In the decades-old debate over how to reduce chronic flooding along the Passaic and Hackensack rivers, proposals have often involved huge, expensive infrastructure projects, such as a larger sewers or a $2.7 billion tunnel to carry the water out to sea. Now, there is a growing push for radically different, lower-cost alternatives — planting gardens on rooftops, installing grassy swales or depressions in highway medians and parking lots, adding rain gardens on front lawns and attaching rain barrels to residential gutters.
These varying strategies, collectively called green infrastructure, are all designed to do the same thing — capture rainwater before it ever reaches the storm drains, reducing the risk of flooding.
While many environmental initiatives are inherently controversial because they look to prohibit development or limit growth, there are generally few vocal opponents of green infrastructure. The principal obstacle remains the upfront cost to individual homeowners or developers who might consider embracing the strategy.
Proponents say those costs often cause people to overlook real long-term savings, since green roofs can better insulate a building, making it more energy-efficient, and the captured water can be used to irrigate lawns and run toilets, cutting operational costs. Green infrastructure can also increase property values and lower the huge costs many communities face to upgrade or replace aging sewer and water infrastructure.
Advocates say the obstacles of upfront costs can be alleviated by creative use of incentives, such as rebates and tax breaks.
Examples of green infrastructure have already sprung up in North Jersey. A green roof sprawls across the top of a parking garage in Fort Lee and another sits atop a cancer center at Hackensack University Medical Center. Despite the chronic flooding that has ravaged the state, however, New Jersey lags well behind many urban areas that have embraced green infrastructure, such as Philadelphia, Chicago and New York City.
“It’s something that would make a real difference in a place like Bergen County,” said William Weiss, whose Paramus landscaping company has installed green roofs on urban high-rises in the metropolitan area. “If office buildings had roof gardens to capture rainwater, it would reduce runoff and reduce consumption of treated drinking water.”
Because green infrastructure projects are by nature small in scale, no single project will eliminate flooding. But if used widely — picture green roofs on thousands of the flat-roofed buildings across the region, rain barrels and rain gardens on thousands of suburban properties, and swales along major roads and mall parking lots — these projects can certainly help reduce the extent of floods during heavy rains, experts say.
They will also cut down on the 23 billion gallons of raw sewage that spills into the state’s rivers and bays each year when old sewer systems become overwhelmed during heavy rains.
For instance, in New York City, officials estimate that widespread use of the strategy over the next two decades can cut sewer overflows nearly in half. In Chicago, green infrastructure projects in 2009 diverted more than 70 million gallons of storm water from the city’s combined sewer overflow system. New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection estimates that widespread use of green infrastructure could remove 10 percent of the storm runoff that overwhelms old sewer systems and contributes to discharges of raw sewage into rivers and bays. A single green roof can capture up to 70 percent of the rainwater that falls on a building, experts say.
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