Waste Water Treatment Facility
Oakwood Beach Waste Water Treatment Plant
Hurricane Sandy | New York
Staten Island’s position in New York City’s lower harbor left it particularly vulnerable to flooding when Hurricane Sandy reached its shores. Storm surges reached upwards of 12 feet, washing away homes and inundating critical infrastructure. The Oakwood Beach wastewater treatment plant – a facility serving over 240,000 residents in the southern portion of Staten Island, backed-up when flood waters overwhelmed the site. As a Civil Engineer assigned to Sandy recovery efforts, I reviewed plans to repair the facility and incorporate hazard mitigation measures. The plant needed to be elevated to just over 19 feet to prevent similar catastrophic malfunctioning in the future. However, the real challenge was coordinating recovery plans among multiple stakeholders with various interests. When I began working on the project, the Army Corp of Engineers had already developed an approved design for a berm and flood walls, so the repair and mitigation designs needed to compliment theirs, while also meeting the rules and regulations established by the Office of Management & Budget, the State of New York, and the Department of Environmental Protection, among others. Coordination and final buy in took approximately two and a half years, however, our deliberate approach to meet the standards of all parties, ultimately paid off. By 2018, $72 million was obligated to restore and elevate the Oakwood Beach wastewater treatment plant.