Hoboken Flood Meeting Scheduled: Rebuild By Design Plan Nears Completion

Hoboken, NJ – It’s down to three choices, Hoboken.

City administrators announced that the NJ DEP will host a community meeting on Feb. 18 to introduce the “three build alternatives” that have emerged in Hoboken’s $230 million effort to reduce flooding in the municipality.

• See related article: Great (Flood) Wall Of Hoboken: 5 Things You Need To Know

The meeting will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Wallace School gymnasium, 1100 Willow Avenue in Hoboken.

The city’s overall flood prevention plan – known as “Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge: a Comprehensive Urban Water Strategy” - was developed by Dutch firm Office For Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).

See OMA’s final proposal here.

The overall plan has four major components such as “delaying” stormwater runoff, “storing” water using green infrastructure and upgrading Hoboken’s stormwater management system to help “discharge” floodwaters.

But it is the fourth aspect of the plan – “resisting” – which is causing some of the loudest uproar among Hoboken residents.

According to the DEP, the “resist” aspect of the plan includes a “combination of hard infrastructure (such as bulkheads, floodwalls and seawalls) and soft landscaping features (such as berms and/or levees which could be used as parks) that act as barriers along the coast during exceptionally high tide and/or storm surge events.”

Exactly where the barriers might be placed – and how high they may be – is still under consideration.

According to the NJ DEP, the overall plan will take place throughout the City of Hoboken and extend into Weehawken and Jersey City with the following boundaries: the Hudson River to the east; Baldwin Avenue (in Weehawken) to the north, the Palisades to the west, and 18th Street, Washington Boulevard and 14th Street (in Jersey City) to the south.

“State engineers have drawn up five configurations, including some that would place a wall on the waterfront and one that would have it wind along city streets and end on a block lined with brownstones,” The New York Times reported.

Proposed configurations include:

• A wall or gated jetty at Weehawken Cove
• A wall that stretches south down the middle of Garden Street
• A wall alongside the Observer Highway
• A gated dam in the water outside the Hoboken ferry terminal

Preliminary renderings of the five concepts and their proposed locations can be seen online here.

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Photo by the NJ DEP