A flood mitigation project in Broad Channel is, after years of water-weary residents and legislators advocating for it, going to become a reality, city officials confirmed this week.
The city Office of Management and Budget gave its stamp of approval Dec. 2 on the capital project, which will bring bulkheads to West 11th, 12th and 13th roads in Broad Channel. As part of the project, for which residents have fought for years, the same streets’ elevation will be raised. Both the bulkheads and the raised streets are expected to provide some relief from the flooding that regularly plagues the area.
Relief for West 12th Road, which has been plagued by flooding for decades, is on its way, city officials said this week. File Photo
“Just this morning, the people on West 12th woke up to a foot of water on their block again because it was a super high tide,” said Dan Mundy, president of the Broad Channel Civic Association. “This has long been in the works. It was a discussion for almost decades – more than 20 years ago people said we have to do something on West 12th Road.”
Residents have noted that the years of flooding set Broad Channel up to be extremely vulnerable to the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy. The neighborhood was devastated by last year’s storm, and, for example, numerous homes along West 12th Road remain unoccupied because residents have had to pay for such extensive repairs.
“We have pre-Roman Empire infrastructure,” Sophia Vailakis-DeVirgilio, who owns a home on West 12th Road, said in a previous interview. “There’s really no infrastructure. They put pavement over the sand, and there’s no real infrastructure like you have in Manhattan or Brooklyn to keep the streets from collapsing.”
While Sandy dramatically highlighted the need for relief, the push for the city project became especially apparent following the 2010 nor’easter that brought another round of devastating flooding to the area. Several years ago, the West 12th Road Block Association spearheaded efforts to shed light on the neighborhood’s flooding in an attempt to pressure the city into finally acting on the project.
After former Queens Department of Transportation Commissioner Maura McCarthy crafted a plan for the area, current borough DOT Commissioner Delilah Hall followed through with the project that Mundy said incorporated input from area residents.
“It really was an agency led project, but one that really interacted with the community and took all our feedback,” Mundy said. “The final project is going to be a really great design.”
The first phase of the project will be constructing the bulkheads on each of the roads, after which Mundy said West 12th will be the first road to have its street raised. At the same time as the street raising is being done, the city Department of Environmental Protection is going to upgrade the sewer lines as well.
The DOT’s project – the bulkheads and the street raising – will cost approximately $977,000, and the DEP’s sewer project comes with a price tag of approximately $25 million.
By Anna Gustafson
