Governor Kathy Hochul visited the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in Westchester County on Sept. 3, going to Yonkers and then to Mamaroneck. The Governor visted a flooded portion of Warburton Avenue in Yonkers that resulted in a landslilde of a parking lot and a cancellation of MTA service on the Hudson River line.
“I can commit here today that the state will provide the resources for this project to get the engineering and design phase underway. My heart goes out to the first responders here representing those all over the State of New York. They teamed up with our State Police to literally save people from the raging waters that had turned their streets into rivers,” said Hochul.
“So when people talk about these 500-year events, 1,000-year events, none of us are buying it anymore. Mother Nature has changed because of what man has done – man-made, man-induced climate change, the extent of greenhouse gases that have destroyed our environment have left us vulnerable, and we all stand together – local, state, and federal officials – to build the resiliency while we can, but also to address the specter of climate change with a greater sense of urgency because the future of climate change is right now,” said Hochul, who also visited Mamaroneck with both U.S. Senators from NY, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Both Schumer and Gillibrand pointed to a study by the U.S. Corps of Engineers for Mamaroneck, which has been flooding out during every recent storm. “Though the study was completed and we successfully fought for construction to be authorized and it was in the 2018 Water Infrastructure Act, I put it in there with Senator Gillibrand’s help, the Trump administration in another one of their vicious moves, because it was anti-New York, decided not to move forward with construction,” Schumer said.
“They disregarded the loss of human life here, they disregarded the destruction to the village, the cost to the village and the taxpayers, the cost to the small businesspeople, they just said ‘no.’ They let many other projects in other states go forward in states that were friendlier to them.”
The project would involve deepening the Mamaroneck River and Sheldrake River and buidling breakwater walls along the Sound Shore. “The construction of the Mamaroneck and Sheldrake River Flood Risk Management Project is critically important to the families of the village, to the local economy and the future of the community,” Gillibrand said. “We have been hit by these severe weather storms constantly, constantly over the last decade. This country is being devastated from flooding, from tornados, from wildfires. This is the impact of global climate change on our new normal and it is devastating, it is heartbreaking, it is deadly.”
