At A New Park In New York, Flood Protection Is Hiding Right Under Your Feet
Source: Fast Company, Adele Peters
Photo: At a new park in New York, flood protection is hiding right under your feet. (Battery Park City Authority)
The newly renovated Wagner Park is a beautiful place to relax—but it’s also a key part of New York’s new plan to protect the city from water during storms.
If you sit on the terraced steps at the newly-rebuilt Wagner Park on the Manhattan waterfront, looking out at the Statue of Liberty, you probably won’t know that there’s an 18-foot-tall flood wall hidden under your feet.
The small park, which just opened after an 18-month renovation, is one piece of a larger, $1.7 billion system of flood protection being installed in New York City.
Most of the park now sits around 10 feet higher than it did in the past, with the hidden wall high enough to hold back water in a storm surge. Under the central lawn, a 63,000-gallon stormwater cistern holds rain in heavy storms, then recycles the water to irrigate the park. On the other side of the wall, near the Hudson River, rain flows through gardens and into an infiltration system that releases it slowly to help avoid floods.
“You can engineer these solutions with large floodwalls everywhere,” says Raju Mann, president and CEO of Battery Park City Authority, the public benefit corporation that manages urban planning in the area. “But here, we took a more careful approach. How do we have a great open space that also has flood protection in it—not how do we just build a flood protection project?”