7 Clever Ways to Fight Flooding in an Increasingly Wet World

As part of the city’s many efforts to buttress itself from storms in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Danish architects BIG recently won a Department of Housing and Urban Development competition to design a 10-mile-long protective system of landscaping and barriers around Manhattan that double as public space. It's called the Big U. Looping from West 57^th Street to East 42^nd Street, the plan calls for a raised, sloping, landscape-covered barrier extending from the city’s existing waterfront infrastructure. The five other winners of the competition will be focusing on coastal zones at the edge of the Bronx, Staten Island, Long Island, and New Jersey. The city’s 2013 Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency outlined countless other measures to address resiliency. Many are underway or completed.

One of the most dramatic victims of sea level rise has been Miami, where streets and sidewalks are increasingly flooded by so-called king tide events. In response, the city is spending close to half a billion dollars on flood mitigation, including a completely re-engineered streetscape in commonly flooded Sunset Harbour, featuring a street and sidewalk on an upper tier, 2 ½ feet above the front doors of roadside businesses, and backed by a nearby pump house. Miami is raising streets across the city, and is reportedly installing up to 80 pump stations.

Located on the southwest coast of the Korean peninsula, Saemangeum, completed in 2010, is the world's longest man-made dyke, measuring 21 miles. Running between two headlands, and separating the Yellow Sea and the former Saemangeum estuary, it was described by former American Ambassador to Korea Kathleen Stephens as the country’s “Great Wall on the sea.” Its average width is 950 feet, and its average height is 120 feet.

Another place famously under threat from “Acqua Alta” is Venice, whose relationship with the sea has long been a love/hate one. The ongoing MOSE Project (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico, which means Experimental Electromechanical Module.) is a mile-long system of mobile flood gates installed at the city’s inlets to shut off the Venetian Lagoon from the Adriatic Sea during times of flood and rising tides. Other efforts to prevent catastrophe in the slowly sinking city include coastal reinforcement, quayside elevation, and lagoon buttressing.

The plan, first launched in 2007, and updated continuously since, calls a dizzying array of flood prevention measures that call out just how many systems play a part in protection from natural disasters. Just a few include new or restored levees, pumps, coastal habitats, barrier islands, marshes, and shores. The plan also calls for raising and flood proofing buildings, and government acquisition of structures or entire communities built in particularly threatened areas.