Weird weather is becoming the norm all over the world, and as evidenced by 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, cities along the United States Eastern Seaboard are at risk of suffering damage due to more devastating weather events in the future. Researchers are scrambling to come up with solutions to protect cities, including the Big Apple, from potential storm surge damage. Students at the New York Harbor School have come up with an innovative solution – one that’s surprisingly simple.
New York Harbor School
New York Harbor School is part of the city’s public education system. It is also a place where students are encouraged to think outside the box, and as a result, it has been described as home to innovative and effective teaching techniques. Students from around New York City, mostly from families with incomes that fall below the poverty line, study such subjects as science, history, and boat building. They also grow oysters in an attempt to restore vital living reefs that not only act as pollution filters, but as storm barriers, as well.
In Harms’ Way
Clearly, one of the most incredible cities in the world is sitting directly in harms’ way, and recommendations concerning ways to cut risks from the next inevitable storm are being made from experts all over the world. Students at Harbor School are some of the same people who will be in the path of the next weather event to strike the city, and they’re also some of the most innovative when it comes to planning for the future. They are convinced that building more oyster reefs can help cut the chances that another massive flooding event will cause citywide devastation.
These students know that sea walls protect us only until the water reaches their tops, then spills over into the city. They reason that if the city built higher walls, everyone would be virtually imprisoned in New York, and that higher walls would prevent people from enjoying the region’s greatest natural resource –the shoreline. Simply doing nothing more than creating more elastic infrastructure and allowing flooding to continue unabated is also seen as an unacceptable solution by most.
Instead of building higher walls, the students are promoting the use of living oyster reefs, which act as wave attenuators and as benthic stabilizers. They want to grow the oysters in their hatcheries, then move them to nurseries located under the Governors Island ecodock and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Once they’re big enough, they can be placed on reefs in New York harbor, where they can sustain life and promote enhanced biodiversity within the harbor. In addition, this solution is one that would be cost-effective, rather than expensive, cumbersome, or difficult to build.
The idea of using oyster reefs as barriers against storm surge is not a new one. For thousands of years, they protected New York’s coastal regions from storms and resulting wave action. If oysters are brought back to New York Harbor, the students at Harbor School believe the city would ultimately become more resilient to the increased storm activity that is certain to happen as a result of warming oceans worldwide, and rising ocean waters that come with decreased amounts of sea ice. Could oysters be part of the solution? Many experts agree that this is a distinct possibility – and that returning part of New York Harbor to nature would be a beneficial action overall.