New York City has partnered with its local environmental department to place bluebelts throughout the city as a natural way to control flooding.
According to ABC7 Eyewitness News, the Bluebelt program has been in development since the 1990s and has proved effective in keeping floodwaters out of residential and urban areas.
As extreme weather events become more frequent, the bluebelts — which are "ecologically rich and cost-effective drainage systems that naturally handle … runoff precipitation," per NYC Environmental Protection, are crucial to keep communities afloat.
"The Bluebelt System is a way to move water, rainfall that comes into our neighborhoods off the streets and into the bay," Sangu Iyer Chief, chief of bluebelts and urban stormwater planning, told ABC.
The program was initially launched in Staten Island and utilizes natural drainage corridors, such as wetlands, ponds, and streams, to boost their natural functions of storing and filtering stormwater runoff.
As ABC7 reported, the DEP has installed around 100 bluebelts on Staten Island to help drain stormwater and is working on putting in more across New York City. So far, the bluebelts have successfully kept every drop of floodwaters out of homes in the area.
"It's everywhere we've built a Bluebelt over the years, none of them have flooded," Iyer told ABC.
"We haven't had a single flooding incident of a home or street or intersection since the inception of the Bluebelt," Rob Brauman, deputy chief of bluebelt operations, told the news outlet.
They're equipped to handle up to 5 inches of rain in 24 hours, which is becoming increasingly likely as storms worsen because of our overheating planet. Hurricanes and even just daily storms are dropping more rainfall, making it harder for cities to keep up.
Thankfully, the bluebelts show that we can turn to nature for answers to rebalancing our climate. Brauman told ABC that the bluebelt technology includes various-sized pipes and valves that can be adjusted depending on the rainfall amounts so that new infrastructure doesn't have to be built every time a severe storm hits the area.
In addition to mitigating flooding, the bluebelts provide green spaces for communities and biodiverse habitats for wildlife and plants.
New York City is working to expand the bluebelt technology on Midland Beach with a new investment of $14 million. The three-acre site will help drain water away from hundreds of homes near the beach and is expected to be operating by the summer of 2025. Further down the road, NYC has bluebelt projects planned up to 30 years in advance to ensure the city remains flood-proof.
Other innovative flood control methods are popping up, from "green roofs" that help absorb rainfall to "sponge cities" that incorporate lakes, rivers, and gardens into the urban design. Even though our warming world is causing more rainfall, we can feel better knowing there are plenty of natural flood mitigation tools to help us combat it.
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