Thomas Breen photos
Looking from Long Wharf towards the industrial port in the Annex: Federal funds to be used to deepen the channel to allow for more, larger ships.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn at Monday's presser.
Look for more room for bigger ships carrying steel, cement, and oil to New Haven’s industrial waterfront — and less room for climate-change-exacerbated storm surges to inundate the streets and highway on Long Wharf.
Federally funded economic-development and climate-resiliency projects aimed at those goals were touted at a press conference at the Sound School Monday by U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Mayor Justin Elicker, City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, Connecticut Port Authority Executive Director John Henshaw, and Hill/City Point Alder Carmen Rodriguez.
The reason for celebration was two new large allocations of federal money towards boosting business at New Haven’s ports, and towards protecting the city’s waterfront Long Wharf neighborhood from sea level rise, flooding, and storm surges, all of which are likely to take place more frequently and intensely in the coming decades thanks to manmade climate change.
Those two projects are :
• The $63 million New Haven Harbor Navigation Improvement Project, to be funded with money from the recently passed bipartisan federal infrastructure bill, and
• The $160.3 million New Haven County Coastal Storm Risk Management Project, to be funded with money from Hurricane Ida federal relief funds.
U.S. Rep DeLauro: "A new day" for federal investments in infrastructure.
“It’s a new day.” DeLauro said Monday in a second-floor Sound School library that looked out onto the shimmering blue waters of the Long Island Sound. “It’s a new dawn, with regard to federal resources really being pumped into states and cities, localities, in order to rebuild roads, bridges, ports. It is infrastructure.”
That includes investing in climate resiliency and protecting vulnerable waterfront areas, she said.
There is “very little we can do to prevent natural disasters from occurring.” Thus the importance of being “proactive about preparing for them, minimizing the damage, protecting the areas from damage.”
CT Port Authority Executive Director John Henshaw.
According to DeLauro and Henshaw, the $63 million port project will “deepen the federal navigation channel” within the New Haven Harbor from 35 feet to 40 feet.
That deepening of the channel will allow “larger vessels to access our port and the terminals,” DeLauro said.
She and Henshaw said that large ships looking to unload cargo at New Haven’s industrial ports in the Annex have real trouble making it all the way to the terminal because of the current depth of the navigation channel. They either have to wait in the harbor for more favorable tides, or lighten their loads while still outside of the breakwaters.
“The project will enable New Haven to more safely and efficiently accommodate ships coming to port by reducing tidal delays and loitering,” Henshaw said, “accommodating anticipated growth in bulk and liquid cargo, by accommodating larger vessels, and improving maneuverability for deep-draft vessels.”
He said that New Haven’s port saw a nearly 35 percent increase in vessel traffic from 2020 to 2021.
And what kinds of products are currently shipped into New Haven’s port on a regular basis?
Henshaw said those include construction materials, oil, cement, steel, “aggregate,” and “other types of imports.” He said New Haven’s port has also begun exporting scrap metal from the city.
There are a total of eight different terminals in New Haven, he added. Most of them are on or near Waterfront Street in the Annex.
Henshaw estimated that the channel-deepening project will take “a couple of years” to complete.
One of the I-95 underpasses on Long Wharf, to be protected by a flood wall and moveable gates.
As for the $160.3 million coastal-resiliency project, Zinn said that those federal Hurricane Ida relief funds will be used on three main projects:
• A new flood wall along the water side of I‑95 on Long Wharf, from roughly the side near the Long Wharf Nature Preserve to the area across the street from the old Lenny and Joe’s restaurant. “The height of the wall will vary” from a couple of feet to eight or nine feet, he said, because of the uneven topography of that area. Overall, he said, the top of the wall will stand at elevation 15.
• Five new “moveable gates that will seal off the three underpasses of the highway” along Long Wharf.
• A new “large pump station.” “When there’s high water in the harbor and you have a rainfall event at the same time, the water can’t drain out of the city,” Zinn said. “So it accumulates in the low spot,” which is the Long Wharf district. This pump station will allow the city to more easily get those pulls of water back out into the harbor.
Some of the other coastal-resiliency projects to be paid for with these federal funds include a “living shoreline” off of Long Wharf to help with erosion protection.
Zinn said these federal investments in protecting waterfront areas like Long Wharf are “visionary” because, “in Connecticut, we’re expected to see up to 20 inches of sea-level rise by 2050. We need to start investing now. We’re not going to be able to build all that infrastructure very quickly in 2050 when the sky is falling. We need to start now.”
Zinn estimated that these various projects will take roughly five years to complete.
I am pleased to see that New haven will be getting funding to combat such common occurences as flooding. In Morris Cove, where we have a home, our basement flooded several times in just the past year due to sewer and storm drain systems that are old and deteriorating. These threats of flooding occur to the point that even moderate rain storms and tides cause backups and backwater flows. This is a quality of life issue as well as a public health concern.
I would love to see the City of New Haven commit sufficient funding to repairing and rebuilding these systems to prevent the floods and the damage caused by floods that we have suffered.