If we get another Sandy or another Irene, we’re gonna be in big trouble. Any area that already struggles to contain stormwater and / or already has industrial sites is gonna have problems.

I just had the opportunity to speak with Beryl Thurman as part of organizing the northeast Barnraising and wanted to share some notes (any transcription errors are mine) as well as a link to this video, published less than a year and a half ago by the Northshore Waterfront Conservancy, which describes how people's health is connected to the interaction of water, land, and contamination: http://sinorthshoreresilience.org/?p=60 and also:

• Wetlands protect Staten Island's northshore environmental justice community from flooding, and by extension from the contaminants from nearby contaminated soil that floodwaters may carry onto people's property, where they could walk on them and carry them into their home.

• NYDEC finally admitted that simply mapping privately owned wetlands in their system does not protect them. Mapping wetlands puts up additional permitting requirements, but if you are willing to go through the paperwork, you can still develop on top of the wetlands.

• Since NYDEC doesn’t have the legal ability to protect these wetlands, as advocates we need to fight for our agencies to have this power.

• For wetlands under 12.4 acres, if a developer wants to build on them, there’s virtually nothing that can be done unless NYS or NYC wants to purchase them outright.

• Seasonal wetlands pop up after snow melt or during rainy season, then the surface water dries up and only the land is damp.

• We became part of a coalition of other groups on the island because wetlands, especially where the Matrix Warehouse is being built, was pivotal in keeping the EJ community from flooding during Sandy. Some of the homes in this area were also built on wetlands, and that’s where the water will go -- into people's homes. Why? To build a BJs and a strip mall.

• Across the other side of the highway, Amazon is also building a warehouse on our wetlands. If you are building on these properties with wetlands, you will have a containment area for some of the water, but you can’t contain all of it, so where is that water going to go? The powers that be dismiss these questions. There's so much discussion about needing to improve the resilience of NYC to climate change, yet we’re still developing on wetlands.

• We don’t have a new FEMA flood map yet, but by the time it comes out, these facilities will be built, and homeowners will end up bearing the brunt. Right now homeowners in this area don’t have to pay flood insurance, but after this urban development occurs on top of the wetlands that were absorbing water, the flood zone will expand. They’ll end up having to pay twice - once for their home, and once for the entire Condos Owner Association. Two of these associations are trying to figure out what the cost might end up being.

• Regarding frogs: They’ve just found some rare leopard tree frogs on the Matrix Warehouse property, and the impact and destruction to their habitat would potentially derail this development. Riverkeeper and Baykeeper (?) are working together to see if they can save 2000-5000 acres of wetlands for this leopard tree frog.

• Dating from the time we took the boat tour and flew kites to aerially image the shoreline (2014) , we’ve been following the issue of property erosion happening on shorelines that do not have a bulkhead. The Arthur Daniel Midland radioactive site (uranium) does not have a bulkhead. A recent report from Army Corps of Engineers states that some of the radioactivity from that site has made its way into the adjacent marine sediments.

• This is typical of a lack of containment around contaminated sites while they are waiting for a future possible clean-up. Until properties are de-contaminated, owners and government need to screen them, plant them with plants, cover the margins in haybales — all these methods prevent the soil-bound contamination from becoming airborne or migrating with rainwater to cross the street to where you are living and contact it. NYC, NYS, and EPA are all stewarding contaminated sites in Staten Island. Both NYC and NYS have contaminated sites that fall under the brownfield program. NYC is on the cheap site only requiring property owners to do partial and not complete remediation — which is central to the problem.