If you live in New York City, you’re (probably) at risk of flooding. And here’s what to do about it.

What information is needed to live in NYC as the climate changes?

(A final project write-up at the close of my Newmark J-School M.A. in Engagement Journalism)

Introduction

In New York City, as severe storms and rainfall become more common with the changing climate, more and more communities are being impacted by flooding, especially inland flooding caused by overwhelmed sewer systems. 1.3 million New Yorkers are at risk of coastal flooding, and millions more are at risk of inland flooding. My community of focus has been South Brooklyn residents impacted by flooding, especially in Sunset Park and Red Hook. I’m interested in the kinds of concrete information people need (and can use!!) as the climate changes.

One of the primary questions I hoped to solve for was how to share with residents their *new* risk of flood impacts, and how they can prepare for and deal with these risks. The official FEMA maps are changing, and many people don’t know if their home is newly at risk. And, these flood maps DO NOT show flood risk from inland stormwater flooding, which was a huge issue during last summer’s massive storms Henri and Ida, impacting neighborhoods that historically don’t experience intense flooding. Right now, even if people try to check their risk, they have to check two separate maps. And if they find out they are at greater risk, it’s hard to know what next steps to take, especially for renters that have less agency over their home’s resilience and repairs. Current resources are scattered across several city agency websites, and resources for repairs change with every storm event.

What are the impacts of flooding for residents? There can be health impacts from toxic floodwaters, and the losses can be deadly — over 40 people died during Ida last year, mostly in inland neighborhoods. While it can vary block to block, flooding tends to be worse in areas where the infrastructure has been historically disinvested, which in many cases can be traced back to redlining and other racist city practices. This article from Pablo Herreros Cantis and his colleague at the urban systems labs shows the location on a flood map alongside Tweets of photos of what each location looked like during Ida: people lose belongings, cars, photos; homes may need expensive repairs — and landlords might never make repairs.

Background

The community, broadly: New Yorkers in Brooklyn and Queens impacted by flooding. I’m zooming in to South Brooklyn as a focus: it’s a mix of residential, commercial, and industrial neighborhoods, and includes Sunset Park and Red Hook, among other neighborhoods. It is home to a significant maritime industrial area along the harbor, which designates a high concentration of heavy industry, which poses increased health risks during flooding. This area also experienced major flooding due to storm surges during Hurricane Sandy and major inland stormwater flooding recently during Ida. Sunset Park is home to large immigrant populations from Central and South America, as well as China: 46% of the population is foreign-born, and 48.2% of residents self-identify as having limited English proficiency. Sunset Park is lower-income than nearby neighborhoods like Park Slope: 27.9% of residents have incomes below the poverty threshold used by the city. In Red Hook, nearly ⅓ of the 9,000 residents live in public housing: the Red Hook Houses.

I started out going to Brooklyn community board meetings on Zoom to listen for more context and learn what issues folks were bringing up in their communities. This is how I first learned about how some of the sewer infrastructure issues impacting individual residents — like folks on this street in Sunset Park who have been trying to repair a sewer on their street for 18 years.

Survey/Callout

Last spring I circulated a callout/survey (Eng./Espanol) to residents in south Brooklyn and beyond. I sent the callout through direct email outreach to several organizations, as well as advertising in community board newsletters. I received 34 callout responses. 15 respondents were open to talking with me further, and I was able to schedule and complete interviews with 11 of them by the time of this writing. Through this process I also learned about five aligned projects: the NYC Community FloodWatch, FloodNet (a new flood sensor project), the Bronx River Alliance, PortSide New York, and the Waterfront Alliance’s City of Water Day (an annual event about connecting with waterways and learning about risks). These organizations shared my survey and I saw more responses as a result of this sharing. I also spoke with representatives from all of these organizations to learn more about their work and how I might be able to connect. Three of them said they would be willing to partner on sharing future resources, and that they were interested in seeing the results of my initial callout.

A few major takeaways from survey responses and interviews — the primary reference point for folks is Hurricane Sandy and its complicated aftermath. As one anonymous resident from Red Hook shared, “I was displaced in Sandy, I almost died. Because I was not a homeowner, there weren’t many resources available to help me recover. All of the Sandy money went to Community Orgs with opaque processes who put people like me on endless lists, doing paperwork, which never seemed to result in any kind of direct and helpful aid. Renters need better and more accessible aid.”

Another key item folks highlighted was that maps are changing around coastal flood risk, which have major impacts on flood insurance rates — and a lot of people don’t know about this change. After Ida, inland flooding due to stormwater overflow is top of mind, especially as it impacts new neighborhoods and areas. And people don’t know about the new map that shows that risk. I also heard several reports about how people who recently moved into homes were shocked to find out the hard way that their homes are in areas that flood. People said that there should be better ways for people to know about this risk before moving in. Renters also feel limited in the steps they can take if their landlords aren’t proactive about flood preparedness or damage repair.

I also heard stories of communities banding together to share information about flooding and lobby the city for changes etc. is an important component of preparedness, but is more likely to happen in areas like those around Jamaica Bay, where flooding has been an issue for generations. Those areas feel “ahead of the game” compared to areas who have experienced flooding for the first time only recently. Top three needs identified from this callout: 1) localized early-warning system 2) information about how to fix known problems 3) how to request sandbags. (Bonus, beyond my scope: requests for the government to make good on past promises for mitigation and infrastructure improvement).

Community/Scientist Interviews & Map

There are a lot of people and organizations thinking about big solutions and community resilience projects with renewed fervor since last summer’s Ida. There are many citizen scientists, volunteers, city departments and organizers who are actively working towards solutions and gathering data needed to inform them.

As Victoria Sanders from the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance said in an interview last fall, “Historically we’ve seen that if the community doesn’t take it unto themselves, especially communities of color and disadvantaged communities, no one else will, right. And so if they want to protect themselves, they need to push for their own needs and rights. And so this is a perfect example of how we can do that. In doing the research ourselves, we can find the information to prove that what the government is doing is insufficient.”

To learn more about these existing projects, in the spring of 2022 I interviewed several citizen/community scientists as part of this story mapping project: knowing is power: a tour of (some) community resilience projects in nyc.

Since then I have sought to learn from and work with several organizations and projects, particularly:

• The FloodWatch and FloodNet programs — they are working on early warning systems and gathering data about where flooding is occurring hyperlocally, and in real time. This is a quite new program, and they are in early phases of public outreach about this system, but they have plans to grow: there’s funding for an additional 500 sensors to be placed around the city (and community members can suggest locations!)
• PortSide NY, a longstanding local organization in Red Hook with a heavy focus on hyperlocal engagement with water, including flood preparedness, resiliency, and outreach.
• The Billion Oyster Project, an organization which is restoring oyster reefs to New York Harbor in collaboration with New York City communities.
• The Waterfront Alliance, especially their Rise to Resilience coalition and City of Water Day event
• Sunset Park’s UPROSE participatory action research project on fugitive chemicals.

Connecting with the Urban Systems Lab

Over the summer I reached out to Pablo Herreros Cantis, who with his Urban Systems Lab colleagues wrote Beyond Flood Risk Mapping, an article that sought to visualize the human impact of a “dark blue flooding area” on traditional flood maps. He had also done a lot of research, writing, and work with local orgs like WeAct around environmental justice and flooding. After a long initial conversation that answered lots of my initial questions about what is and isn’t currently accessible about flood risk maps, he asked if he could attend one of the listening posts (see below) that I was hosting in Coney Island the next day. Pablo became a great partner throughout this project — he helped with user feedback on the initial prototypes, connected me with program staff and volunteers at WeAct, and affirmed enthusiasm for my approach to the project and focus on reaching folks’ information needs in an approachable and fun way. We ultimately co-authored a Q+A about how people can use flood mapping to understand their risks (see below!)

Listening Posts

This summer I also hosted three listening posts — one at the City of Water Day and two at the Sunset Park CSA pickup. The core questions for these listening posts: How have you experienced flooding in NYC? And, what questions do you have about flooding in your neighborhood? People could choose to answer these by: 1) speaking with me 2) drawing their experiences or writing them on post-its 3) recording their story.

Listening Post #1: The first was part of the City of Water Day: In Your Neighborhood event in Coney Island’s Kaiser Park. The event was organized by Pamela of the Coney Island Beautification Project, a longstanding grassroots organization, who I was introduced to by Elizabeth Ballardes of the Hudson Riverkeeper. The listening post was one of about 20 booths at the event, alongside organizations like the Billion Oyster Project, CERT, Coney Island Anti-Violence Collaborative, NYC Parks, and lots more. I spoke with many 35+) community members of all ages, some briefly and some more in-depth. Nine were willing to provide contact information for additional follow-up conversations. Some folks lived in the adjacent public housing, others from the surrounding neighborhood, and some from other neighborhoods of Brooklyn. I talked with a couple of younger children who didn’t remember Hurricane Sandy but are worried about floods, and several of their parents that had been deeply impacted (cars destroyed, displacement from their homes, etc.)

Listening Post #2 & #3

I hosted a Listening Post at the Sunset Park CSA pick-up at St. Michael’s Church in Sunset Park. The Sunset Park CSA is an organization that is centered on supporting immigrant family farmers, connecting the local community, and creating economic equity & fresh food accessibility. I spoke to eleven people about their experiences with flooding in the neighborhood, and four were willing to share their contact information for further conversation.

From all of this listening and conversation, four distinct categories of information needs emerged:

1. Knowing Risk: Many people don’t know about existing maps and their risk, especially new residents,
2. Early Warning: Residents want neighborhood-specific early warning system so they can determine things like, “when should I move my car, or avoid my subway station”
3. How to solve known problems: Many have experienced problems like clogged sewers on their block, toxic floodwaters, basement flooding, and more for years. Some have had success organizing with their neighbors to call for infrastructure investment or other action.
4. Request supplies and navigate city systems — Both preparedness supplies and post-flooding resources are complex to access and change from storm to storm.

I also learned that people definitely don’t love talking about disasters and preparedness. It’s a topic that can feel both scary and tedious (even though it’s super important!). So two key things I focused on during my project development phase were: How to make it fun, and how to pinpoint the times at which people WILL be interested in this news, for example when folks are looking for housing (how can you tell if your new potential apartment will flood, etc?), or when they’re already engaging with events or organizations that are water-focused. After a flood is another time when people need information of course, but I aimed to provide something useful before that moment.

After I had these initial findings, I sent a thank you email to everyone who had completed the survey or interview which outlined the four key takeaways from that initial community research, and shared that I was working on a prototype. That resulted in a few additional interviews, and some great advice for the next stage!

Prototype Development

Using previous research and conversations as a guide, I initially focused on the flood mapping changes in New York City. The official maps of flood areas in New York recently changed, and last summer, New York City released three new tools (a big update because they are starting to use flood data from 2015 instead of 1983) that can better help residents in New York understand if their home is now at greater risk for flooding in the event of a strong storm. So my initial idea was to create something to help residents learn about how their risk has changed, and what they should do if they learn that they are at risk, by highlighting three tools: 1) A new tool to help residents learn if their home is at risk of coastal flooding 2) A new map that maps stormwater flooding, risks that exist inland, beyond just river/ocean/harbor storm surges. 3) Hurricane evacuation zones have also changed (during a hurricane, the city uses these to tell people when to evacuate and where they should go).

After highlighting how residents can find their complete (stormwater + coastal) flood risk, I wanted to answer the question “then what?” Preparedness and post-flooding information is currently scattered across different city department, state, and local organization websites. At the time Floodhelpny.org, the city’s primary resource for this topic, did not include rainfall/stormwater risk or any of the related local projects run by nonprofits or community coalitions. I heard from folks in the community that it was hard to find out what to do, and that being able to find as much flood-related information in one place would be useful. As Nick Malter, Sunset Park resident said in an interview last fall, “you almost need a degree in engineering to figure out what to do.” Neighbors on his street have been trying to fix a broken sewer on their block for 18 years (see more here).

So, I set about developing NYC Flood Guide, a website (www.nycflood.guide), a paper zine, and instagram account @nycfloodguide. I knew that a paper component was important because my initial survey showed that after word of mouth, fliers and email were the ways that folks were getting news in their neighborhood. The paper zine is a scavenger hunt of actions: it shares key actions to take and context about this issue locally in NYC.

It looks like this, and my wonderful cohort helped me prepare and fold many of the 150 zines!

Deeper information about each action listed in the zine is available on the website, nycflood.guide.

Also included on the site are some longer-form pieces that dive more deeply into the actions and related topics, including:

• A feature on Sabina Unni and Nikolas Michael’s Rainy Day Play and the FloodNet flood sensor system (also published on NY City News Service)
• A Q+A with mapping expert Pablo Herreros Cantis about what folks need to know about understanding their risk in NYC
• An explainer about the new flood disclosure bill for renters focused around an interview with Tyler Taba, policy lead at the Rise to Resilience coalition.

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT — @nycfloodguide

At Sandy +10, a conference I attended in October that reflected on community preparedness and resilience ten years post-Sandy, several people asked where they could find the project on Instagram, so I made an Instagram account and started pulling actions from the site into even smaller and more visual infographics for distribution on that platform as well. Pablo Herreros Cantis helped me connect with some WeAct volunteers in Harlem who recorded videos highlighting what they have in their go bags, and I also included excerpts of interview recordings from the Rainy Day Play.

DISTRIBUTION + REFINING THE PROTOTYPE

I first tested in-person distribution at the Rainy Day Play, part of FloodNet’s artist residency program. It’s a musical comedy that explores folks’ emotional connection to rain and how we can support each other in times of disaster — basically a great moment to hit people with actions while they’re thinking about water in the city! I went to two different site-specific performances in Gowanus and West Harlem, handed out zines to the audience, and recorded several interviews of their rainy day stories. I also sat down with the creators Sabina and Nikolas for an interview, and ultimately published an article. Sabina and Michael later agreed to share my project and callout via email to everyone who had previously attended the performances in Gowanus, the Rockaways, and West Harlem.

I also attended an Open House New York event at Portside NY and met with its founder, Carolina Salguero, who I had been in touch with since last spring. I met some of the org’s volunteers and shared a few zines for their feedback — people were generally interested in learning more and talking with me. While I was there Carolina also invited me to attend the next week’s Barnacle Parade, an annual celebration of resilience in the face of flooding that started as a protest the year after Hurricane Sandy.

I interviewed several Red Hook residents about their experiences and their advice for others experiencing flooding, and handed out some paper zines alongside Red Hook-specific postcards about flood prep that PortSide NY had previously developed and distributed.

Other online distribution

• Email: I sent another email to everyone — individuals and organizations — that I had spoken to over the course of the project
• Facebook: I also shared this project in several Facebook groups that I had initially shared the callout + survey with, and posted the piece about tenant rights re: flood disclosure in a few groups focused on NYC housing/roommates, etc. (trying to hit folks at a moment that they’re making a decision about where to live). I will say the housing-focused group attempts were not very successful.

METRICS

While I have some metrics around distribution, listed below, for this project my primary impact has been measured through the partnerships I formed with community members and other stakeholders. In order to develop NYC Flood Guide, I needed to get to know folks who have been doing this work for years, and become a trusted partner. Though it’s still in development, NYC Flood Guide’s future growth and development will be shaped through these community partnerships.

Website

• Total views as of 12/12: 578
• Total unique visitors as of 12/11: 181

Instagram

• 24 followers, 68 likes across six initial posts

Paper zines — printed and distributed 150 zines

• Response from folks in person at the Rainy Day play, Barnacle Parade, and other drop spots was often “oh cool!” “this is super helpful!” and “this should be in more languages, especially Spanish and Mandarin.”
• 18 people accessed the website via the zine QR code and bit.ly link

What am I hearing from people when I share the prototype back with the callout participants? Organizational partners? Broader community?

• “Good idea to have a paper pocket guide… Love the humor in this, that is helpful to engage people. Makes this sound like “NOT another government hand out.” I like the idea of assembling a working group to discuss Portside as a co-host to you” — Carolina Salguero, Portside NY in Red Hook
• “I love a one stop shop. I love one place where I can go and get all that information. I think that’s fantastic. Like if you go to the site and you scroll you can find your risk and make your plan — it’s just easier…you should also add information about making sure to gas up your car first, and ” — Roger Gendron, founder of the Community Flood Watch group.
• Pablo Herreros Cantis, the mapping Urban Systems shared my project with Annie, a volunteer coordinator and program manager with WeAct. She reached out to some of the volunteers she works with for feedback and with an ask on my behalf for additional filmed interviews. Carol Johnson from West Harlem COAD said “I viewed Christine’s prototype, I really like her approach. I would like to be in the project.” She then filmed a “what’s in your go bag” piece for the NYC Flood Guide Instagram page.
• From Katie Graziano “Thank you for doing this important work!”
• From Agata Poniatowski, outreach and engagement manager, Billion Oyster Project, “Thank you for sharing this amazing resource prototype…I shared this around with our education and community engagement teams.”
• Carly Yuenger from Red Hook, who had been organizing a group of neighbors on Pioneer Street (particularly against last mile warehouses and their impacts on streets/infrastructure damage), “Sure, it’s great to have this information all together, but there’s limits to what individuals can do on their own — it’s more about the systemic changes we need in sewer capacity and other infrastructure because of all the underground streams and other water features.”
• From Kate Boicourt, Environmental Defense Fund + H20NYC — “Thanks for sharing this really great project. These are excellent — I love the creativity you’re putting into communicating about these issues! We need that in the overwhelming media environment we live in. No bike tours until the spring, but will be planning to do so with Matt then! Have you thought about sharing your materials/connecting with NYC Office of Emergency Management?”

Looking ahead:

There’s so many more opportunities for collaboration with more organizations that I’ve already connected with around this work. I’d love to collect more stories with the Rainy Day Play team, and maybe even build future performances based on those stories.

I’ve also mailed zines to Kate Boicourt, who leads bike tours of NYC flood resilience projects so she can distribute them on spring 2023 bike tours.

I’ve also reached out to Portside NY about assembling a working group of volunteers after the holidays to think about how this site and zines could be incorporated into their existing education and community outreach efforts.

And, I’ve been in conversation with Youth at the Center, a group I met at Sandy +10 — they run a working group of young environmental activists. We’ve spoken about potentially attending one of their future weekly meetings to present this work and/or lead a short workshop together to get this preparedness info out to young folks who care about the environment (and maybe even work on their own zines!)

To grow on a larger scale — I would love to connect with more of the organizations that are involved in NYC Emergency Management’s Strengthening Communities program, which connects cohorts of hyperlocal organizations as they do their own community resource mapping and get funding to continue preparedness work in their communities. So far, I’ve had one interview with the team at NYC Emergency Management and I’ve spoken to a few leaders of involved organizations, but I think this could be a really interesting route to pursue in the future if it fits.

So, what did I learn?

Aside from learning more than I ever thought possible about New York city’s sewer system and the historical hydrology of the city, two constants for me have been: 1) It’s amazing how much you have to learn about a topic and the people impacted by it before you can identify where the gaps are in services and information and 2) to get to that place you have to get out there — ideally in person — to spend that time talking with people.

I’m most proud of developing relationships with folks at organizations and neighborhoods across the city, and the moments when I started to be re-introduced to people by folks I’d met through totally different inroads and organizations felt like a real turning point. I realized that I was (starting!) to be entrenched in the dense network of folks in the city who are thinking about water and climate impacts from a community perspective.

One thing that was challenging was that many of the organizations who were really aligned with this approach and topic (and were even interested in collaborating!) were on different timelines, and were balancing lots of other priorities, often with really limited staff time. I had hoped to narrow my geographic community scope more, but the organizations that had time and were able to connect were more scattered throughout different parts of the city — I had to be a bit more opportunistic than I’d hoped to meet deadlines.

NYC Flood Guide: A Scavenger Hunt, is very much a product born from feedback loops on feedback loops — from listening at community events, to identifying an information gap around the most basic of preparedness steps: knowing your risk (especially from stormwater), and knowing what to do next. It delivers information in a way that’s approachable and available across different formats (and it could be much more accessible if it was available in more languages in the future!)

I also learned that this work has its limits! For so many people that I talked to in areas that have flooded more often (like coastal rather than stormwater flooding), what they needed wasn’t necessarily more information about what to do — what they needed was for the city to take action to invest in infrastructure repairs. In some areas, like Sunset Park for example, these repairs have been long voted on, approved and planned for, but not yet implemented, even years later. The information my project provided was most useful in places where the flood impacts were newer — and those places have fewer organizations focused on these spaces. Already in the last year, I’ve seen such a change in the access to stormwater/rainfall preparedness information, and I think Ida really pushed this forward as a priority for city agencies and community organizations.

A few best practices I’d suggest:

1. Find the networks. Learning about Rise to Resilience, a coalition of water-based organizations and City of Water Day was a total turning point. Also cannot recommend enough Open House New York,
2. Be present by attending local events! From Zoom community board meetings to the Barnacle Parade, these days chatting with people out in the world (“official” listening posts or not) are the ones that pushed me and the project forward the most. It takes time to even know what events are happening — but cruising the Gowanus Dredgers calendar on a whim is how I found out about the Rainy Day Play, who became a really wonderful partner.
3. Reach out to folks who write or talk about taking a similar community-focused approach around the topic. Often people are really excited that you’ve read what they’ve written, and that you care. This was so instrumental in connecting with more people and organizations.
4. Connect with the NYC Emergency Management department early on (I couldn’t get an interview for a quite a while but once we connected they were so helpful, and have deep roots with community organizations across the city because that’s their job to be a facilitator between orgs and city departments. And for flooding in particular, the response is across several city departments, it’s tricky to sort out the ones that are most relevant for different questions!
5. Share your work early and often! Probably before you feel ready. There’s nothing like quality assurance testing from the people you’re building for (and it’s okay to start by sharing with your friends!). Doing this felt scary, and it was also critical for creating a stronger and more useful end product (and one with fewer typos and more working links!).

Throughout this project I’ve remained inspired and grounded by City Bureau’s Engagement Guidelines and Hierarchy of Information Needs. As they put it: ‘Where journalists are paying attention to concrete impact, it’s mostly understood in terms of political changes, putting focus on legislation, policy and elections. These things matter, for sure, but they are abstract — something we engage with only when we have the time to think past our basic needs. Yes, democracy dies in darkness. But so do people. Which are we prioritizing?” Engagement journalism prioritizes people. It’s building community information resources together. It’s about making space for learning together and building collective power through access to information, and it’s what I’ll keep working towards!