Superstorm Sandy's direct hit in 2012 on Broad Channel in Queens made the coastal community a poster child of the storm's devastation, with nearly every house on the tiny island in Jamaica Bay swamped by several feet of water. But when New York City's Department of Design and Construction started a $28-million roadway reconstruction and bulkhead project there last spring, it was targeting a more chronic and crippling problem—regular flooding of community streets at high tide.
"The water went up 8 feet in the street and halfway up the first floor of the houses in Sandy," says Joseph Branco, president at EIC Associates, the project's Springfield, N.J.-based general contractor. "But this is going to fix the everyday tidal situation. At high tide, half of those streets can get flooded."