Thomas Breen photos
Rendering of planned new drainage pipe (in blue).
City Engineer Zinn: This will help mitigate harms of the "absolutely existential crisis" of climate change.
Expect less flooding on the often-flooded Union Avenue in the years ahead, thanks to a $25 million federal grant that will help the city construct a roughly 3,000-foot drainage pipe and tunnel from West Water Street to the Harbor.
City and state officials celebrated that recently awarded grant and detailed that planned new resilient-infrastructure project during a Monday morning press conference held outside of Union Station.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn — standing alongside Mayor Justin Elicker, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Gov. Ned Lamont, Hill Alder Carmen Rodriguez, City Plan Director Laura Brown, and Assistant City Engineer Dawn Henning — said that the roughly $25.1 million FEMA Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant will cover most of the costs of designing and building out a new drainage pipe from the intersection of West Water Street and Union Avenue to the New Haven Harbor. That project will also require a roughly $10 million state and local funding match.
The pipe will be 10 feet in diameter, lie roughly 45 feet below ground, and extend around 3,000 feet, Zinn said.
It should “more than double our capacity of stormwater out to the harbor,” he said on Monday. That drainage capacity should double yet again when the Army Corps of Engineers-funded drainage pump station at Long Wharf is also built out and up and running.
Taken together, Zinn continued added, these pipe and pump projects along with the planned new Army Corps of Engineers-funded flood wall along the I‑95 corridor on Long Wharf should help the city maintain existing infrastructure and “be resilient” in the face of the “absolutely existential crisis” of climate change.
Examples of recent flooding incidents on and around Union Ave.
Elicker, DeLauro, and Lamont all agreed.
“The city has been requesting funding and has gotten a remarkable amount of funding to build a wall, a pipe, and a pump,” he said. “That sounds really uninspiring, right? It’s a wall, a pipe, and a pump. But the wall, the pipe, and the pump are about climate resiliency. They’re about jobs. They’re about economic development. They’re about ensuring that vital infrastructure like Union Station remains safe and accessible.”
Just two weeks ago, the mayor said, “there was major, major flooding right out here” on Union Avenue. “And that is a regular occurrence, because this is a low-lying area. We have a lot of flooding here.” (Click here, here, here, and here for previous articles about flooding on Union Avenue.)
U.S. Rep. DeLauro at Monday's presser.
DeLauro said that the city’s so-called “Inland and Coastal Flood Resiliency Project” was one of roughly 50 projects that FEMA picked to fund nationwide out of more than 780 applications.
“There’s nothing we can do to prevent natural disasters, but we can prepare for it and help to mitigate the damages,” she said.
Gov. Lamont.
Lamont described this pipe project as an example of one governing philosophy winning out over another. The losing philosophy is: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I think we’ve seen the consequences of that attitude accelerating over the last few years,” he said. The winning philosophy: “A stitch in time save nine. I think that’s what we’re trying to do here.” This is not a flashy project, he said, “but think of the disaster if the water kept rising here at Union Station.”
Hill Alder Rodriguez.
While this pipe will ultimately be underground and therefore won’t be visible to Hill residents and Union Station travelers, Rodriguez said, it is indeed a “shiny buckle” that is going to “keep this area safe from flooding. … It’s safety, safety, safety.”
Timeline: 1.5 Years To Finalize Design, 1.5 Years To Construct
Mayor Elicker (center) on Monday.
Zinn and Henning said that, per the federal grant, the city has three years to complete this pipe project.
Over the next year and a half, Zinn said, the city plans to finalize all of its paperwork with FEMA and complete the design of the pipeline tunnel. Then it’ll have to make a “Go / No Go” decision with FEMA “once the design is complete, making sure the project’s financials and fundamentals work.”
Then the city should begin construction, which will “require us to use a tunnel-boring machine 45 feet underground to tunnel from [around Union Avenue and West Water Street] under the railyard, under the highway, and out into the harbor. I don’t plan on sleeping at all during that entire project,” he added with a smile.
Zinn said that construction should take roughly a year and a half to complete. The tunneling work should have “very little impact on the surface,” he said. There will be “three large pits the machine will go between.” One of those pits will be off road near Union Avenue, another will be down by Brewery Street, and a third will be by the harbor. “For a large construction project like this,” he said, that should mean pretty minimal above-ground disruption.
After a few questions from reporters about the timeline for this pipe project, Mayor Elicker returned to the mic.
“There’s been a lot of focus on the timeline,” he said. “Whenever we put a timeline out there, Mr. Breen puts it on his calendar and then, when we don’t make the timeline, he says: ‘Aha!’ We live in a world of uncertainty, especially supply chain uncertainty. … We just need to be cautious about putting out a specific timeline, because these things are complicated and they may take longer than we all would like to see.”
Click on the video below to watch Monday’s press conference in full.
This is a very small step in the right direction of getting proactive to prepare for and mitigate climate change impacts. There is a lot more work to be done, and we better get busy, because sea level rise, severity of storms and flooding will only continue to get worse each year.