Rebuilding with Resilience

THE PROPOSAL
The Hunts Point Lifelines proposal looked at different ways to build the resilience of the Hunts Point peninsula,
including measures to enhance flood protection, build economic resilience, enhance transportation and other
infrastructure, and create redundancies using maritime routes. The design team looked at options for protecting
critical assets in the region including the Food Distribution Center, local businesses, and the wastewater treatment
plant. To do so, the proposal called for four integrated components, called “Lifelines”:
• Lifeline 1: Integrated Flood Protection: This lifeline called for the combination of a protective levee,
wetland system, and an integrated greenway, that would protect critical assets from a 100-year flood event
and also allow for integration of additional protective measures to account for future sea-level rise. “Levee
labs” would be created to support additional research and to develop innovative flood protection approaches
and to scale up flood resilience investments in the region. The central goal of this component was to keep the
food distribution center online and operational during a storm and to allow continued access for the 20,000
trucks that travel to and from the center weekly. The proposal also envisioned alignment of the flood protection
measures with future phases of the “South Bronx Greenway” (a project that has been planned since 2005 and is
being designed to create safer connections between residential neighborhoods, the waterfront, and commercial
areas). In addition to the flood protection measures, this lifeline also called for the incorporation of habitat
restoration and green infrastructure approaches for managing stormwater behind flood protection structures.
Proposed Hunts Point Levee
This rendering depicts the proposal's call for flood protection to be integrated with recreational amenities like bike lanes.
82 Chapter 7: Hunts Point Lifelines | Rebuilding with Resilience GEORGETOWN CLIMATE CENTER