<
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-11-25/new-york-city-s-living-breakwaters-brace-for-stormier-seas>
"I arrived at Robinsons Beach at the southern tip of Staten Island to find a
narrow band of sand, muted fall color and calm blue waters. Ahead of me, eight
stoic-looking rows of stacked rocks ranged along the shoreline, perhaps a
quarter mile out in Raritan Bay.
Had I been standing on the beach 12 years ago, on Oct. 29, 2012, I would have
been swept away by a wall of seawater 14 feet high as Superstorm Sandy struck
the northern New Jersey coast and New York City. The storm pushed a gigantic
surge that inundated New Jersey shore towns and flowed up the New York Bay into
the Hudson and East Rivers. More than 50 square miles of New York City were
flooded, affecting the homes of 300,000 people. On Staten Island, floodwaters
mangled shoreline houses and swept into the low-lying streets of Tottenville
and other towns, killing 24 residents.
The piles of stones before me represent an innovative $111 million effort to
make sure that disaster does not repeat itself. Called Living Breakwaters, it’s
a network of artificial reefs designed to shatter future storm surge waves,
reducing their damaging height and momentum. Every stone of Living Breakwaters
— 2,400 linear feet — has been carefully shaped and positioned. The spaces
between the reefs were calibrated to so that floodwaters would not get trapped
inside, while waves pushing around them would collide with each other,
depriving them of energy.
The reefs vary in height from three to eight feet above low tide, their ragged
profiles evoking giant caterpillars resting in the shallow waters. They don’t
look very formidable, but they could have a dramatic effect: Should a 100-year
storm occur in concert with 30 inches of sea level rise — an amount that is
realistic in this century but no one wants to think about — Living Breakwaters
should be able to reduce flooding of nearby buildings to not more than 1.5
feet.
The project is the brainchild of Kate Orff, founder of the landscape
architecture firm SCAPE, who has been looking at remedies for polluted and
flood-vulnerable coastal landscapes since the 2000s. It’s among the largest and
most extensive urban examples of an idea that has been gaining ground in
climate resiliency: Rather than trying to contain rising seas with concrete or
steel walls, Orff and other practitioners create infrastructure that mimics
naturally protective features like oyster reefs and marshes, which can break up
waves and blunt their devastation.
“They reduce risk but don’t eliminate it,” Orff said. “We can’t just keep on
building bulkheads and piling excavated sand on beaches. These tactics don’t
work as we face multiple threats.”"
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-new-york-steam-heat-network/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
