The Boston Globe
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy ripped by way of Alex Berkowitz’s hometown of Rockaway Seashore in Queens, N.Y.
Her neighborhood, a thriving neighborhood the place youngsters performed on the road and the aged walked their canine, was all of the sudden coated in grey silt.
“It was a distinction of night time and day,” she recalled. “I bear in mind considering, I by no means need anybody to ever expertise this.”
Eleven years later, her concept that shaped within the aftermath of the storm has germinated into an organization that goals to guard coastal areas from devastating storm surge. Berkowitz based Coastal Safety Options, an organization engaged on constructing Wavebreakers: constructions floating offshore that act like a wave pace bump to lower the peak and velocity of harmful waves. She runs the corporate herself and has raised cash from Harvard Innovation Labs in addition to non-public funders. She wouldn’t disclose the whole quantity raised.
The concept of a wave-dampening equipment will not be new, however what’s new is the aim and the size of the Wavebreaker. Floating breakwaters as we speak are primarily used for lakes and marinas, whereas this construction is particularly constructed for the ocean and is for use for climate-aggravated hurricanes and storms.
“For the final 70 years, the world has been targeted on concrete limitations like concrete partitions, which aren’t sustainable and value thousands and thousands of {dollars} and years to construct,” Berkowitz mentioned. “Conventional strategies are out of date, and we have to assume out of the field if we’re going to proceed to dwell on the coast sooner or later.”
When you had simply checked out Berkowitz’s résumé 4 years in the past, it could be laborious to consider that somebody with a bachelor’s diploma in visible arts — and no background in engineering in any way — would design a expertise that has the potential to guard complete swaths of susceptible coastal communities. However her private expertise — notably the sensation of shock after her neighborhood was hit by Hurricane Sandy — has been fueling her ardour to maintain going.
“I had a really sturdy imaginative and prescient for what it ought to be,” she mentioned. “I began modeling it in a 3D mannequin software program and did exams in my bathtub with [3D-printed] fashions.”
As for her lack of expertise as an engineer or biologist?
“I remind myself that Thomas Edison didn’t have any formal coaching or training in engineering,” Berkowitz mentioned. “It was a mixture of instinct and iteration that drove him to world-changing innovations.”
She utilized to a grasp’s program at the Harvard Graduate Faculty of Design along with her thought in 2018. Throughout her time there, with the steering of a number of engineers, enterprise specialists, architects, and biologists, Berkowitz was capable of design the Wavebreaker. Final yr, she utilized to hitch the Harvard Innovation Labs and shortly after she received the Harvard President’s Innovation Award. She additionally visited the Netherlands final summer time to tour flood-protection websites and met with Delft College of Expertise specialists and different leaders in coastal flood mitigation.
Up to now, Coastal Safety Options has designed the expertise — 300-foot extensive rotating cylinders, half submerged in water — and can start testing its first prototype this fall at a flume facility on the College of Oregon. The constructions require no energy, as an alternative function utilizing easy mechanical rules. When a big wave hits the Wavebreaker, the construction bears the brunt of the wave, which rolls over the grooves and panels of the construction, in the end dissipating the wave. The expertise is patent-pending.
Rebekah Emanuel, the pinnacle of Harvard’s Entrepreneurship Circle, mentioned that Coastal Safety Options has big potential due to the constructions’ low price and applicability. Every is estimated to price $80,000, with a yearly upkeep payment various on the dimensions of the set up. For a metropolis like Boston, that payment can be roughly $50,000. That’s considerably cheaper than different measures of flood mitigation like The Massive U undertaking in New York ($1.5 billion) or the 20-foot-tall sea wall in Miami ($6 billion).
“Adaptation will not be a simple space to work in,” Emanuel mentioned. “Alex’s resolution is form of unbelievable as a result of it’s orders of magnitude cheaper, you’ll be able to manufacture it rapidly, you’ll be able to deploy it rapidly, and one of many issues that I believe matter probably the most is you could transfer it to new areas across the coast as dangers change.”
Emanuel additionally highlighted how Berkowitz’s expertise equips her to strategy these issues from a recent angle.
“She is a girl in a discipline that historically has only a few ladies,” she mentioned. “She brings a really cross-sector set of insights and views. She’s not occupied with it simply as an engineer or simply as a municipal planner, or simply as an environmentalist.”
Harvard Entrepreneurship Circle’s 2023 cohort, which incorporates Berkowitz, has two-thirds of its groups led by ladies or individuals of coloration. That variety issues, Emanuel defined, when local weather options are designed to assist individuals throughout cultures and international locations.
Berkowitz envisions her major clients to be municipalities who’re investing in defending their coastal areas. For now, she is starting to achieve out to state and native governments in coastal New England about putting in the Wavebreaker alongside their coastlines. Berkowitz has additionally been invited to current her undertaking on the Clinton World Initiative later this month.
“I really feel that we’re at a essential time in human historical past the place we’ve got completed a lot injury to the planet that a few of that’s irreversible,” she mentioned. “However it’s as much as people to provide you with options so we are able to proceed to dwell with a semblance of normalcy. Now could be the time to assume massive.”
And large this undertaking might be. Her plan is to start putting in the expertise alongside the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, after which broaden abroad to coastal areas in Asia and West Africa. Berkowitz envisions Coastal Safety Options sometime defending a 3rd of worldwide coastlines, putting in roughly 2.2 million Wavebreakers. She doesn’t assume these are bold objectives for a construction that has but to be examined, as a result of local weather change turns into an much more pressing downside with each passing day.
“We plan to be operational in 2024 with three cities,” Berkowitz mentioned. “By 2028 we might be in 60 cities, and by 2032 we wish to be the worldwide chief in flooding discount.”
Coastal Safety Options additionally goals to combine a method to seize wave vitality into the Wavebreakers, successfully making them a twin function machine: dissipating sturdy waves and producing clear vitality.
Chris Ross, the operations supervisor on the Mooring Lab on the Woods Gap Oceanographic Institute met Berkowitz when she launched her proposal to him in 2019. He says he was instantly struck by her ardour.
“I believe it has potential, and it looks like I’m not the one individual believing that, with the sort of help she has obtained,” he mentioned. “It appears as if there’s an opportunity that this might actually work out effectively.”
