FEMA Flood Hazard Information map; areas of 1 percent annual chance flood hazard shaded in blue.
Thomas Breen file photo
City Plan Director Laura Brown: "The closeness of water that makes the city vulnerable also makes it desirable."
Rising sea levels. More hurricanes. More intense rainstorms. As a coastal city, New Haven has had to think about all that water more than many other places in the country, especially when that water has ended up submerging its streets.
This has resulted, recently, in greater coordination with neighboring towns and state and federal agencies. It has also made waves in a few of the city’s development projects — most notably Long Wharf and Tweed — as the city balances its immediate economic needs against the coming climate challenges.
“In recent years, the City of New Haven has experienced several heavy rainstorms and coastal storms that have caused flooding in certain areas of the City, occasionally resulting in impassable roads, damage to property, and potential threats to public health and safety,” a recent Elicker administration press release about city resiliency stated. “To help address this, the City of New Haven is continuously working to improve its preparedness for natural hazards and disasters — including floods, hurricanes, severe storms, and other major weather events — and to foster community resilience and awareness through various educational and public information efforts.”
Some of this preparedness involves working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Two aspects of that have come to the fore.
First is New Haven’s voluntary participation, along with over 1,500 other municipalities, in FEMA’s Community Ratings System (CRS) program. Under the CRS, cities are working to “reduce and avoid flood damage to insurable property,” “strengthen and support the insurance aspects of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP),” and “foster comprehensive floodplain management,” as FEMA states. When cities can show they’re doing that above FEMA’s minimum requirements, residents can get a 15 percent discount on flood insurance through the NFIP.
Under the CRS, the city has an interactive map that lets residents figure out if they’re in a floodplain. If they are, they can look into getting insurance through the NFIP. Everyone can sign up for alerts from the city’s emergency notification system. The city also has a wealth of other public information related to its flood preparedness.
The city also has updated its hazard mitigation plan, which it first drafted in 2018 “to help manage the region’s potential flood hazards and to help mitigate against potential threats and damage from flooding events,” as the city’s April 27 press release stated. The hazard mitigation plan was created in coordination with the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCRCOG), which describes itself as “a platform for intermunicipal coordination, cooperation, and decision making.” It comprises 15 towns centered around New Haven, stretching west to Milford, east to Madison, and north to Meriden.
FEMA requires this regional approach as “hazards don’t adhere to municipal boundaries,” said City Plan Director Laura Brown. Similarly, the flood preparedness and hazard mitigation plans are, in turn, part of the city’s overall approach to dealing with climate change.
“You can think of our response as a matrix,” added City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, to address the panoply of potential problems the city faces: storm surges, rainfall, flash flooding, heat, disease vectors (such as Lyme disease from ticks) and a “bucket of others,” including the recent smoke from wildfires in Canada.
“That was California’s problem and now it’s ours,” Zinn said. Those smoky days “remind people that the climate emergency is not tomorrow,” a situation made more acute because “we are a coastal community.” That concern has to be balanced, of course, against even more immediate concerns — like housing, which is about “immediate survival,” Zinn said — but “what we try to do is have an undercurrent of resilience in everything that we do,” connecting back to this “absolutely existential question that we have.”
New Haven’s track record with FEMA extends to funding; it has managed to secure a couple recent FEMA grants. In September the agency granted the city $25 million for a drainage pipeline that will alleviate flooding on Union Avenue. In May FEMA gave just over $1 million to strengthen its water treatment plant against flooding during storms.
Brown pointed to New Haven’s Vision 2025 plan, described as “a blue print of the city’s vision for the future, and a policy guide for achieving the city’s planning goals.” It has a section devoted to environmental concerns, but overall, climate resilience is “woven into every aspect of that plan,” she said.
All that said, the interactive map points out ways in which balancing concerns about climate with other policy issues can become complicated. Even a quick glance at the map shows that two of the city’s major projects under development — Long Wharf and Tweed Airport — are in areas more susceptible to flooding.
Morris Cove, Tweed, East Haven.
“This is a very hot question,” Zinn said. The argument about expanding Tweed is being hashed out very much in public, lately in meeting after testy meeting, as the city and airport wait on a decision from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regarding whether more analysis is needed regarding a larger airport’s potential environmental effects. Long Wharf’s development has been less fractious, as the city’s proposal under its Long Wharf Responsible Growth Plan has received millions in support for its vision of an amenity-rich district that includes park space, housing, and a commercial area.
“This is where we balance,” Zinn said. “We need housing. We need resilient housing,” and the plans for the area’s revitalization, if they come to full fruition, will in some sense restore some of New Haven’s historic connection to its waterfront that was lost in the building of I‑95. At the same time, Zinn said, “Long Wharf is an artificial creation.” Much of the land prone to flooding near the water is fill. “Water Street used to be the water.”
The elevation of that fill above sea level is the primary issue as far as flooding is concerned. “Could they have gone an extra three feet and done us a lot of favors? Absolutely,” Zinn said. In developing the district, filling and raising the area further would be “the best way to go about it.… Proofing against water is dicey at best” and “there’s no substitute for elevation.”
Having to worry about flooding at all — at Long Wharf and across the waterfront — in some ways gets at the heart of the city’s identity as it reshapes what it is. “As a coastal community, we’re really stuck with a lot of the issues that are caused by the world as a whole, and we feel the brunt of it now,” Zinn said. “There are certainly parts that are vulnerable and we’re seeing it.”
That said, “on the flip side of it, being on the coast is what made New Haven,” Brown said. The closeness of water that makes the city vulnerable also makes it desirable. “People want to be on the water. We want to re-create on the water. There are other uses that are sustainable,” she said, and Long Wharf’s development reflects how “we’re in that transition.”
The petroleum terminal in New Haven’s harbor is likewise more vulnerable to flooding than most of the city is; Zinn pointed out that “we have stakeholders that have no issues with opening another petroleum terminal” but are grappling with the fact that doing so would be riskier than it was in the past.
The most cautious option — of forsaking development on the coast altogether in the face of rising risk — strikes Zinn as going too far. “That is asking the people of New Haven to retreat from our economic opportunity, to retreat from housing, to retreat from the things that make New Haven New Haven,” he said. But as the Long Wharf project in particular moves forward, it was also necessary to “be responsible to flag ways to make Long Wharf work.”