New York City announced a major stormwater resiliency initiative — one of the largest in scale to be undertaken at a private property in the city — at the Green-Wood Cemetery, a national historic landmark.
The project was made possible by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP’s) Resilient NYC Partner’s Program, as well as the new York State Environmental Facilities Coporation’s (EFC’s) Green Innovation Grant Program.
At 478 acres, Green-Wood is one of the largest contiguous tracts of privately-owned land in New York City. This provides an immense opportunity to alleviate the amount of runoff that flows into the city’s combined sewage system, thereby creating additional capacity to help manage the more intense storms brought on by climate change.
The project will manage an estimated 51 million gallons of stormwater runoff annually through a variety of green stormwater practices, such as a pond retrofit with smart sensors, the installation of bioretention basins along impervious surfaces, subsurface storage, and a new rainwater harvesting system.
The improvements are slated for completion by 2024 and will reduce localized flooding as well as the discharge of pollution into New York Harbor during intense storms. The rainwater harvesting system will enable Green-Wood Cemetery to reduce the amount of potable water the cemetery uses to irrigate its scenic landscape.
The project is the first to benefit from DEP’s $53 million Resilient NYC Partners program that engages private property owners across the five boroughs to green their properties and manage stormwater onsite. The Green-Wood Cemetery will be provided with a $600,000 grant from DEP for the stormwater project.
“We have already built more than 11,000 green infrastructure installations, mostly on public property, across the city to soak up stormwater, but in order to make New York City resilient to the severity of storms that climate change is creating, we require better management of the stormwater that falls on private property,” says New York City Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Rohit T. Aggarwala. “This is why we’re so pleased to join forces with New York State, The Nature Conservancy, and The Green-Wood Cemetery on this innovative green infrastructure project on private property that will manage enough water to fill more than 77 Olympic-sized swimming pools!”
Green-Wood first partnered with URBANSEA, an urban resilience analytics startup, to apply for and secure state funding. The Nature Conservancy then joined to provide technical consulting and coordination of funding streams. Brightstorm, an initiative of The Nature Conservancy, will manage the implementation of the project on behalf of Green-Wood Cemetery. A public procurement process will commence next month to engage multidisciplinary firms for the design of the project.
