Pumps (and a Bump?)


Can't touch this!

Hoboken may have gotten Hammered by a nor'easter but thanks to our NEW flood pumps, the city's residential areas stayed dry.

Yes, there was some flooding over on NJ Transit train tracks, but low-lying areas of the city which ordinarily would have flooded did NOT...  Flat areas, and those with a bump, stayed dry.

That's a big deal, people.

Thanks to Mayor Zimmer, working in concert with the North Hudson Sewerage Authority, storms of this magnitude are no longer drowning whole swaths of Hoboken.

We got pumps for our bumps.

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Comments

  1. Didn't NJT get millions in some sort of Federal grant after Sandy to fill in their canal on the Jersey City side next to their tracks to prevent flooding ?
    WTF are they waiting for !

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    1. Yep- you are right.

      TRACKING THE FEDERAL SANDY AID MONEY ONE YEAR LATER

      "NJ Transit has received $1.3 billion in federal Sandy aid from the Federal Transit Authority....

      $150 million for rail station resiliency. Includes flood control for Hoboken Terminal and Secaucus Junction station and potential construction of flood walls....

      $26.6 million for light-rail resiliency. Includes raising electrical substations, improving stormwater drainage, and installing pumps and other flood-control measures on the Newark Light Rail and the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail. Also improving the resiliency of the ferry facilities at Hoboken Terminal"

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    2. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that NJT will find a way to funnel big money into the next election to try to get rid Zimmer and flip the City Council to get a much more receptive to go back to their plans to build massive building on their property like past administration would have allowed them to build. That kind of development would crush the life out of Hoboken but make NJT and their friend a whole lot of money.
      Meanwhile they are making Hoboken miserable by doing nothing until they can get their way.

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  2. Wasn't Frank Raia the Chairperson of the North Hudson Sewerage Authority when the design study and construction of a second pump for Hoboken was approved? He and his commissioners worked cooperatively with multiple city, county, state, and federal authorities-including Mayor Zimmer- to make Pump #2 a reality. A big thanks to all involved.

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    1. Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan.

      ~JFK

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    2. Yes, thanks to all involved. However, Frank sat on the NHSA for 30 years, it got done under Mayor Zimmer.

      Moreover, the Mayor has brought the innovative "Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge" water management design to Hoboken, of which pumps play a part- but the city's infrastructure, architecture, flood walls and landscaping work together to prevent another Sandy-magnitude flood. Zimmer and her team got Hoboken the Rebuild-by-Design $230M grant for the 'wall' element of the Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge plan.

      This did not happen under OG management.

      The Water Next Time
      How nature itself could become a city’s best defense against extreme weather


      "The city is the fifth-densest in the country, with some 50,000 residents stuffed into little more than a single square mile. Sandy flooded more than 1,700 Hoboken homes, knocked out the city’s power grid, and halted trains into New York; in total, the storm caused more than $100 million in damages. “It filled up Hoboken like a bathtub,” Mayor Dawn Zimmer told me when I visited her at city hall. Two years after the hurricane, Hoboken remains susceptible even to lesser storms; Zimmer explained that half a dozen significant floods have hit the city since Sandy. I asked her when Hoboken would ideally have a storm system in place. “Tomorrow,” she said, moments after an aide joked, “Yesterday.”


      The team calls its plan “Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge,” and it intends to reduce local vulnerability to water in just the ways the name suggests. Flood walls strong enough to resist storm surges will protect high-risk sites along the riverfront. A system of parks, so-called green roofs, and terraced wetlands will hopefully act like sponges, soaking up water long enough to delay runoff and keep drains and sewers from being overwhelmed; another system of underground cisterns and retention basins will store excess water until high tides recede. Pumps will discharge floodwater back into the river once a storm has passed. Together, these parts should be capable of withstanding a once-in-500-years storm. What makes the plan so innovative, says Daniel Pittman, an architect and strategist at oma and the overall lead for the design team, is that it doesn’t rely on one isolated tool for defense but instead weaves together “hard” infrastructure (like levees) with “soft” infrastructure (like parks).

      This combination of tactics reflects a new approach to water management for coastal cities, one embraced most notably by the Dutch. Decades ago, the Netherlands—much of which is at or below sea level—built a vast system of dams, levees, and other hard barriers to protect against the North Sea. But as sea levels rose, and as major storms exposed the limitations of such structures, water experts realized the need for a change. Indeed, Mayor Zimmer told me that a recent visit to Rotterdam left her thinking that the Dutch had learned more than Americans had from storms like Katrina. Instead of continuing to bank on the idea of keeping water out, the Dutch have begun to create a sort of partnership with the sea, inviting a certain amount of flooding into trenches and urban parks."

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    3. I find it ironic that developer Frank Raia who got all sorts of variances and made all kinds of money to build ShopRite, when sitting on the NHSA board he knew better than anyone it was going to flood and did zip to prevent it.

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  3. Watching that video, I am for the first time very grateful for parachute pants.

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  4. Mayor Zimmer has been a catalyst for positive change in Hoboken.

    Long dormant plans have become reality under her administration.

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