Photo: Inside Climate News.
Children play with a water fountain at a park in flood-prone Hoboken, New Jersey. The playground doubles as storage for stormwater runoff.
Yay for humans who come up with ingenious ways to mitigate the effects of climate change! Here’a a clever idea from Hoboken, New Jersey.
Victoria St Martin reports at Inside Climate News (via the Guardian), “For a city that is almost small enough to fit inside Manhattan’s Central Park just a few miles away, a lot of history has played out within the narrow borders of Hoboken, New Jersey.
“It was the site of the first organized baseball game in 1846, home of one of the US’s first breweries in the 17th century and the place where Oreo cookies were first sold in 1912. And, as any Hobokenite will tell you, the Mile Square City, as it is called, is also known for something else.
“ ‘Everything floods up here,’ Maren Schmitt, 38, said with a nervous chuckle on a Tuesday afternoon as she watched her two boys climb at a city playground.
“Nearly four-fifths of the land area in Hoboken – which sits on the western banks of the Hudson River – rests on a flood plain. And its intense susceptibility to flooding has probably never been more apparent than it was during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when 500m gallons of storm surge flooded the city.
“But now … Hoboken officials have put in place a series of measures designed to mitigate the destructive effects of storms that are driven by climate change, including one innovation that the city hopes may become known as another Hoboken first.
“Located at the corner of 12th and Madison streets, one of Hoboken’s newest playgrounds, known as ResilienCity Park, [is] doubling as a storage area for roughly 2m gallons of stormwater runoff. …
“The park, which sits on five acres barely a mile and a half from the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan, features swing sets, slides, a basketball court and an athletic field – and, underneath it all, a below-ground tank capable of holding hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater that city officials say would have otherwise spilled on to the streets or streamed into the basements of Hoboken homes and businesses.
“Building climate-resilient – or climate-smart – playgrounds is part of a growing movement among municipalities and environmental advocacy groups in the US. … The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit conservation group, estimates it has helped fund the construction of more than 300 such play spaces in communities around the country, including Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles. …
“Some spaces, like those in Hoboken, utilize an underground tank, porous artificial turf and scuppers or openings on a basketball court to store excess stormwater. Others increase resilience with newly planted trees that can absorb carbon dioxide and airborne pollutants; once they mature, those trees also provide shade cover that can reduce the heat island effect of urban areas, a problem intensified by the traditional black asphalt playgrounds commonplace generations ago. …
“ ‘Every geography is going to have slightly different stressors,’ [Daniella Hirschfeld, an assistant professor at Utah State University who studies environmental planning] said. ‘Hoboken is a place that used to be an island. And the amount of water that it needs to store is very different than where I am here in Utah. But ultimately, you know, places can perform both as a safe haven for stormwater and, hypothetically, can even be a safe haven for fire, which is another threat that we’re facing.’
“Caleb Stratton, Hoboken’s chief resilience officer, recalls how city officials asked him to lead the rebuilding and recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy. The park, one of four planned resiliency sites in the city, was primarily paid for with infrastructure replacement grants, including roughly $10m from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Stratton said a key element of the park’s design was its multipronged approach to flood mitigation.
“ ‘It’s a park, stormwater pumping station, the whole thing,’ Stratton said during an interview at the park while a cluster of summer campers squealed on a playset nearby. ‘This is all the strategies mixed up into one.’ …
“In addition to the underground stormwater detention tank, which holds 1m gallons of water, Stratton said above-ground infrastructure including rain gardens could hold a million more. An above-ground pump can also send water back into the Hudson.
“ ‘What we’re doing is creating places for the water to go so that we can manage it and keep it off the streets, keep it out of people’s buildings, and get prepared for the uncertain future, which we’re kind of experiencing in real time.’ …
” ‘They need more like this, for sure, so the kids can get outside,’ said Tyrik Davis, 26, a resident of nearby Fairview, New Jersey, who was visiting the park with his children, Naylani, six, and Tyrik Jr, three. ‘Especially this generation. There’s no more kids at the parks. They’re all inside with their phones.’ ”
More at the Guardian, here. No paywall.
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