After Superstorm Sandy struck the northeast U.S. in 2012, an unprecedented effort began to fortify the densely populated coastline against the next big storm.
Thousands of homes were raised on pilings. Concrete and steel walls meant to help hold back the sea were hidden beneath rebuilt dunes and beach boardwalks. Tunnels near New York's harbor were equipped with giant flood doors.
"We must be more prepared than we are now," said Shawn LaTourette, New Jersey's environmental protection commissioner. "We have done a lot of work since Sandy - developing the dune system, the buildings raised and the flood control infrastructure. We're still not ready." "We have to think of more sustainable ways to live along the coast," said Greg Tolley, executive director of the Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University. "We have to do things differently. The so-called 100-year storms and the Category 4 and 5 hurricanes are happening more frequently."
"Because the challenges we face are very widespread and can vary - they might deal with something like long-term sea level rise or being prepared for a big storm shock like Sandy - I think we're at real risk of it showing up in a slightly different way, and we won't have the defenses in place to handle that," said Andrew Salkin, who co-founded New York-based nonprofit Resilient Cities Catalyst.
Some projects launched after Sandy are complete. A 4-mile steel wall is buried under the sand of replenished beaches in Mantoloking and Brick at the Jersey Shore, where storm surge cut a coastal highway in half and swept dozens of homes into Barnegat Bay. Complicating the calculus of storm protection was Hurricane Ida - a "humongous wakeup call," said Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design, an organization that worked with federal officials to jump-start post-Sandy resiliency projects.The group says urban areas need to be transformed from concrete jungles into sponges by creating "resiliency parks" designed to flood during storms. The parks capture water that would otherwise flow into streets and sewer systems.
Other work that began after Sandy and continues today includes six projects sponsored by Rebuild by Design and funded in part by nearly $1 billion in federal seed money given in 2014. "The Big U" is among them. So is a resilient energy generation project in the Bronx and a plan to lessen flooding in northern New Jersey's Meadowlands. Other projects are in Hoboken and Bridgeport, Connecticut.