Watch The Video Now! Voice Of Gowanus Town Hall "Water, Water Everywhere Town Hall: Climate Change, Flooding and the Gowanus Rezone"

On May 11, grassroots community coalition Voice of Gowanus hosted a Town Hall for the Gowanus community entitled Water, Water Everywhere: Climate Change, Flooding and the Gowanus Rezone.
It was a fascinating panel discussion with Flood Risk and Climate Change experts Adrian Santiago Tate,
D.J. Rassmussen, Noah Dewar, as well as Maureen Koetz, Esq, principal of Planet A+ Strategies.

For anyone who missed the event, PMFA is posting the complete video of the Town Hall so that as many people as possible can watch it and hopefully share with other residents living in and around the Gowanus. 

There were some crucial takeaways that everyone in the community should be aware of:

-Hurricane Sandy-like storm events will increase in prevalence due to climate change and the flood impacts of such storms have intensified due to sea level rise; current projections show that the Gowanus Houses would be inundated by flooding—much worse than Sandy—if a similar event happens in the near future. (See maps below)

- the piecemeal flood mitigation measures for new construction included in the proposed rezoning, including raising the banks and bulkheads along the Canal, could actually have the unintended consequence of funneling flood waters towards older structures, like the Gowanus Houses, exacerbating flood impacts for those parts of our community.

- the substructures underneath Public Place indicate that the flow of dangerous contamination from the site could be going in multiple directions, including underneath the residential blocks of Carroll Gardens on the other side of Smith St; the flow of contamination is not only towards the Gowanus Canal.

-- a review of a 2005 Public Place Investigation Report by the firm GEI shows that the worst kinds of contamination were migrating off the site, including to the other side of the canal.

Please pay attention to this issue as New York City has now certified the proposed Gowanus rezoning and the Uniform Land Use Review Process has started in earnest. The clock is ticking and we need everyone to be engaged in this discussion.

And for those who still don't know: The Gowanus Rezone is the largest being pushed through by the De Blasio administration. It covers 80 blocks in Gowanus and will bring a projected 20,000 new residents, 8,500 new dwelling units on 63 development sites by 2035.

This, despite the fact that the Gowanus Canal has been declared an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund Site, that the City still uses the canal as an open sewer and discharges raw sewage into our waterway, and that most of the development area is a FEMA Flood Zone A .

This point was very well illustrated during the Town Hall with the illustrations below.

From the Town Hall: Sea-Level Rise will increase the extend of the floodplain

Above: Hurricane Sandy Flood Extend in Gowanus in 2012. 

Red Line indicates the outline of the proposed Gowanus Rezone 

Projected 2050 Hurricane Sandy Extended Floodplain