Living in Hoboken, New Jersey isn’t just the home of Frank Sinatra, the zipper and America’s first Blimpie, but on days and nights of torrential downpours, it’s a city known for its undeveloped landscape that has made it vulnerable to heavy flooding. I, myself, live in the Fourth Ward of Hoboken, a western uptown area of the city that becomes prone to flood issues that result in wet basements, flooded vehicles and insanely tough commutes to NYC. The only action that the city council has done so far is provide flood advisories and $5 overnight parking discounts in local parking garages. There must be ways we can design a system that takes care of this issue and after visiting the small but mountainous of Pisac, Peru, I became amazed out how such a tiny village has designed a system for sustaining floods.

When I first arrived in Pisac, I was blessed with heavy rain and no rain coat. As I walked into the village, I headed for shelter at a local cafe and as I waited for the rain to stop, the first thing I noticed was a rush of water gushing elegantly through beautifully-designed narrow irrigation canals. As I continued to explore the city, I was amazed at how simple and smart their solution was for preventing flood. Curious as to how extensive this network of street irrigation was, I followed each path and realized that every pathway of the village was connected into this web of canals and all directly draining to a local neighboring farm land. (see below)

One of my favorite parts of their design is the intelligent linking of paths between the intersections of streets. It seems that they have designed this intersection to support the flow of water that may travel from different parts of the land and therefore the design of this irrigation must be flexible enough to transport in one fluid direction towards the farm land.

And to add more flavor to the design of their irrigation, they’ve crafted these intricate snake heads at the end of each pathway. Perhaps this is a nice way to add a playfulness to the design and a solution for marrying the system as both utility and art.

Now how can we take this design, learn from it and apply it to the Hoboken flooding problem? It is important to state how this flooding occurs in Hoboken. Sewer systems in this city only have a finite amount of water that they can hold, and almost all of this storage volume is found in the pipes. Once the pipes are full, the water level in the sewer/manholes increases very rapidly as the small volume of the manholes is filled. The reason that the water level increases is simply because the water has nowhere else to go. However, once the water level reaches street level in one manhole, this volume restriction is gone. Water is then able to fill all of the bowls and depressions on the land surface, which may have a very large volume. In such a system, the higher elevation areas will not flood until all of the lower elevation areas are filled with water. Hence, even though a majority of Hoboken is below the normal storm high tide, flooding may only be contained to only those lowest lying areas.

Man-made alterations of the land not only lead to flooding, but also result in devastating consequences for the local environment. For instance, all of Hoboken’s rainwater and sewage is pumped to the treatment plant in the city’s northwest corner. There, the wastewater is treated along with the runoff water and then the resulting clean water is pumped into the Hudson River through a pipe that empties into Weehawken Cove.

Joan Abel, a local architect in Hoboken proposes a radical rainwater management plan using a constructed that wetland allows water to percolate through the soil and evaporate into the air. Ultimately, the marshes are naturally efficient at absorbing rainwater. Similar to Pisac’s irrigation system, there would be a more natural ecosystem that mimic’s nature’s intention to some degree and alleviating the additional strain that flood rain puts on sewage plant treatment. Abel’s plan is to runoff water to these surrounding wetlands via a system of canals that span across the street grids of Hoboken.

Although this would be the more natural way of irrigating flood waters, Hoboken has already broken ground this past April for the construction of multiple pump stations. The much awaited flood relief system will relieve 80% of flood problems and pump at least 100 million gallons of water during a severe rain storm. I can’t wait till the day I don’t need a canoe to get to my bus stop during these disastrous Hoboken floods.