On Oct. 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit America’s largest city. It flooded the subway system, many of its suburban communities, and all road tunnels except the Lincoln Tunnel, entering Manhattan. Sandy impacted 13 states, including New York, resulting in more than $65 billion in damages and economic loss.
In New York City, the low-lying setting of Lower Manhattan, from West 57th St. down to The Battery and up to East 42nd St., is home to about 220,000 residents and is the core of a $500 billion business sector that influences the world’s economy. Hurricane Sandy devastated not only the Financial District, but also 95,000 low-income, elderly and disabled residents.
In response to the devastation, in 2013 President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force launched an innovative design competition, “Rebuild by Design.” This event assembles global expertise with regional leadership, and community stakeholders to gain a better understanding of how overlapping environmental and human-made vulnerabilities leave communities at risk.
Rebuild by Design coupled innovation and global expertise with community insight to develop solutions to the most complex needs of the affected cities and regions. The result of this was a multi-billion-dollar New York City project called Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency (LMCR), or its more-familiar name, “The Big U,” for its shape on the city map.
“Rebuild by Design creates teams for the design and construction of climate-mitigating measures around the world,” says Rebuild Managing Director Amy Chester. “The LMCR was an innovative competition, with first-time-ever designs for the future.”
Jordan Salinger, the city’s director of adaptation strategies with the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, considers the LMCR a key part of New York’s weather safety efforts.
“As part of the LMCR design competition, our office has been working with many different agencies over the past 10 years, looking at all hazards to our city, including flooding, coastal storms, and extreme rains,” Salinger says. “We expect to see an increase in sea level and coastal storms of about two feet by 2050, causing our waterfront to flood daily. This would severely impact our infrastructure, subways, ferries, and jobs.”
Five separate projects are being implemented as part of the LMCR, each constructed to provide comprehensive flood defense for Lower Manhattan, tailored to respond to individual neighborhood typology and community-desired amenities: the Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience; South Battery Park City Resiliency; the Battery Coast Resilience; North/West Battery Park City Resiliency; Seaport Coastal Resilience; and FiDi-Seaport Master Plan.
Construction is underway for the first three projects, with scheduled completion dates for all by 2030. The current budget for the entire LMCR is $5.4 billion.
In addition to The Big U, New York has implemented Climate Resiliency Design Guidelines that require new developments to consider future flood risk in their designs, elevating structures and protecting critical infrastructure. “Focusing on life cycle, we’re connecting the latest science with design innovation in the built environment,” says Salinger.
There is also a Green Infrastructure Plan in place to manage stormwater that can overwhelm the combined sewer system when it rains. This includes advanced street-tree pits, porous pavements and streets, and green and blue roofs to improve water and air quality, help cool the city, reduce energy bills and greenhouse gas emissions, and beautify communities.
Since 2002, New York has invested more than $6 billion in water quality, according to the Plan document. As a result, New York Harbor is now the cleanest it has been in more than a century.