Turner to Build $631M Flood Barrier in Lower Manhattan

New York City initiated the first phase of its defense against rising sea levels—and monster hurricanes like Superstorm Sandy—this week with the awarding of a $631M design and construction contract for what NYC is calling a “sea level resiliency project” on the waterfront in Lower Manhattan.

The Battery Park City (BPC) Authority named Turner Construction and its subsidiary E.E. Cruz as the primary design-build team for the North and West Battery Park City Resiliency project, which is the lion’s share of NYC’s plan to erect a series of flood barriers around the southern tip of Manhattan.

The design-build team also will include specialists from two cities with hundreds of years of experience designing canals, levies and sea walls to protect against North Sea flooding: Arcadis, an Amsterdam-based design and engineering consultancy, and Bjark Ingels Group, architects from Copenhagen. Montreal-based general contractor WSP also is part of the team.

The project will install 8,000 linear feet of flood and seepage barriers along the Lower Manhattan waterfront, including a “deployable” barrier that can be moved into place across West Street and extend the flood protection uptown to Tribeca.

The flood barriers will stretch from BPC’s North Esplanade to the waterfront of the district’s western edge, the lowest lying areas on Manhattan island—areas that were deluged with storm surge flooding during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Drainage improvements will be made in parkland and the 92-acre Esplanade neighborhood along the Hudson River.

Also planned as part of what is known as the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency plan is a $231M project to improve flood resistance in South Battery Park City, including the Staten Island Ferry terminal.

The South Battery Park City project, approved in August, will include adding about 13K SF to Wagner Park at the southern tip of Manhattan—and raising the entire park by more than 10 feet as a storm surge barrier.

NYC planners have embraced elevating parkland—adding tons of new soil to parks and re-landscaping them—as a key tool in protecting the waterfront in Manhattan, which has built a series of highly popular riverfront parks in recent decades.

Not all Manhattan residents are happy about plans to raise their parks: NIMBY backlash against the East Side Coastal Resiliency project’s plan to raise East River Park have included a demonstration where opponents chained themselves to a tree at City Hall.

The US Army Corps of Engineers in September unveiled its comprehensive plan to protect coastal areas of NYC and northern New Jersey from storm surges—a $52B infrastructure upgrade that will take 14 years to complete.

The plan, which still has to be approved by federal, state and local officials—a review process expected to take up to three years—calls for the construction of a network of storm-surge barrier gates in the waters off low-lying areas and sheet-pile reinforced dunes on land along the shoreline.

The barrier gates—to be lowered during storm surges—would be installed in Jamaica Bay, Coney Island Creek, Newtown Creek, the Gowanus Canal, Gerritsen Creek, Flushing Creek and in the waters between New Jersey and Staten Island.

The Army Corps was tasked with creating the plan for NYC in 2016. The plan was delayed when Congress cut off funding for it in 2020, then completed after funding was restored in the infrastructure bill passed at the end of 2021.