Green infrastructure, by contrast, involves strategically deploying wetlands, dunes, mangrove forests, and reefs to reduce threats of catastrophic flooding and coastal erosion, while also revitalizing the land. Its guiding principle is that “gray infrastructure”-the dikes, dams, and seawalls that modern societies use to contain and control water-is often insufficient, and sometimes destructive. She’s also at the forefront of an emerging approach to climate resilience that argues we should be building with nature, not just in nature. She’s the founder of the design firm SCAPE, the director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University, and the first landscape architect to win a MacArthur “genius” grant.

Now we have a different climate, and we need a different approach.”Ī great deal of Orff’s work addresses the inescapable fact that the Atlantic Ocean is rising, and coming for the land. We’ve spent the past one hundred years dredging out everything for shipping and hardening the edges. They acted like breakwaters, absorbing wave energy and slowing the water before it hit the shore. “There were oysters, tide pools, grasses, lots of colorful marine life, and they were a big part of New York’s coastal-protection system. “Before Buttermilk Channel was dredged, people used to walk from here to Governors Island at low tide,” she said. Behind us were the Red Hook Houses, the largest public-housing complex in Brooklyn, with some twenty-five hundred units set on a peninsula, a former tidal marsh that will take on more and more water as the planet continues to warm. Farther west, along the Hudson River, we could make out the ports and cities in New Jersey where the risk of tidal flooding has more than doubled over the past generation, as sea levels have risen. This test section is scheduled to finished in the following days.“I’m interested in reworking the edges,” Orff told me, squinting into the breeze. The initial stone placement work focuses on Breakwater “A” with the construction of a 100-foot test section that will be used to establish an in-field standard for the subsequent construction activity. This floating equipment will help Weeks Marine with the stone placement operation which commenced in February. The Weeks Marine crews moved the W537 crane to the Greenville Yard in Jersey City for maintenance and to prepare it for the stone placement operation.Īfter two months of being away, the red W537 E-crane is back at the site accompanied by floating amphibious excavators. In January, work was largely taking place off-site, according to the latest project update. The program, conducted by Weeks Marine, is an innovative coastal green infrastructure project designed to reduce or reverse erosion and damage from storm waves, improve the ecosystem health of Raritan Bay, and encourage stewardship of nearshore waters and generally enhance people’s experience of the shoreline of southern Staten Island. Remu Oy’s Big Float E35 is currently busy working on a costal protection and restoration project in the southern portion of Lower New York Bay – Living Breakwaters.

Living breakwaters project