When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the neighborhood of Hoffman Triangle was overwhelmed by 6 feet of water. But it doesn’t take a hurricane to make this wedge in the center of the city flood. The sidewalks, where they exist, are buckled, cracked, and overgrown from past deluges. Every time it rains, the narrow streets become rivers, the potholes tiny lakes. When the water comes — which it does, and will continue to — it makes navigating Hoffman by foot or by car feel like an obstacle course.
Dana Eness expertly navigates that gauntlet. The executive director of the Urban Conservancy, a New Orleans nonprofit that provides resources related to environmental stewardship, knows the neighborhood well. From her car, she can identify what material was used to make a particular parking lot, which homes have the best drainage systems, and which native plants, from muhly grass to sweetbay magnolias, would best serve the drainage or water management needs of each yard. She’s part of a grassroots coalition called Umbrella working to keep Hoffman relatively dry — no mean feat in a city that averages over 60 inches of rain a year — using landscaping interventions that can be implemented one yard at a time. “You can do two things at once,” says Eness. “You can create space for water to go, and, if you’re thoughtful about it, you can create space within society for people who are being shut out economically.” New Orleans is in the midst of a green infrastructure revolution, and in smaller neighborhoods like Hoffman Triangle, residents are leading the way, house by house, block by block. Along oak-lined South Galvez Street, Eness pulls over in front of Stronger Hope Baptist Church. It’s one of roughly 17 congregations in the neighborhood, which sits on less than a square mile. She points out a small rain garden the Umbrella coalition constructed to capture runoff from the church parking lot. Once, this was nothing more than ragged tufts of grass sprouting up from a broad swath of concrete. Now, there’s rich mulch with manicured rows of shrubs and clean, permeable pavement in the driveway. It’s been raining all week, and the new garden is soaked through, but the sidewalk and driveway are dry. The front yards of the homes across the road, meanwhile, are swamped with several inches of water. For many New Orleanians, water management isn’t about billion-dollar levees or century-old pumps. It’s about small, nature-based projects like that rain garden or pavement that allows water to soak in, new wetlands, or streets lined with trees. These installations reduce the burden on the city’s aging, overwhelmed drainage system and can do a lot toward improving the quality of life for residents fed up with routine flooding. But as the neighborhood of Hoffman Triangle has shown, flood resilience takes a village. Many of the Umbrella projects are constructed by landscaping firms owned and operated by New Orleans locals using this green revolution as an opportunity to bring in jobs and money. And by harnessing the power of the community, it can be done cheaply and effectively when time is running out for adaptation.Year-round, New Orleanians deal with a chronic kind of inundation researchers vaguely call “urban flooding.” Overtaxed pipes back up, roadside ditches fill, and water pools, creating mosquito breeding grounds and blocking access to sidewalks and front steps. It eats away at foundations, damages cars, and allows mold and mildew to flourish.
For over a century, the city’s rapid, haphazard development created vast landscapes of pavement and concrete, which can’t effectively absorb water. Increasingly intense storms linked to climate change have brought one swift inundation after another. No longer able to soak into the ground, runoff from rainstorms flows into aging stormwater pipes, picking up all kinds of junk from fertilizer residue to miscellaneous litter along the way. Much of New Orleans lies in a shallow bowl that dips below sea level, so to prevent flooding, every drop of water must be siphoned into Lake Pontchartrain through an elaborate system of canals and pumps. That leaves the underlying clay soils parched and brittle, unable to support the weight of the city’s infrastructure. As a result, New Orleans sinks a little lower every year. Meagan Williams, an engineer at the Department of Public Works, compares the soil under the city to a sponge: When it rains, the sponge expands; wring the water out, and it shrivels and hardens. To compound the sponge problem, the city’s so-called “gray” infrastructure — the existing network of concrete pipes, pumps, and levees — isn’t always reliable. During floods in August 2017, several pumps failed. One investigation found that over 11,000 of the city’s catch basins were clogged by debris. Old-fashioned neglect has also created areas that Todd Reynolds, executive director of the nonprofit Groundwork New Orleans, calls “drainage deserts.” On South Johnson Street in Hoffman, for] example, there are four blocks without a single catch basin. “When it rains, every corner has two feet of water on it,” Reynolds says of these undeveloped stretches. “People shouldn’t have to live that way.”In 2016, New Orleans secured over $140 million in funding through the federal government to develop a multi-faceted “resilience district” in one of the city’s largest neighborhoods. There’s $3 million for workforce development (which Morse’s Thrive is managing), a Community Adaptation Program that installs projects for homeowners, and over 8 miles of streets and canals that will be transformed into blue and green corridors of open space. At the same time, the city is undertaking its largest investment ever in roadwork, with $2.2 billion across 200 projects that include green infrastructure elements wherever possible.
It’s hard to compare the scale of grassroots effort to the city’s plans, or even what is needed overall to shore up New Orleans against the rising seas of the 21st century. Yet, everyone agrees that there’s a great need for the kind of house-by-house, neighborhood-level adaptation that Umbrella facilitates. Colleen McHugh, a planner at the Water Institute of the Gulf, adds that grassroots efforts bring stability. Every time a new mayor comes on board, McHugh says, “you have a bunch of folks who started something, leave, and move on.” Community groups are more nimble, though, and keep momentum going through those transitions. Williams, from the Department of Public Works, says that the city needs people working at every level to make green infrastructure work. Grassroots groups, she says, provide a “huge service” for individual residents. As the Stormwater Program Manager for the entire city, she adds that groups like Umbrella “shine a light on some of the boots-on-the-ground issues” like where it regularly floods, what’s working, and what’s not. Of course, there are challenges. Projects on public property require permits that can be cumbersome to acquire. Todd Reynolds, from Groundwork, says it’s taken him years in some cases to get approval. The original design for Coach’s house on South Johnson Street, for example, originally envisioned putting permeable pavement in the right-of-way in front of his house, but the city blocked it because it interfered with its planned roadwork. Then there’s the question of maintenance. Green infrastructure saves money down the line, but it can require more routine maintenance, such as nurturing seedlings as their roots take hold. On paper, it’s straightforward: The homeowner is responsible for upkeep, like keeping native plants alive, dumping out rain barrels, or clearing drains. But in a neighborhood like Hoffman with many older and fixed-income residents, that means carefully designing projects that owners will be able to manage physically and financially. Eness has taken to driving around with trash bags in her trunk to collect litter and keep projects clean. Eness recently drove by a newly constructed home on Jackson Avenue where the Umbrella coalition had put in a permeable driveway to help direct water away from the structure. She hopes to see more projects like that in the future, where green infrastructure is incorporated into new constructions, to spare future residents the stress and cost of flood management. Without better long-term strategies and dedicated funding for maintenance, everyone agrees that no acres of rain gardens or miles of green corridors will solve the flooding problem. There will also always be rainstorms that overwhelm the system, and green infrastructure alone won’t save the city from rising seas, intensifying storms, and sinking streets. As Hoffman resident Coach says: “The water got to go somewhere. You got to live with it.”This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How New Orleans neighborhoods are using nature to reduce flooding on Jun 8, 2022.