New York City has started another initiative aimed at protecting a neighborhood from storm surges. The Red Hook Coastal Resilience Project will spend $218 million weaving flood walls, elevated street levels and two types of gates into a perimeter around the Brooklyn neighborhood of the same name. When the floodgates are active, the continuous boundary will be 10 feet above sea level.
Bringing Red Hook’s waterfront up to that height should protect against the kinds of 10-year storms the area might see today, as well as the larger 10-year storms that could hit Brooklyn around 2050 thanks to sea level rise, says Bobby Isaac, assistant building commissioner for the New York City Department of Design and Construction.
The design process was led by NV5 Engineering along with 12 other companies and consultants. Construction so far has involved test wells, soil sampling and the insertion of new water pipes, although the department has signed a nearly $158 million contract with Perfetto Contracting Corp. to work on site. Funding comes from the city itself, nearly $80 million from FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and the New York State Department of Emergency and Homeland Security Services.
New York City has started a project to protect a Brooklyn neighborhood from storm surges. Video courtesy Red Hook Coastal Resiliency Project
The city began researching how to protect this pocket of Brooklyn from storm surge in 2014. Two years earlier, Hurricane Sandy had heavily flooded the neighborhood, which juts out from the borough into New York Bay and is as low as four feet above sea level . To figure out what might protect Red Hook from different storm intensities, the city turned to data including sea-level rise predictions from the New York City Climate Change Panel, an advisory group that suggests how the city can protect itself from a changing environment.
The final design calls for more than a mile and a half of wall up to five feet high, along with eight roll-up doors and two drop-down designs. Near the Atlantic Basin, an inlet that houses the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal and a New York ferry stop, the street elevation and flood walls will overlap to create a permanent flood structure. Vehicles will enter and exit via a permanent ramp, Isaac said.
The 10-foot elevation perimeter requires the defense structure to be four to five times longer than a version that sits only eight feet above sea level, Isaac said. This is because floodwall systems must reach connection points or points in the natural landscape that are already at the target elevation. “As you increase the level of protection, system lifetime increases exponentially.” Isaac said.
The height of the walls is also limited because the waterfront properties are privately owned. In the water of the East Manhattan Coastal Resilience Project, the walls can reach at least 16.5 feet above elevation because the city owns and maintains the infrastructure on the relevant parcels, Isaac said.
According to the DDC, more than 99% of the storms that Red Hook has experienced over the past century would have been protected by the 10-foot elevation barrier. One of the two exceptions is Hurricane Sandy.
The 2012 storm is what prompted the local nonprofit organization Resilient Red Hook to start asking the city for adequate flood protection infrastructure, says interim executive director Benjamin Werner. The decade-plus of requests came with infrequent updates, Werner said. It’s hard for Resilient Red Hook to know if the project will address any of its concerns about design choices because information was so scarce over the years. “It reports general disdain for Red Hook, even though this is a plan for Red Hook,” he said.
In 2024, Resilient Red Hook sent a letter to the Red Hook Coastal Resilience Team, asking about particular concerns that the organization still believes have not been adequately addressed. A major concern is that the floodwalls could cause other flooding problems by holding back rain, including runoff from other Brooklyn neighborhoods sitting at higher elevations. Any increase in flood risks related to rain could also increase the odds of a combined sewer overflow.
Borough President Antonio Reynoso expressed similar concerns in his request for a uniform land use review procedure. Ultimately, the document said, “the District Chair understands that RHCR’s funding and jurisdiction is limited to coastal flooding.” The DDC is also working on a separate project in the area called Columbia Street Phase 2 that should begin construction in 2027 and will increase the size of the sewers by 20 to 25 percent.
Instead of using the levee, Resilient Red Hook had wanted to see softer infrastructure, such as rain gardens, or mitigation in the water itself, such as the oyster breakwater project on Staten Island. Any major infrastructure investment in the neighborhood should also look into whether Red Hook is dealing with pollution related to the Gowanus Canal, Werner said. The Superfund site is located upstream from Red Hook.
