NYC students make ‘shore’ Coney Island is safe from storms by planting grasses

(Students walking off of a school bus and listening to the speaker talk)

(FADE IN playful music)

Elise Herschlag, Wetlands Volunteer Associate, NYC Parks: We’re all going to grab equipment. Oh, we’re also going to grab buckets of grass. So, I don’t want to see any empty hands. It’s a team effort, so everybody needs to grab something.

Emily Fano: What you guys are going to be doing today is super important because you are going to be planting the beach grasses to help protect this community from future storms.

Emily Fano: Today, we are hosting three schools from Coney Island at Coney Island Creek Park… 

(LOWER THIRD: Emily Fano, RiSC Senior Manager, National Wildlife Federation)

Emily Fano: …And we’re here because we actually are funded to be here by NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency]. The students are here planting dune grass along the dunes at this park to stabilize the dunes with beach grass. 

(Speaking to a group of students)

Emily Fano: And the Latin name for those grasses is Ammophila breviligulata. Does anyone want to try to pronounce that?

Students: Ammophila breviligulata

Emily Fano: Ammophila breviligulata

Emily Fano: It’s a hearty grass, native grass…

(IMAGES: Drawing of American beach grass roots. Another drawing of horizontally spread out beach grass roots. )

Emily Fano: …that has very, very long roots that go about 13 feet deep into the ground and spread out in the opposite direction horizontally and form these underground networks of root systems that hold the sand in place. So what we’re trying to do is prevent the dunes from washing sand into people’s homes during coastal events.

(FADE OUT playful music)

(FADE IN ominous music)

(Archival footage: Flooding in Staten Island, emergency vehicles driving through water, NOAA footage of Hurricane Sandy from aerial view)

Emily Fano: The folks living along Bayview Avenue over here got about 10 feet of water into their homes and it was badly damaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012. And it was really devastating for the folks living here. And we’re planting these grasses to try to shore up some of this sand so that that doesn’t happen again. 

(FADE IN playful music)

(Students and teachers walking toward beach with tools for planting dune grass)

Teacher: Is this your first time at a beach? In New York? Well, great! You can see, look at the water, you can see the bridge right there.

(Students planting dune grasses with shovels and dibble bars)

Sheldan Clerge: I love gardening and I love working my hands…

(LOWER THIRD: Sheldan Clerge, senior, Rachel Carson High School for Coastal Studies)

Sheldan Clerge: …It’s been really fun and I feel like I’m, you know, doing my part to help the environment. I feel like the outcome of this is going to really help a lot of people living here. People in Coney Island, especially, are still recovering from Sandy till this day. We take so much from the earth, I feel like it’s our job, like, our instinct duty to, like, give back and kind of just replenish it so we have this natural balance.

Katherine Moy: They help, like, the water and the sand not get onto the streets. Like when Sandy came, a lot of the homes around the beaches got affected by it. 

(LOWER THIRD: Katherine Moy, sophomore, John Dewey High School)

Katherine Moy: Many of their basements were flooded. A lot of things are lost. It was just a really bad time. So by planting these, we’re basically helping solve that problem for if there’s a next storm to happen.

Emily Fano: What we’d love to do is get hundreds of thousands of plants planted here so that we can create a very long living shoreline with dunes that can protect this community. 

Emily Fano: Living shorelines are essentially — it’s green infrastructure, things like dunes, wetlands, marsh grasses, nature-based features that were often here before human development.

John Delgado: This grass here in particular came from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn… 

(LOWER THIRD: John Delgado, Wetlands Stewardship Coordinator, NYC Parks)

John Delgado: …And some of the students who are here today actually helped bundle it for us and process it. So these, like, nice, neat little bundles, they helped us like put it in sand, chop off the tops and actually help us separate the dead material from, the, what’s viable.

Hannah O’Leary: All the dune grass that you see in the back and over here, that’s a little more established, that’s all dune grass that we planted last year during this event… 

(LOWER THIRD: Hannah O’Leary, teacher, Rachel Carson High School for Coastal Studies)

Hannah O’Leary: …And so hopefully we get to come back in September and see that all of this has become established. 

(Sand spilling over from side of road into the streets)

Hannah O’Leary: As we were driving in, you could see that this street here was full of sand, right?

Hannah O’Leary: So anywhere where the dune grass is not established, you see that sand moving because they are transient dunes, right, they’re meant to move. But we built houses and infrastructure there and don’t want it to move anymore. 

Hannah O’Leary: I think it’s a really great opportunity for them to see a blank dune, and then when they leave, see a dune that’s covered in dune grass, right. They did something today instead of feeling like, ‘Oh, I emailed my representative and maybe they’ll get back to me,’ I saved this dune with my classmates today.

(Student planting a stalk of dune grass)

(FADE OUT playful music)