Climate Resilience Takes the Back Seat in NYCHA Repairs
How one NYCHA complex still struggles with repairs and environmental issues seven years after Hurricane Sandy
(December 2019)
Karen Blondel has been semi-packed for the last seven years. In preparation for Hurricane Sandy in 2012, she removed any projectiles from the walls — picture frames, various décor — of her ground floor apartment in Red Hook Houses. She remembers the moment the water began to enter. “Someone was standing near the front door and I could see them,” Blondel says. “And the face they made and the tears on their face let me know that something was happening and I ran out and I saw the water coming in like a slow tsunami.”
Seven years later, Blondel still hasn’t replaced her furniture that was damaged in the superstorm. For her, there is no guarantee that Red Hook will be here in the future.
When Hurricane Sandy hit New York in October 2012, the water both rose and receded quickly. But the damage was done. Red Hook Houses’ boilers and electrical equipment were located in the basements, and completely flooded in the storm surge. In coastal areas of the city especially prone to severe weather effects, such as Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, the saltwater damage was so severe it left residents without power for almost a month. As the temperature dropped in the following days, Blondel and her neighbors would keep warm by lighting their gas stoves — which somehow still worked, if lit with a match — and filling pots with water to create steam.
Today, some of the temporary boilers put in place in Red Hook after the storm are still in operation, partially hidden from view behind chain link fences. As the days get shorter, the fences and massive construction equipment cast shadows that bring nighttime to Red Hook earlier than what once was.
Despite the fact that Blondel doesn’t feel safe walking between the maze of fences that separate the construction from the concrete, these temporary boilers, along with the permanent boilers at 606 Clinton Street, are part of Red Hook’s recovery success story. Red Hook received $500 million dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and was able to use some of that money to raise the boilers above the base flood elevation level, so they won’t flood again so easily.
But in the time it took to install the new and temporary boilers, secondary problems began to creep up in Red Hook. Blondel, an environmental activist, former building facade inspector, and long-time resident of Red Hook, suggests that the resulting condensation from residents’ DIY heaters led to the proliferation of cracks and mold in the walls and ceilings. Not only do residents’ own attempts at addressing these problems create further damage, but also planned temporary fixes contribute to added costs and environmental concerns. For example, some of the street lamps destroyed during Sandy were replaced by temporary diesel-powered Herc light towers that leak fuel onto the sidewalk. Blondel says she is furious with NYCHA’s reliance on fossil fuels. “No fossil fuels!” she says. “I’m an environmentalist!” The towers are also rented at a cost of over $1000 per month, according to quotes available on the Herc website.
There has been a social cost from the storm, too. The senior center at Red Hook West was flooded out during Sandy and never reopened. Today, it is uninhabitable because of mold and contaminants, and it is used for construction equipment staging as repairs to surrounding buildings are made. Trash and wet leaves pepper the five concrete steps to get to the entrance of the old senior center, raising the question of how mobility-impaired individuals were ever able to get down there in the first place.
A new senior center opened in another part of the complex in January 2018 — five and a half years after Sandy. But before the completion of the new center, several senior residents died. Says Blondel, “I’m sure it’s because they didn’t have a place to go and share a meal and companionship.”
Citywide, planned improvements for NYCHA developments have encountered delays. In addition to the $3 billion in FEMA funding, NYCHA received $4.2 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Neither of these sources of funding were disbursed until 2015, due to what the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency calls, “federal red tape.” According to the Comptroller’s report from May 2019, New York City has only spent 43.9% of FEMA funds and 79.5% of HUD funds, with the deadline to spend the HUD money approaching in September 2022. A 2018 NYCHA report says that the renovation of all vulnerable or damaged public residential buildings will be completed by 2022 as well. But in order to make these renovations last, they must be climate change resilient too.
According to NYCHA, resilience in New York public housing includes retrofitting and upgrading buildings, isolating electrical grids, creating flood-protected roofs and boilers, installing solar panels, and creating emergency back-up generators. Some of these improvements have been made in Red Hook. But Elisa Petkova, a lecturer in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and a researcher on climate change resilience, says, “the most sensible thing is to not live there.”
Red Hook is an especially vulnerable neighborhood for several reasons. It is at sea-level in most of the area, and downslope from the Gowanus and Park Slope areas of Brooklyn, making it prone to flooding. Even on a day with light rain or mild snow, the wet clay fills with puddles and ponds, sometimes exacerbated by heavy equipment on the soil. The land that Red Hook Houses was built on was once marshland, and later turned into landfill before becoming home to its approximately 6,000 residents. It is effectively the watershed, says Karen Blondel, and any rainwater “cascades toward the lowest point, which is Red Hook.”
Some good scientific models, including one from the New York City Panel on Climate Change, indicate that Red Hook, among other areas such as the Rockaway Peninsula, Howard Beach, Coney Island, Gowanus, and Staten Island could be permanently inundated or experience monthly flooding by the 2080s if the city does not take additional coastal protection methods. The report does not indicate square acreage, and is meant as a guide to predict sea-level rise.
Raising the base flood elevation level of the boilers in Red Hook is one part of withstanding future flood events. But the potential for future electrical outages remains a possibility. In 2016, NYCHA made a Request for Proposals to partner with companies in creating an isolated electrical grid at Red Hook. Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist and disaster risk expert at Columbia University, explains that such a grid would provide emergency back-up power in the event of a storm. If there are outages, Jacob says, “the idea is that you have a smart grid, where you disconnect from the channel power grid and have your own resources, at least for some time, or if not, continuously, then certain hours of the day, so you can actually function to some degree.”
But the microgrid project, which would have been led by private companies such as Con Edison, has not moved beyond the concept phase, leaving the complex susceptible to power outages in the event of a storm.
Some other projects have been completed or mostly completed, though, such as the implementation of recycling programs, upgrading boilers at 11 NYCHA developments, and full roof replacements.
107 NYCHA contracts are publicly available listing the companies responsible for Sandy repair at Red Hook East and West. Technico Construction Services received a total of $55,695,000 — the largest share of funding by more than three times the second-largest contract, with LiRo Program and Construction. According to their online portfolio, Technico’s primary focus in Red Hook is repairing the roofs. Technico was expected to complete the work by November 2019 but the company is still installing railings along the roofs of the remaining few buildings, including Karen Blondel’s. The contract manager for the roof work, Dave Stahl, even has a model of the new roofs for residents to look at. Whereas the old roofs were of the ballast type, the new ones are liquid; they have a sealant around the edges to reduce the penetration of water into the buildings, and keep heat and air conditioning inside, reducing energy consumption.
After the roofs are finished, says Blondel, the next phase for NYCHA is the construction of two central heating plants, including at the corner of Clinton and Hamilton near the new senior center. While she has some concerns about the effects of possible electrical interference from the construction on seniors’ pacemakers and defibrillators, Blondel is cautiously optimistic about the future of Red Hook. In the nearly eleven months since a federal monitor was appointed to oversee the notorious physical conditions of NYCHA, she says she has seen improvements in heating and hot water retrofitting, which should be able to keep residents warm this winter, where in past years, inefficient heating systems would result in overheating and lost energy. Additionally, the global youth climate movement, led by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, has residents paying attention to the issues that affect Red Hook every day.
In September, hundreds of children from various schools in the neighborhood attended Red Hook’s own climate action march in Coffey Park. Says Blondel, “young people can solve a lot of problems, especially when they do it collectively, equitably.”
