The High and the Low: Climate Change Resiliency in NYC

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a short series on creating resilient cities, sponsored by Siemens. Please join us for a live Google Hangout with Siemens and Arup on October 1, where we’ll talk about this issue live! RSVP here.

As a coastal city with an inland water supply, New York City faces a unique set of challenges for climate change resiliency in a future marked by frequent, destructive coastal storms and rising sea levels.

In terms of clean water supply, New York has one advantage thanks to resiliency planning that dates back to the early 19th century. At that time, urban sprawl, commerce and industry quickly overwhelmed Manhattan's patchwork of privately-owned wells after the Revolutionary War.

Rather than continuing to dig wells within the city, planners developed a system of reservoirs far inland at higher elevations, some as far as 125 miles away, relying almost exclusively on gravity-powered aqueducts and water tunnels. The incorporation of Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island into New York City was impelled partly by Manhattan's lock on reliable, expandable inland water resources, as groundwater in those boroughs proved inadequate to sustain population growth. Only one group of public wells continued to serve part of Queens until 2007, when they, too, were finally put out of service.

The city's wastewater resiliency, however, is a different story.

The wastewater treatment resiliency problem

New York's 14 wastewater treatment plants present two different kinds of problems for climate change resiliency.

The first problem is their vulnerable location: Unlike the city's reservoirs, they are located much closer to sea level, and they are all within the city's borders. In addition, as is is typical with wastewater treatment plants, they are also located alongside or very near the city's waterways, including rivers, creeks and bays.

One of the plants is even located entirely on a waterway. The North River treatment plant was built on a platform in the Hudson River, adjacent to the shoreline of upper Manhattan.

The second problem is mechanical: Again in contrast to the city's reservoir-based, gravity-powered water supply system, wastewater treatment plants are massive, energy-sucking machines characterized by enormous engines and pumps along with tanks, digesters and other infrastructure.

After Sandy: Climate change resiliency in New York City

Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York City in 2012, causing an estimated $100 million in damage to the the city's wastewater facilities. It affected 10 of the 14 treatment plants and 42 out of 96 wastewater pumping stations.

In the context of climate change resiliency, an analysis estimated that more than $1 billion in wastewater equipment and infrastructure would be at risk from future destructive storms.

With that in mind, the city's Department of Environmental Protection, which administers the water supply and wastewater systems, assessed the city's wastewater vulnerability and issued a series of recommendations in a 2013 report titled The NYC Wastewater Resiliency Plan.

Billed as "the nation’s most detailed and comprehensive assessment of the risk climate change poses to a wastewater collection and treatment system," the plan was actually initiated before Sandy, in 2011. It includes an analysis of 58 wastewater pumping stations along with all 14 treatment plants.

As a cost-based analysis, the report makes a clear case that potential damage to the city's wastewater assets could top $2 billion over the next 50 years from a series of coastal floods precipitated by rising sea levels, unless steps are taken to protect the facilities.

The report calculates an up-front investment of about $315 million in infrastructure upgrades with the aim of minimizing damage and preventing service disruptions during storms and coastal floods.

The upgrades consist of a variety of strategies, including elevating and waterproofing critical equipment and infrastructure, installing flood gates and dikes, and replacing conventional pumps with submersible pumps.

These infrastructure-centric mitigation measures also dovetail with the city's broader A Stronger, More Resilient New York initiative, which calls for restoring protective wetlands along with creating engineered barriers.

A toolkit for climate resiliency

The city's wastewater resiliency planning also dovetails with the resiliency report developed by Siemens.

As New York's experience with Sandy shows, every city faces a unique set of circumstances, but there are many areas of commonality.

Aptly titled Toolkit for Resilient Cities, the report covers systems for energy, transportation, water supply and buildings. As Siemens proposes, focusing on these critical systems ensures a firm platform for other services -- including public health related services such as sanitation, emergency response and food supply, as well as fuel supply.

As clearly stated in the Toolkit, Siemens recognizes the 'new normal' of climate change and its related impacts:

Resilience is the ability of people, organizations or systems to prepare for, respond, recover from and thrive in the face of hazards. The goal is to ensure the continuity and advancement of economic prosperity, business success, environmental quality and human well-being, despite external threats.

As a technology company, Siemens' emphasis is on the use of microgrids with updated monitoring and control features, to build more resilient IT systems and ensure that the widespread failures characteristic of today's storm-related impacts are a thing of the past.

Siemens makes clear, though, that IT is only part of the solution. Infrastructure actions like the NYC Wastewater Resiliency Plan are also critical.

Even more critical is a change in the nature of our civil discourse. While not necessarily referring to the anti-renewable energy, anti-Agenda 21 paranoia expressed by certain pundits and politicians, the Toolkit makes it clear that we can't simply engineer our way into a sustainable response to climate change:

Changing social, political and economic conventions is as fundamental to the success of city resilience initiatives as is upgrading physical assets. Implementation of technology solutions often requires a broader ‘enabling’ toolkit, which includes changes to urban planning, policy and regulation; governance; knowledge development; and financing models.

The good news is: The climate denial noise is finally being overwhelmed by a more reality-based approach, and we'll hear more about that as the United Nations General Assembly meets in New York City this week.

Image (cropped): Courtesy of NYC DEP

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