Silverman and fellow NYU engineering assistant professor Elizabeth Hénaff are working on a project to help the city figure out where its needs are greatest in updating infrastructure by creating sensors to install across the city that will monitor flooding in real time.
“There’s no rigorously collected, quantitative data about the nature, frequency and extent of these events,” Hénaff said.
So far, she said, the data reveals just how hyperlocal the floods can be: The project’s pilot areas, around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and in Queens’ Hamilton Beach neighborhood, on Jamaica Bay, didn’t register any flooding Thursday night.
Yet that shouldn’t reduce anyone’s level of alarm, Hénaff said.
“The sense of urgency is real. But it’s been real for a while,” she said. “What these kinds of drastic, almost violent events do is really bring it to the forefront as far as the impacts of this kind of flooding.”
