Less than a quarter-mile off Staten Island’s southernmost shore, eight rocky structures rise from the ocean and run parallel to the beach.
Called Living Breakwaters, the project brings together natural processes and constructed techniques to weaken waves before they crash ashore and to lessen coastal erosion.
Now, after a decade of work, the project is complete, a dozen years after Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge brought 14 feet of water to Tottenville, a quiet South Shore neighborhood of beachfront condos and vinyl-and-brick detached homes.
The 2012 storm, which led to the deaths of 43 New Yorkers and was the most destructive in the city’s history, battered the area’s already eroded coastline. The jetty-like mounds serve to prevent as much destruction next time.
“It’s not taking all the risk out of the equation, but it’s reducing the most damaging impacts,” said Pippa Brashear, resilience principal and partner at SCAPE Landscape Architecture, the firm behind the project. “People have been building breakwaters for hundreds of years as a principle of breaking waves, but this really leverages the knowledge and technology of understanding how waves work and working with nature.”
The structures, made of stone and special concrete, have nooks and crannies to foster habitats for fish and other marine life. The Billion Oyster Project will install oyster larvae on the Living Breakwaters as part of a citywide effort to restore New York Harbor’s once-thriving oyster population. The idea is that the reef will grow, attracting other creatures and adding to the buffer effect of the breakwaters.
Many locals think they might be onto something.
“I don’t doubt for a second that this is gonna really hold fish. Maybe it has to develop,” said Jim Manning, a local fisherman and retired fire lieutenant who exercises on an overlook across from the breakwaters multiple times a week. “Everything that’s on all this structure here, the fish live on that. The small fish, the crabs, and the tiny stuff eat the moss, and then the bigger fish eat the crabs and the bigger fish eat those fish, and it’s just the whole ecosystem.”
SCAPE came up with the concept at the heart of Living Breakwaters over two years before Sandy hit. After Sandy, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2013 launched a design competition calling for protective measures in advance of another storm. Living Breakwaters was one of the winners and received funding to make it happen.
Lessons Learned
Deb Amoroso, a lifelong resident of Tottenville and an eighth grade science teacher, got involved in the project at its inception and taught her students — many of whom had been displaced after Sandy — about it.
“This was an awesome way of saying, ‘Hey, we have a problem but there can be solutions. It’s not a hopeless case,’” said Amoroso, who helped advise the project and has documented its progress on walks with her dog along the beach.
The state Office of Resilient Homes and Communities within the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal managed the project over the past 10 years.
“It’s very exciting to see this piece done. We’re looking forward to the oyster component over the next year,” said Devon Shumate, senior director of resilient investments at DHCR. “It’s been a long, steady process to go from an idea and a competition back in 2014 to kind of a living, breathing thing that’s going to be there for a very, very long time.”
The state Department of Environmental Conservation will maintain the $111 million project, which was funded by the state and through a HUD grant.
Other Tottenville residents expressed skepticism about the efficacy of the Living Breakwaters, which are designed to reduce the impact of powerful waves during a storm but not to keep water out of residential neighborhoods.
“I get mad when I look out and see those things. To me they’re so useless and they spent so much money,” said Veronica Petersen, a Tottenville resident of over 50 years who lives near the beach. “I was here during Sandy. I didn’t have big waves — I had surge coming in.”
Other projects meant to prevent water from breaching land, including flood walls, reinforced dunes and other physical barriers, have seen slow progress because of extended planning and construction timelines.
The East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project on the Lower East Side, for instance, has only reached its halfway finished point, while other protection efforts — including one in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and several around Lower Manhattan and on the eastern shore of Staten Island — are in the works. A massive federal plan to protect the region is not yet finalized and still decades away from completion.
Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala said the city is about as vulnerable to coastal storms as it was a dozen years ago — though measures to protect key infrastructure have improved, with many buildings, utility equipment and subway facilities upgraded to withstand possible floods.
“What would be different if Hurricane Sandy, or a twin to Hurricane Sandy, hit us now, is that we would not suffer anywhere near the impacts or the long term damage that we suffered in the aftermath,” Aggarwala said.
