Clip: Let Water Go Where It Wants to Go

A September 2021 NY Times opinion piece “Let Water Go Where It Wants to Go” by one of my inspirations, Eric Sanderson points out the connections between historical ecology and the future city with a simple statement:

“Water will go where water has always gone”

– Eric Sanderson

I feel like I’ve been overcomplicating my explanations of the connections of climate change and hidden hydrology and Sanderson just nailed the concept in a few words. While the explanation is simple, the complex interactions between that hidden (buried) strata beneath the surface that have been erased from our urban areas and how these areas are poised to re-emerge in the urban sphere in dangerous ways as zones of flooding during extreme weather events is a topic worthy of more examination.

We have plenty of extreme events and flooding here in the Pacific Northwest to see this phenomenon play out in similar ways, causing water levels to rise in creeks or streams, or with high-precipitation rainfall that accumulates faster than it can drain in cities. Hurricanes, however, seem to be a special case in exacerbating issues just by the sheer scale and concentration of impacts in a short duration. These continual, cyclical events along the Eastern Seaboard ad Gulf Coast highlight the danger or urban flooding and as Sanderson points out, offers clear connections with the current flood events in locations of historical, now buried, waterways.

Hurricane Sandy opened many eyes to the risks. At the time there were a number of articles that caught my eye, particularly the idea that inundation and flooding at the margins were related to the idea of land filling and shoreline creation and the margins, replacing natural shorelines with hardened urban edges and bringing development out into these areas. In this June 2013 article in the Daily Mail, “How Hurricane Sandy flooded New York back to its 17th century shape as it inundated 400 years of reclaimed land.” the .

Looking at the extent of flooding in Hurricane Sandy (map below) and a number of studies on flood risk, it’s possible to do a quick mental overlay ad show the vulnerability related to the ‘made land’.

This is obviously not unique to New York City, and I’m interested in researching other places where flooding and made land has a similar correlation. In these cases, the conceptual connection started to take shape in the impacts of flooding at the edges, and how filled land can become a marker for shoreline flooding, which will inevitably be impacted more by sea-level rise in cities that have claimed¹ this land from their adjacent water bodies.

The most recent events, during Hurricane Ida, Sanderson points out, go even more fine grain to individual inland areas where historic creeks or wetlands intersect with, such as Central Park (where wetlands were removed in construction of the park) and various other areas, including fatal incidents of basement flooding, in areas of where creeks, streams, wetlands and tideflats existed even up the the early 1900s.

A specific example of flash flooding in the subway in Manhattan at 28th Street and 7th Avenue (see video on Twitter post which is bonkers for both the intensity of the flooding and the utter lack of reaction from New Yorkers watching on the platform). As the article mentions the location of the flooding: “Right in the middle of a wetland clearly shown on 18th-century maps, the headwaters for The Old Wreck, a stream that fed Sunfish Pond, on the south side of Murray Hill, before reaching the sea at Kip’s Bay.”

The takeaway of cause and effect is summed up by Sanderson:

“The city even has a map where the extreme flooding happens, compiled from 311 reports and official observations. It is, for all intents and purposes, a map of the old streams.”

The action here is simple – avoid damage and loss of life from these events, because they are not going to stop any time soon. Increase resilience (both social and eco/hydrological) helps, and as the OpEd mentions, there are many other socio-economic factors involved that increase risk. But Sanderson looks for solutions (the old ways of knowledge) and points out “The losses are mainly the result of our inability to read the landscape where we live and conceive fully what it means to live there. We need to see the landscape in new, by which I mean old, terms.”

Where we location development must respect the hydrological history, as we’ve seen time and time again our inability to overpower nature, and ultimately the failure of forgetting what we buried. Worth a read for the article is a great explication of a terribly absent land consciousness and ethic, but at a practical level, there are some hints that allow us to connect historical ecology to solutions such as making room for water and using Nature based solutions such as wetland restoration and tree planting, many of which are continuing to take a rightful place in climate and resilience plans.

Perhaps the ending, again, for all of our complex machinations, allows us to think more simply about the solution and find opportunities for this simple action:

“Let’s let the streams run free.”

Endnotes

1. Maybe my own rant, but there’s a whole series of posts and discuss related to the concept of ‘reclaiming’ land from the sea, which is the common parlance in this case. I do prefer ‘claiming’ and the idea of ‘made land’, as it’s really impossible to reclaim something you never possessed in the first place.

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Header image – NY Times – photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa – Associated Press