After Superstorm Sandy brought the reality of sea-level rise home to New York City, city leaders and the community responded. As a result of hundreds of meetings and a design competition over the past five years, New York now has “Big U,” a planned flood-protection system that will run from West 57th Street down to Battery Park and then back up to East 42nd Street. It incorporates not only walls and levees but also parks and pedestrian plazas.
One of the two major projects is the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, a 2.4-mile coastal protection project still in the planning stages. It aims to lower risks for the flood-vulnerable neighborhoods from Montgomery Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to East 25th Street, including the Financial District. The second major job is the under-construction Broad Channel Street Raising Project, which is located in Queens and designed to curb flooding from the nearby Jamaica Bay.