Transcript: Mayor Adams Visits Jewel Streets Neighborhood to Evaluate Flooding Impacts and Resiliency Infrastructure

October 4, 2023

Mayor Eric Adams: We… You know, on my way off to the airport but wanted to come by here. And really. a picture speaks a thousand words. This is several weeks — three, to be exact — after Ida, and this is days after, probably two days after the recent storm we had last week. And just the difference in some of the fixes we put in place, a thousand feet of sewers, really looking at ways to mitigate the flow of water; and because of that, you're standing on dry ground.
 
And the water has gone away, but we are not going away. We know that this is just the start, but we wanted to give people some immediate fixes. Everyone asks, what do we believe are the short term, mid term and long term, and that is how we are approaching this. This community needed relief. I know this community well as a borough president, but also… 
 
So, the goal, as I stated, is for the short, mid and long term solutions. We saw some of the short term solutions that we invested in. We did almost $75 million to just improve the quality of life, and also looking at affordable housing. We have a long term plan for this area. The HPD commissioner is going to be holding a meeting, I believe tonight, to look at some of these available locations on how do we build out the housing we need and how do we ensure that we continue to be creative in draining the water after the rain.
 
So, some of our long term plans are still being actualized, but some of the short term plan is really showing some results. You can't argue with the photos. Three weeks later, and we saw still saw the accumulation of water, looks like we have a little marsh growing there. This is the same building that was here during that. As you look at the land here based on of what Rit and his team are continuing to do over at DEP.
 
And there are spots like this all over. On my way here, I stopped at Springfield Gardens where there's a drainage problem off the lake in Springfield Park, and so we know we have to identify each one of these locations and come up with a plan. It's not a one size fits all. And you know, just in all honesty, as I learn from Rit, is that these sewer systems were not all created equal.
 
Some of the sewer systems are smaller than others. There were changes when, you know, the history shows that borough presidents were making those decisions eons ago. We have to not only retrofit the systems but we have to think about modern ways of displacing the water after a storm. We had a storm, one of the largest accumulations of water that hit the city in probably in the history, that we were able to, again, I say over and over again, we were able to see some of our quick fixes but we also were able to learn from the past.
 
Zero deaths, zero serious physical injuries, only three rescued from basement apartments, 15 rescues from people stuck in vehicles, really executing a plan that we were able to save lives and save property at the same time. So, there's so much more to do. You'll speak to the community here, they know for years this area, which is a low lying area, for years they have been dealing with this issue.
 
But again, our message to them, this accumulation of water is gone, but we're not going anywhere until this problem is fixed. And this is going to a period of time. It's going to be several administrations that are going to have to continue and build on to what we have done here. It's not going to be done instantly. But we are definitely going it started, and you can see that from the results today.
 
Why don't we open it to a few questions.
 
Question: Yes. Mayor, what specific improvements were made to the sewers and drainage systems in this particular neighborhood since Hurricane Ida?
 
Mayor Adams: Yes. Rit.
 
Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala, Department of Environmental Protection: Sure. I'm Rit Aggarwala, commissioner of the Department of Environment Protection. So, in this area we did two things, one on this street, we had DEP crews, we did this work in house. We found that this area just had no storm sewer underneath it.
 
There's a limited capacity sewer network just down that direction, and so we had our crews very quickly put in a storm sewer, and that has a significant impact. In a normal rain storm, this area is now staying dry; in a massive rain storm like Ophelia, the area still accumulated some water, but as the Mayor said, it drained out relatively quickly. We did a similar short term or Band aid fix south of Linden.
 
And as the mayor said, we don't kid ourselves that this is the right answer, but as we look at this issue and we saw a community suffering, we figured out what can we do quickly, this was an answer. The reality, as the mayor said, is sewer upgrades, water infrastructure is not work that takes months, it's work that takes years, sometimes decades, and that is the work we are starting.
 
Question: Yes, thank you. Mr. Mayor, after Hurricane Ida then Mayor de Blasio released a report, one of the top kind of actions that were promised in that report was to create a new position within City Hall called an Extreme Weather Coordinator.
 
Mayor Adams: Um hmm.
 
Question: Did you ever hire someone for that post, number one. And then I just had a second question kind of about what your schools chancellor said yesterday where he, reflecting on the storm response, said that there were several things he wished his department could have done better. So, I'm wondering, have you reflected in any similar way and is there anything you could have done better before…
 
Mayor Adams: First of all, we have an amazing commissioner in Zach Iscol, and we are going to be, through Deputy Mayor [Meera Joshi], she's going to look at not only the former mayor's report but our report and show you the one that we put in place when we took office and show you what we stated that we were going to do and we would do a comparison to tell you which ones we disagreed on, which one we agreed on. And let her do her job of rolling out that report and she will answer those questions directly.
 
On reflection, there is not a day I don't wake up and at the end of the day I write in my diary on how could I go through my day better and what could I do better. What I wish I would have done is mobilize my local electeds so they would have been with me in the morning when I was going out to areas and actually seeing what the damage was, I want to spend some time in telling my local electeds that the goal is not to critique what we're doing on Twitter but to come out in the streets and join me like I was doing early in the morning out in Sheepshead Bay, out in Flatbush, out in Prospect Park area.
 
It's an all hands on deck moment, and so I'm going to sort of do a briefing with them and say, when we are hit with these major issues, that it's up to all of us to get out. When I was a state senator during the hurricane I was on the streets going to Coney Island Hospital and others to see how we could help. I did the same thing as borough president.
 
And I think that we all need to be conscious of that, that the role of the elected official is not to sit home, it's to come out and find out how do you help your constituencies. And I think upon reflection, that's what I'm going to try to encourage my local electeds to do.
 
Question: So, in terms of the short term, there was a sewer project here to try to help drainage in an immediate flood. What are...can you talk what the long term plans are for sustainability here?
 
Mayor Adams: Rit, you could talk about that. But listen, the sewer systems must accommodate the new norm of the heavy rainfall. Those sewer systems as it stands now cannot accommodate the level of rain that we are receiving. But Rit, why don't you go into some of the other plans.
 
Commissioner Aggarwala: Thank you, mayor. Yes, so just to pick up on what the mayor said. You know, know across the city our standard has until the Adams administration been to build to a maximum capacity to absorb 1.75 inches per hour. As a reminder, Ida at its maximum got 3.75 and 3.15 in Central Park. On Friday, our DEP rain gauge in the Brooklyn Navy Yard measured 2.58 inches, and there were reports that some parts of Brooklyn got up to three inches in one hour.
 
There's no way that a 1.75 inch per hour system can absorb that. We've known that, we've been saying that, I've been saying at every possible opportunity. The climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can keep up. So, to get to your other question around what are we going to do in a place like this, we're working closely with HPD and our other colleagues, we are working on a master plan for this neighborhood.
 
One of our top priorities both here and across the city is to figure out where we can actually keep the water on the surface through green infrastructure at a very small scale— that's like rain gardens by the side of the road— at a larger scale it could be blue belts, which we have 30 blue belts on Staten Island, they're very successful, they work very well. They're actually very popular with the neighbors and they're very cost effective.
 
Compared to building underground infrastructure, if we can build a lake they can absorb that run off, that's a really good investment, it also makes the neighborhood beautiful, it attracts wildlife, it does wonderful things like that. So, that's what we're exploring here, is what is that combination of a blue belt, rain gardens and perhaps necessary in improvements to the underground infrastructure.
 
Question: And I know there's an HPD meeting today. What is the timeline for finalizing the [inaudible] in that plan?
 
Commissioner Adolfo Carrión, Housing Preservation and Development: Yes. Thank you. So, working in tandem with DEP, with DOT, with a host of agencies, we're looking at the entirety of this area and looking at the long term opportunities, long term solutions, whether it's housing, infrastructure, open space, community services, economic development.
 
And we're hosting a series of meetings that started...a planning exercise that started this year and will culminate in the spring of 2024 with a plan that includes the input of this area. And so folks are looking at tonight at a 17 acre site that HPD owns just minutes away that we just walked from where there's an opportunity for several thousand units of housing, in addition to other sites along Linden Boulevard, high ground sites that offer opportunity for even more thousands of units of housing.
 
There is obviously a housing crisis that we have to address, sites like this in parts of the city like this are great opportunities to address that challenge.