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City To Put In $100 Million To Prevent Flooding In Lower Manhattan

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Mayor Bill de Blasio and other city officials announced a major capital commitment Thursday to protect Lower Manhattan from flooding.

As 1010 WINS' Al Jones reported, Mayor de Blasio is pledging $100 million in city money for the project in hopes that the federal government antes up.

"We think the investment we're making here has the potential to bring in hundreds of millions more in federal investment," the mayor said.

City To Put In $100 Million To Prevent Flooding In Lower Manhattan

The city is competing for $500 million in federal funding for additional resiliency efforts.

The plan is to put levees, flood walls and earthen berms along the river in an effort to protect against a repeat of the destruction wrought by Superstorm Sandy in the fall of 2012.

City To Put In $100 Million To Prevent Flooding In Lower Manhattan

"Our NYCHA complexes being out of power and flooded and the damages that comes from that; people being stranded in their top-floor apartments – a whole range of impacts that we don't want to see again," said Dan Zarrilli of the Mayor's office of Recovery and Resiliency.

Officials told reporters, including WCBS 880's Rich Lamb, that the protection would be built from Montgomery Street at the base of the Manhattan Bridge around the tip of the island to Battery Park City.

"So much of what is important to this city is in Lower Manhattan. It all has to be protected. This investment is going to be a key part of that," the mayor said.

He said the berms and deployable flood walls "will help us to control storm surges and prevent flooding."

The effort is part of the city's overarching $20 billion resiliency plan created in the wake of the devastation left by Sandy

Zarrilli said completion of the project is still at least five years away.

(TM and © Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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