In 2024, the State of New York announced the completion of Living Breakwaters, a project designed to improve coastal resilience by decreasing the impact of storm waves and erosion along the coast of Staten Island.
The 2,400 linear feet of breakwaters will mitigate risk to homes and businesses across the low-lying coastal community of Tottenville on the southern shore of Staten Island.
Living Breakwaters combines coastal resilience measures and habitat enhancement to create a network of nature-based infrastructure that is designed to reduce risk to the shoreline and improve the aquatic ecosystem of Raritan Bay.
The project consists of eight partially submerged structures made of armor stone and ecologically enhanced concrete units that will break storm waves, decrease erosion, and help restore the beach along Conference House Park.
Extensive hydrodynamic modeling was used to design the breakwaters to reduce the strength of waves reaching buildings and roads near the coast to below three feet in height.
The breakwaters are designed to slow sediment flowing along the shore to help reverse the impacts of decades of erosion, enabling the beach to build back and widen over time.
The breakwaters are also designed to create aquatic habitats, increase biodiversity and restore ecosystem benefits once provided by oyster reefs in Raritan Bay.
The breakwaters design includes with features to increase habitat complexity and offer opportunities for diverse marine life to thrive. On the ocean facing sides of the breakwaters are rocky protrusions known as “reef ridges” as well as “reef streets”, which are the narrow spaces between the reef ridges.
Wildlife has already started to inhabit the breakwaters including shore birds, seals, crabs, mussels, barnacles, sea sponges, and a variety of fish species. Live oyster installation is expected to be completed by 2027.
Living Breakwaters was proposed and designed by a team of landscape architects, engineers, and ecologists led by SCAPE Landscape Architecture. The team worked with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) to review the proposed outcomes and ways to monitor the shoreline change over time.
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