Climate Change, Meet Mr. Zinn

No need to flee Morris Cove or City Point for the hills quite yet. Giovanni Zinn has a plan. He’s scrambling to put it into place.

Zinn’s official title is New Haven City Engineer.

His unofficial title: Climate Change Point Person. It’s his job both in emergencies, and long term, to figure out how to help New Haven adapt to rising sea levels, increasingly violent hurricanes and downpours.

At a time when an estimated one third of Americans have confronted weather emergencies in just three months — and New Haven dodged one such bullet —that’s a tall order.

With an eye on clogged drains and solar roofs, Zinn faces a daily question: ​“How do we deal with this existential threat that we caused ourselves?”

“It colors everything we do,” he said during an interview on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. (Watch it below.) From drawing up sweeping plans for coastal protection. To identifying smaller challenges: like recharging electric police cars.

B Shift Math Problem

“Everyone’s going electric in the next ten years” when it comes to buying cars, Zinn observed. That includes police cars.

One day he started doing the math. New Haven’s police department has ​“50-something” cruisers. ​“How do you charge all them” in between three round-the-clock shifts, and keep cops on the road?

The solution might lie in employing ​“fast chargers” that can get the cruisers 80 percent rejuiced in 30 minutes.

But that will require a lot more electricity in a short time — roughly equal to the energy demand at any one time at the city’s wastewater treatment plant.

Then again, by the time the problem arrives at New Haven’s doorstep, charging technology may have improved enough to change the equation.

So Zinn doesn’t have the answer yet. The point is, he has begun considering the question.

The Drain Game

He’s been considering climate change questions since, believe it or not, elementary school, while growing up in Hamden. His green parents and older brother got him interested in environmental issues. He even tagged along to one of New Haven’s early ​“vision project” public meetings called to imagine a greener, better-connected city.

After earning his engineering degree, he has pretty much been considering those questions full time (in addition to helping draw plans for new bridges, the Q House, roundabouts, playgrounds) as a New Haven city planner, then engineer. He considers it a dream job, helping put solar arrays on schools around town, bringing protected bike lanes to the streets.

Some of the biggest questions relate to rising sea levels. By 2050, it’s supposed to rise 20 inches along the city’s shoreline. Meanwhile, more frequent superstorms are bringing higher winds and deeper flash downpours.

So the continual flooding on, say, Morris Creek Road or Union Avenue could spread throughout the city. It could potentially make parts of town unlivable.

Zinn and fellow city planners have teamed up with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to take the lead in preventing that. The Army Corp has selected New Haven for a first-wave regional coastal resilience effort. That includes building a flood wall by the harbor along I‑95, building a pump station that can handle 1,000 cubic feet of water per second (“Right now we’re relying on gravity”), and installing gates on Long Wharf streets like Brewery and Canal Dock that can be closed during superstorms to keep floodwaters in the harbor during superstorms.

Work has already begun on drawing up plans for this project. That will take a couple of years. When it comes time to spending $130 million to build it, the federal government will need to be lobbied to follow through with funding.

That presents New Haven’s biggest long-term climate change challenge, Zinn said: ​“How do we show New Haven is something that deserves protecting” long term?

Meanwhile, New Haven and partners like the Urban Resources Initiative (URI) have planted protection block by block, by making New Haven ​“bioswale city.” Close to 300 of these garden-lot curb plots — mini-greenspaces planted by roads to absorb rainwater that could otherwise cause storm sewers to overflow — have been created in recent years. Other ongoing efforts include updating redevelopment standards so that required first-floor elevation in new construction projects matches rising sea levels.

Click on the video above in this story to watch the full interview with City Engineer Giovanni Zinn on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven,” in which he also discusses the opening of the rebuilt Grand Avenue Bridge (still on schedule for year’s end) and Dixwell Q House (almost there!).