pot of money in place for an entire region.”

The Dutch concept of the "movable barrier" is one of Mayor Zimmer's proposals for Hoboken, along with fixed walls to the north and south of the city, a 'mini-grid' for Hoboken to disconnect from the power substations should they become overwhelmed by flood waters, and more.  She'll present this tonight in her State of The City speech at 7:00 pm at the DeBaun Auditorium in Edwin A. Stevens Hall on the campus of Stevens Institute of Technology.

Whether or not residents agree with all her initiatives, the mayor's visionary thinking is about beefing up our defenses against the next Sandy.  And leading by example, other cities will look at Hoboken's successes and follow suit.  With federal and state support, which Zimmer continues to lobby for.

Her proposals are subject of an article in today's New York Times:

The mayor of this city of 50,000 across the Hudson River from New York, badly damaged by the storm, is pushing federal and state officials to make it a test case for a new model of hurricane resilience, one that could be translated to other cities in the Northeast that rising seas have increasingly turned into flood plains.
 

Most bluntly, Mayor Dawn Zimmer said, that means accepting and planning for the likelihood that most residents will not evacuate, even under an official order. And it requires adjusting federal flood-insurance guidelines to recognize that it is not possible to elevate an entire city. 

About two-thirds of Hoboken lies in the flood zone on new federal maps, but apart from the rare single-family homes, most buildings are apartment complexes or attached houses that cannot easily be mounted on pilings. 

“The rules don’t work,” Mayor Zimmer said. “They’re looking at a fairly suburban approach. We need to carve out an urban approach. Because today it’s Hoboken, tomorrow, Boston.” 

Under Ms. Zimmer’s proposal, federal disaster agencies would not give money to homeowners to have their houses lifted. Instead, the money would go to the city to pay for what she calls a universal solution: building permanent walls to the north and south of the city, where the hurricane sent surges that, as she said after the storm, “filled the city like a bathtub.” The city is also proposing a removable wall installed along the Hudson waterfront and floodgates in the city. 

 In the event that a storm overwhelms power substations, Hoboken also wants to be able to disconnect from the electrical grid — something utility companies have traditionally opposed — and transfer to its own mini-grid, which would rely on a mix of energy sources — diesel, solar, wind and natural gas. Among other things, that would power a system of lights in windows that residents who remain in their apartments could use to signal distress.