City Is Pushed for Storm Protection Plans in Lower Manhattan

Cars floated from the flooded parking garage beneath the office tower at 85 Broad St., where massive amounts of water were being pumped for days after the storm. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

More than two years after Hurricane Sandy's wide-spread destruction, Community Board 1 is dismayed that the city has yet to present a storm protection plan for hard-hit Lower Manhattan.

At a meeting last week, many committee members peppered Daniel Zarrilli, director of the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency, with questions about how $4.21 billion in disaster recovery funds from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development have yet to find their way to Lower Manhattan for safeguarding the area against the next big storm.

“So, can you just like tell us, out of this HUD money, what is the city putting into CB1 directly?” board chair Catherine McVay Hughes asked Zarrilli.

Zarrilli estimated that, between business and housing recovery programs, $10 to $20 million would go to the CB1 area, but he held out no hope for a flood protection plan for Lower Manhattan anytime soon.

What the city is working on is a plan for flood protection, still decades away, called the Big U. Using sea-level rise projections for 2050, it proposes a series of barriers to wrap around the lower part of Manhattan, from West 57th Street to East 42nd Street. HUD has designated $335 million to build a 19-foot-high fortification for the section of the “U” between Montgomery Street and East 23rd Street, where the three-year project will begin in 2017. But the part of the city below that is still unfunded.

“The real place to focus on is the coastal protection gap,” Zarrilli explained. “That is hundreds of millions of dollars that we don’t have right now, but we’re taking the first steps forward to understand what that number is and how to move that ball forward.”

Committee member Marco Pasanella, whose wine store like many other businesses in the Seaport, was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, wanted to know the reason his neighborhood was being ignored.

“Why isn’t the city [saying], ‘we’re going to propose to help the Seaport, which is in no better shape after Sandy than it was the night before, coastal protection-wise?’” he asked. “Why aren’t you proposing that?”

“[With] some things, our hands are slightly tied,” Zarrilli responded, adding that the majority of the HUD money will be going either to planning for the Big U or to the rehabilitation of housing damaged during Superstorm Sandy.

The committee also complained about the cancelation of a city-funded program, which would have given $18 million each to the area covered by CB1 and other Sandy-affected locals to help small businesses and encourage investments. Instead, the money has been assigned to a $200 million citywide program for rebuilding storm-damaged homes.

“I don’t think we should apologize for trying to get people back in their homes,” Zarrilli said, when questioned about the reallocation of the funds.

But committee member Bob Schneck, who agreed that housing was “very important,” said that the community board should have been consulted about the change.

“It feels like there was a decision made to move the money,” he told Zarrilli, “but we didn’t have a chance to think about [this or] have input.”

“It seems foolish to starve resiliency,” committee chair Jeff Galloway added. “I’d be willing to bet that this $200 million doesn’t solve the housing problems. If your goal is to solve some problem completely before you start attacking other problems, then you’ll never [solve] any problem.”

The city has $3 million for a feasibility study—the first step towards a long-term resiliency plan—for the east side of Manhattan from Montgomery Street to the Battery Maritime Building at the tip of the island. But Pasanella insisted that short-term coastal protection measures are needed. He proposed a deployable flood barrier, which he says would cost $1.5 million, to surround the Seaport. Zarrilli told Pasanella the city would consider that suggestion if the committee submits it in writing.

In its resolution, the committee presented Pasanella’s flood barrier suggestion and voiced its concern that nothing is being done to protect Lower Manhattan from flooding in the short term. It also asked the city to extend its feasibility study “to cover the entire coastline of Lower Manhattan” and requested that the $18 million in city funds from the canceled economic development program be reallocated into CB1 for coastal protection measures.

“I think the concern,” McVay Hughes told Zarrilli, “is that it’s so complicated down here in southern Manhattan and it’s going to be so expensive. But that’s not an excuse not to begin the planning process with concrete milestones.”