The water’s edge in Hoboken and the tail-south end of Manhattan are nearly at Sea Level (by just a few feet).
River floods don’t begin at the mouth of the river where it meets a large body of water, like an ocean or lake. The Hudson River enters New York Bay which is connected to the Atalantic Ocean. When the Hudson Floods it does not begin at that point. It begins up stream, and then the collective additional rain and run off from the land at each point adds to waters already in the river.
And the Hudson River is only so wide. The water has to go somewhere.
Ah, but then they “brilliantly” started filling in the Hudson River on the Manhattan Side (WTC & Battery Park City), displacing tons of water, and the river’s space for that water. They also filled in more land on the lower east side of Manhattan, displacing waters of the east river and narrowing it’s channel between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Then they finally got one of the rare but not unnatural storms that brought down in a short time a lot more water than storms usually do. And lower Manhattan flooded - surprise, surprise.
On the Jersey side they got rid of acres of swampy green space, building the sports complex right where wet lands used to help shelter places along the Hackensak River like Little Ferry. Surprise, surprise when Sandy hit and Little Ferry was flooded maybe worse than before.
My question is how do we make PUBLIC officials pay for the consequences of THEIR actions.
Everybody understood why the flooding occurred; there is a reason there is little to no housing in the Meadowlands. In the 1950s a storm broke through the dike holding the Hackensack River from the actual “meadows” (which were grass fields with trees); you can still see many sections of the dike wall from the county park in Secaucus, and at low tide you can still see the tree stumps poking out of the mudflats. Before that, they really were “meadows” instead of a swamp.
My town built a Wal-Mart in the swamp; I’m glad they did. We got to use bad land, and it isn’t in a residential neighborhood.