Melissa Bailey Photo
Navigating the sidewalk to the train station in a 2012 flash flood.
In the next two to three years, New Haven could be awash in green infrastructure projects, rather than flood water.
Gov. Dannel Malloy and the Department of Housing Commissioner Evonne Klein announced Monday that the city will receive $4.9 million to help in its ongoing efforts to recover from the after effects of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy and to minimize the impact of future storms.
The money is part of a second wave of support coming in to the state from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Block Grant Disaster Recovery program, which was established specifically to assist with Superstorm Sandy recovery.
The city will receive $4 million to cover design costs and some construction of more than 200 green infrastructure projects. The projects are expected to help improve stormwater drainage and prevent flooding in the Hill-to-Downtown corridor, including around the train station and Water Street. New Haven also will receive $947,419 for erosion control and the construction of a seawall to protect 10 homes in a low-lying residential area of the East Shore across Townsend Avenue.
Both those areas have become impassable lakes during not Sandy-like superstorms, but flash floods like this one in September 2012.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn said many of the green projects being installed around New Haven, such as bioswales, are the kinds that the federal money will help build, in addition to what he calls traditional “gray infrastructure,” namely pipes and pumps.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Zinn said what might look like pretty green tree pits (pictured: the new bioswale outside Edgewood School) will really be functional infrastructure. Instead of pumping stormwater back into the nearest body of water, they will mimic nature by directing it back into the ground, filtering it through New Haven’s naturally sandy soil, and back into water table uncontaminated.
Similar projects have been shown successful in other cities, including New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. Zinn said the city likely will spend less on design fees because it doesn’t have to design from scratch.
“This is practically off the shelf,” Zinn said.
The bioswale on Trumbull near Whitney has worked out very well and I am looking forward further green projects. The reconstruction of the seawall is more problematic. I understand why the nearby homeowners want to see it rebuilt - I would probably want the same thing in their position. But armoring the coast is not a long term solution to sea level rise.