Like many communities skirting the U.S. coastline, Hoboken, New Jersey, wasn’t built on solid ground.
Many of its charming brick buildings, historic piers, and apartment towers stand atop what was once a low-lying tidal marsh — a grassy, muddy buffer along the Hudson River, designed by nature to absorb high tides and storm surge like a sponge.
Early developers drained the marshlands in the 1800s to make way for modern Hoboken: the birthplace of singer Frank Sinatra, the location of TLC’s Cake Boss, and home to 53,000 people packed within the 1.25-square-mile city limit. Across the river, Manhattan’s glassy skyscrapers sparkle in the summer sunlight.
But Hoboken has never forgotten its marshy roots. Heavy rain events and storms routinely cause serious flooding here, only now the water buries streets, clogs sewers, damages homes, and fills train stations. Going forward, this problem will likely get much worse due to sea level rise, which allows water to more readily pour into Hoboken’s bathtub-shaped topography.
“We are a city that’s on the frontlines of climate change,” Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer said by phone one sweltering July afternoon. She spoke from City Hall, an imposing white-and-brown building just blocks from the waterfront.
This reality became painfully clear for Hoboken when, on Oct. 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge put around 80 percent of the city underwater, leaving most residents without power for weeks. Sandy caused more than $100 million in private property damages in this small community, while in neighboring New York City, 48 people lost their lives.
Hoboken’s flooding problems have been a central theme during Zimmer’s eight years as mayor. She’s routinely battled with inundated streets and buildings, grappled with the aftermath of Sandy, and occasionally sparred with residents over how to best defend Hoboken from the encroaching effects of human-caused global warming.
Zimmer has also led efforts to begin transforming Hoboken into a more resilient city, one that can soak up stormwater with rain gardens and porous pavement, or hold back deluges with underground chambers and floodgates. She’s pushed to lift electrical substations and emergency vehicles out of harm’s way and to expand sewage systems overwhelmed by ever more stormwater.
In June, she announced she won’t seek re-election in November. Instead, she’ll focus full-time on helping other cities fight climate change, though she doesn’t know how or where just yet. She said the Trump administration’s sweeping rollback of federal climate policy is a big reason she’s going all-in on climate.
“Right now, when we lack leadership at the federal level, it’s all the more important that action is being taken on the local level,” the 49-year-old mayor said. “I feel like my calling is to go out and do as much as I can on that front: helping other communities be as resilient and sustainable as possible going forward.”
Henk Ovink, a Dutch water-management expert who worked closely with Zimmer on post-Sandy rebuilding efforts, said Zimmer is a “dynamic force” in this arena. The two first met in Hoboken in 2013, shortly before Ovink became an advisor to then President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Task Force.
Right away, “she started to talk about the challenges and opportunities to rebuild the city in a way that it would actually be able to deal with that future uncertainty,” Ovink recalled by phone from the Netherlands, where he’s now the nation’s special envoy for international water affairs.
“I hope she’s going to step out and be an active voice and partner in our global efforts to deal with these challenges,” he said.
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