The Times has an oped — thank goodness — that takes on the Army Corps’ plan for the west side that would most definitely ruin everything we value about living next to the river — and undo all the work that has been done over the past three decades to make the waterfront accessible. They call it destructive and inadequate and recommend that the Corps “should set aside their flawed proposal and turn to something better…for the sake of our waterfront and the communities excluded by the current plan.”

I was just hoping the wall proposal was one of those things that never gets built (the Army Corps has been working on the plans since 2016) since it is outrageous and not all that inventive. The 50 miles of 12-to-20-foot walls would snake along waterfront neighborhoods across the city and New Jersey, a permanent barrier not just for floods but for views. The Times has great illustrations to give a better sense of the impact than the Army Corps presentation did.

NB: Battery Park City Authority is moving right along with a similar plan for 200 feet of the bikeway/walkway between Chambers and Harrison. They are presenting 30% progress drawings for this plan on Monday, and I suggest getting to the meeting if this sounds like a bad idea to you. See info on that here.

But back to the oped, written by Robert Yaro, the former president of the Regional Plan Association a board member of Metro Flood Defense, a non-profit with a mission to increase public understanding of the flooding challenges in the NY-NJ Metropolitan Region (to do that they translate complicated scientific and technical reports into digestible material); and Daniel Gutman an environmental planning consultant and a member of the New York-New Jersey Storm Surge Working Group.

They are not burying their heads in the sand, rather they note that “New York City is the most vulnerable city in the country [for coastal storm flooding], according to Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. As global warming raises sea levels, more of the region will be at risk, and the likelihood of Sandy-scale flooding will increase.” But they argue that this plan won’t save us.

They note that:

• the plan is estimated now at $52.6 billion — the most expensive project ever proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers.
• the floodwalls will require expensive modifications to New York City’s drainage system and costly pump stations to prevent neighborhoods behind the walls from being flooded by rainwater
• the plan would leave about 40 percent of vulnerable and low-income areas at risk of coastal flooding, in what they are calling “climate redlining”
• the city and state are going along with the plan, most likely, to ensure funding from the federal government

They also outline and explain the prospects of some alternatives, already studied by the Corps, the most promising, they say, is an offshore barrier system — a six-mile storm surge barrier between Breezy Point and Sandy Hook that would be deployed every couple of years. That in tandem with nature-based solutions, such as coastal wetlands and dunes, as well as some rebuilt shoreline features would be effective in protecting 90 percent of the city’s shoreline.

“Despite its great ambitions,” they write, “the Corps’s plan demonstrates the shortcomings of relying on massive shoreline structures for flood protection. If built, this plan could reverse the region’s decades-long effort to open up its waterfront for recreation while, at best, protecting only a small fraction of the region’s most vulnerable areas from devastating storm surge flooding.”