New York-New Jersey Harbor and Tributaries Coastal Storm Risk Management Feasibility Study
In September, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) released a Draft Integrated Feasibility Report and Tier 1 Environmental Impact Statement in connection with the New York - New Jersey Harbor and Tributaries Coastal Storm Risk Management Feasibility Study (NYNJHATS). This is the same study that former President Trump criticized via tweet in January 2020 and was “indefinitely postponed” for some time due to lack of support within the administration. The study has moved forward and a Tentatively Selected Plan (TSP), Alternative 3B, was proposed in this latest report. Among the features included in the TSP are 12 storm surge barriers with complementary shore-based measures. The TSP’s measures are shown in the screenshot below.
The total estimated project first cost for the TSP is nearly $53 billion in 2022 dollars, with average annual equivalent costs of more than $2.5 billion. Breakdown of costs by category are shown below. Nearly $6 billion in first costs are for real estate, and an additional $2.4 billion are estimated for “necessary relocations” for the USACE project. Lands, easements, and rights of way costs would be borne by the non-federal sponsors—the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation—while more broadly the plan would be cost-shared as 65% federal and 35% non-federal. An estimated 1,590 parcels would be impacted by construction of the TSP.
According to the latest report, construction of the TSP is assumed to begin in 2030 and end in 2044, indicating flood protection benefits from NYNJHATS features are still at least decades away from being enjoyed. There is also the possibility that NYNJHATS does not produce a project at all due to funding or political factors. The Corps’ hydrologic-hydraulic-economic analysis conducted to evaluate alternatives in the report uses the publicly-available USACE Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) Flood Damage Reduction Analysis (FDA) tool. According to the Economics Appendix of this latest NYNJHATS report, “the basic data inputs required by HEC-FDA are the structure inventory, stage-frequency relationships (and their future variation to account for sea level change), and depth-damage functions.” This suggests structural damage is the primary damage component considered in the economic analysis, with other dimensions of potential flood impacts (e.g., mortality, lost economic productivity, non-structural assets, and other hard-to-quantify damages such as social, mental health, or ecological costs) are not reflected in the benefit-cost ratio. This consideration of a narrow component of benefits, as well as a chosen level of protection (e.g., 1% annual exceedance probability event for non-barrier structural features) lower than some international peers’ (e.g., the Netherlands), are discussed in detail in a recent publication by Mach et al. to which I had the opportunity to contribute. The screenshot below indicates the standards and storm events against which features of the TSP are designed to protect.
The TSP has the highest benefit-cost ratio, 2.8, of all considered alternatives under assumptions of intermediate sea level rise. The specific natural and nature-based features of the TSP are not yet finalized and will be “further refined” for the Final Integrated Feasibility Report. The Corps explicitly identify three “areas of controversy” in NYNJHATS: storm surge barriers, proximity to known contamination sites, and environmental justice (pp. 526). These are surely topics which will receive considerable public comment in the coming months.
A public meeting will be held at 6 p.m. on Thursday, December 15, 2022 at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, 1 Bowling Green, New York, NY. Public comments on the draft report may be submitted through March 7, 2023 for consideration in connection with preparation of the final feasibility report.
