It Will Cost $52B to Protect NYC from Big Storms

The US Army Corps of Engineers has unveiled its comprehensive plan to protect coastal areas of New York City and northern New Jersey from monster storms like Hurricane Ian—a $52B infrastructure upgrade that will take 14 years to complete.

The plan, which still has to be approved by federal, state and local officials—a review process expected to take up to three years—calls for the construction of a network of storm-surge barrier gates in the waters off low-lying areas and sheet-pile reinforced dunes on land along the shoreline.

The barrier gates—to be lowered during storm surges—would be installed in Jamaica Bay, Coney Island Creek, Newtown Creek, the Gowanus Canal, Gerritsen Creek, Flushing Creek and in the waters between New Jersey and Staten Island.

The good news is that the timeline for construction of the project—slated to begin in 2030 and to be completed by 2044—isn’t more than twice as long as the six years it took the Army Corps to create the 569-page proposal.

Here’s the bad news: the project is not designed to deal with rising sea levels now widely projected by climate scientists for the second half of the 21^st century. The Corps concedes in its proposal that the plan “will not totally eliminate flood risks.”

So, Lower Manhattan will not get the kind of massive sea wall—think Rotterdam—that already has been approved by Congress for Galveston Bay to protect Houston. In July, Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act, including funding for a $31B coastal barrier at the mouth of Galveston Bay, the largest project of its kind in US history.

Locals are calling the Galveston wall the “Ike Dike,” so-named for the 2008 hurricane that flooded Houston. In 1900, an unnamed storm on the same trajectory as Ike wiped out Galveston without warning, killing more than 6,000 people in the worst natural disaster in US history.

When the Army Corps was tasked with creating the plan for NYC in 2016, the primary concern was mitigating the damage to low-lying areas and infrastructure from superstorms like Sandy, which caused an estimated $30B in damage when it plowed through NY and NJ in October of 2012.

The plan was delayed when Congress cut off funding for it in 2020, then completed after funding was restored last year in the infrastructure bill.

Geography may have played a role in the Army Corps’ recommendation of a series of smaller barriers in NY/NJ instead of an Ike Dike-scaled seawall focused on keeping water out of Lower Manhattan.

Depending on where the sea wall was situated in the harbor, displaced water could make low-lying areas of New Jersey—think Hoboken—and Staten Island uninhabitable.