Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery has announced a plan to protect its 600,000 graves, as well as roads and paths on the property, against flooding by investing more than $2 million to store water in dedicated places underground, Gothamist reported on Monday.
This would alleviate the burden on the sewers in the city, which is the main source of the flooding problem.
"Water pools anywhere it needs to — even graves for that matter," said Green-Wood Cemetery facilities manager Frank Morelli. "But we do whatever we have to do because tomorrow someone needs to be buried and nothing's going to stop that."
The plan includes creating rain gardens along roads and paths to capture additional stormwater that would otherwise make roads inaccessible or send a deluge into the ponds.
The program's strategy will focus on reducing sewer overflow, which means moving beyond funding climate resiliency for just public property. The city government hopes to spread flood protection throughout the five boroughs by partnering with private property owners, according to Gothamist.
Cemeteries, which account for 2% of New York City's land area, provide a unique opportunity to leverage greenspace for water management, and thus the project could become a prototype for similar properties, such as golf courses.
Even though the 500-acre, 184-year-old cemetery has onsite drainage and catch basins, its stormwater management is dated, according to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).
"Green-Wood is actually holding back a huge volume of rainfall, which allows for the city to kind of have a little bit more of a buffer and insurance against flooding," said Valerie Strassberg, global director of urban water infrastructure at the Nature Conservancy.
The new improvements would equip Sylvan Pond, the largest of the cemetery's four bodies of water, with a sensor linked to a weather station run by an algorithm.
When the forecast predicts heavy rains, the sensor will automatically release two inches of water into the sewer in advance, while it can still handle it.
This will create additional storage for the anticipated precipitation in the pond, according to Gothamist. When the rains are heavy, the system shuts down, thus preventing any additional water from flowing from the cemetery into the sewer system.
"There's a public benefit to the city for water quality improvements," said Melissa Enoch, managing director of green infrastructure, capital planning, and partnerships at the DEP. "But there's also a public benefit to the surrounding neighborhood, because Green-Wood is going to do what they can to keep the stormwater from running off of their property into the streets."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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