A long-running effort to make the city’s coastal communities better able to withstand major climate-related storms is starting to show true signs of progress.

“That’s my Sandy line,” said Howard Beach resident Betty Braton.

It has been more than a decade since Hurricane Sandy devastated the Howard Beach community in Queens where Braton lives.

Eight feet of flood water submerged much of Braton's waterfront home during the storm.

“Virtually every house in this community was flooded during Sandy,” Braton said.

On Wednesday, Braton, other community members and elected city officials toured a construction project designed to mitigate the impact of future flooding on Old Howard Beach next to the Charles Memorial Park.

“The pipe sits on top and that all gets locked in with the concrete, so there’s going to be no settlement,” said Nicholas Gibson of Hunter Roberts Construction Group.

A construction crew showed Braton, who is the chair of Queens Community Board 10, an 85-foot-long crown wall and footing to protect against rising sea levels, along with a manhole that will absorb rising water from Jamaica Bay.

It’s part of the city’s $100 million Raised Shorelines project — which was started under Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016 — that aims to decrease the impact of rising sea levels and erosion caused by climate change.

“Going across the canal here, that community is seeing flooding every month,” Braton said. “We’ve seen flooding during times when there’s no flood at all.”

The community is also experiencing tidal flooding and inundation, which has risen over the years, according to Victoria Cerullo, the acting executive director of the Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice.

Officials began the project after studying more than 500 miles of coastal vulnerabilities across the city.

“The study found several areas of coastal flooding that are either being experienced now or are projected to flood in the 2050s,” said Jennifer Cass, the senior vice president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

The Old Howard Beach location is one of four such sites in Queens and Staten Island, though none of the other three are as far along as the Old Howard Beach location, city officials say.

The city says the other three sites in Queens and Staten Island are slower to start due to other work that has to be done before the work on those sites can get underway.

The city estimates that the crown wall footing and the rest of the raised shoreline in Howard Beach will be completed by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, opinions of the project from residents in the neighborhood range from not knowing much about it to thinking it is taking too long to construct.

Braton does not believe it will prevent all future flooding, but she does think it will make future flooding less severe.

“This is definitely a needed project and it’s a project that’s going in the first direction and we’re very appreciative of it,” Braton said.

Meanwhile, the project is part of a larger $20 billion citywide climate resiliency project.

The twin goals of the effort are to make the city safer during extreme weather in the short-term, while addressing long-term work to address rising sea levels.