BRONX, N.Y. — Barbara Dolensek is back at the dock again to check on the water quality. An improvement could mean the oyster shells are doing their job.
What You Need To Know
- City Island was among the hardest hit neighborhoods in New York City during Supestorm Sandy
- After the historic storm, city and state lawmakers promised to flood proof East Bronx
- Since many post-Sandy projects have not happened, some residents are hoping to build storm surge barrier using oyster shells
“The reason they are so effective in dealing with storm surges and with cleaning the water, is that although an oyster is a tiny thing, it grows quickly and they tend to attach to each other, so that once a baby oyster attaches to another oyster they create these huge reefs that prevent storms from hitting the shoreline,” said Dolensek.
Along with some neighbors, she started the City Island Oyster Reef Project. It's an effort to repurpose shells discarded by local restaurants to build a reef that would protect the waterfront community from storm surges, like the one she will never forget during Superstorm Sandy. She says she hasn’t seen anything like it in the more than 40 years she’s lived here.
“Demolished the docks at the Stuyvesant Yacht Club, ruined the boats at the City Island boat yard, and did a lot of damage all over. Trees fell," said Dolensek.
City Island was among the hardest hit neighborhoods during the devastating and historic storm nine years ago. The overflow of the Long Island Sound and Eastchester Bay descended on the quaint community. Flames engulfed a neighborhood restaurant. The powerful winds played Ping-Pong with the boats and yachts, slamming them into docks. And while Sandy is in the past, the flooding problem remains. Any time it rains, streams take over the streets and pools form in the potholes.
"It feels as if the Bronx remains the forgotten borough,” said Matthew Cruz, District Manager of Community Board 10 in the Bronx.
Cruz says the city and state both promised big changes there after Sandy, but they have yet to happen. Specifically, the city’s Bridge Street project to build new and repair existing storm drains and the New York Rising initiative. The latter, a statewide reconstruction plan to flood proof neighborhoods in the wake of Sandy. It was crafted by now former governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration, but East Bronx waterfront never saw any of the funding. Cruz is hoping Governor Kathy Hochul, will adopt the plan and put it in motion.
“I know that projects such as sewer projects are not as marketable for city and state government but those projects save lives,” said Cruz.
A spokesman for the city Department of Design and Construction tells NY1 they plan to start building six storm and sanitary sewers on City Island in about one year. Dolensek says it’s a start.
“The entire system for sewers on City Island was installed in 1938," she noted.
Unless that happens. She’ll be here, with the oysters, doing her part.
“There’s only so much what we can do to protect what we have, but we just have to learn to live with it,” Dolensek said.