Higher Ground: How New York is raising a park to hold back the sea

In just 48 hours, 44 people were killed, nearly two million New Yorkers lost power, and 6,500 patients were evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes.

New York swore: never again.

But as climate change threatened to bring in ever more extreme weather, and to dangerously raise sea levels around the coastal city, “never again” meant building ambitious resiliency infrastructure all along the city’s coastline.

Fourteen years after Sandy, UN News visited one section of the multibillion-dollar project: the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) Project.

© NYCDDC Heavy equipment is used in the construction of flood defences along the East River in New York City.

What lies beneath

North of the Williamsburg Bridge, a white crane hoists buckets of fill off a barge and tips them into waiting earth movers.…