The city will spend $100 million to build a new flood protection system to shield lower Manhattan from major storms, Mayor de Blasio will announce Thursday.
The project — stretching from the top of Battery Park City around the tip of Manhattan and up to the Lower East Side — will use measures like levees, flood walls, and more park land to soak up storm water and protect the area from the “absolute devastation” it experienced during Sandy, said Dan Zarrilli, director of the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency.
“With a changing climate, the risks are growing,” Zarrilli said.
The city is spending on the system as it enters a national disaster preparedness competition run by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, hoping to win up to $500 million more to finance a more ambitious project.
That contest will divvy up the last $1 billion of disaster aid allocated after Sandy.
The project, which de Blasio will announce Thursday at a disaster preparedness fair at the Smith Houses on the Lower East Side, aims to shield both the financial district and NYCHA developments that were hard hit by Sandy. It’s expected to take five to seven years to design and build.
A similar project is already underway stretching north from Montgomery St. on the Lower East Side.
The city plans to put out a bid next month for design and engineering firms to come up with specific flood protection measures, but Zarrilli said officials will look for plans that raise elevation levels along the coast and add features like parkland to make the massive project more neighborhood-friendly.
“It’s important to make sure we’re not just walling ourselves off from the coast,” he said.
Sen. Daniel Squadron (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn) said he hopes the extra cash from the feds comes through to build a comprehensive protection system stretching around the whole area. “It has to be a complete system,” he said. “We need more resources than we have to do that.”
Shielding the area is important because flood damage there — where most city subway lines converge — can reverberate beyond lower Manhattan, said Alliance for Downtown New York president Jessica Lappin. “It shut down more than just our community. It shut down the city,” she said.
