City of New Bedford

As a 1989 Civil Engineering graduate from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, my vision of the Civil Engineering field over the past three plus decades has evolved tremendously. The first 20 years of my career focused on the assessment and cleanup of contaminated petroleum and industrial facilities. With much of the work taking place below ground and largely unseen, it was easy to view it in a somewhat detached way — not really seeing the potential for a greater impact on our communities.

Brownfields work brought the opportunity to really embrace the human element of remediation and revitalization. Brownfields are properties that are vacant or underutilized due to real or perceived contamination from prior uses. These sites that were once the economic engines of many of our older cities no longer generate tax revenue and have become liabilities both economically and from a human and environmental health and welfare perspective.

Sustainable revitalization requires a holistic evaluation of mitigating and even reversing past impacts to the community and environment. Redevelopment of these sites provides the opportunity for transformation of neighborhoods that have been blighted for decades. A prime example is the former Goodyear manufacturing site here in New Bedford. Goodyear operated at the 10-acre property for a century prior to its closing in 1990. After extensive assessment and comprehensive remediation, the City began construction of a state-of-the-art elementary school, slated to open in early 2027. This new netzero educational campus, heated and cooled using a closed-loop geothermal network, will replace two smaller neighborhood schools, each well over 100 years old and heated by obsolete fossil fuel systems, with neither equipped to cool in our increasingly hot summers. The City’s vision is for the “good bones” of the former school envelopes to be rehabilitated and retrofitted with energy-efficient systems and transformed into multifamily housing. Through purposeful community planning, we can create a healthy, affordable and efficient housing opportunity, provide our youth with an optimal learning environment that is comfortable in all seasons, and promote overall neighborhood revitalization utilizing existing infrastructure.

Sustainable revitalization requires a holistic evaluation of mitigating and even reversing past impacts to the community and environment.

Even our day-to-day maintenance and modernization decisions undergo sustainability and resilience analyses. With increasingly limited resources, reusing and repurposing existing infrastructure is the first choice, while prioritizing the replacement of obsolete systems with state-of-the-art efficiency.

New Bedford is currently updating NB Resilient, the City’s first Climate Action and Resilience Plan, incorporating lessons learned and best practices since publishing the plan in 2020. New Bedford Harbor has been the highest-valued fishing port in the United States for over 20 years. It has also become a major hub of offshore wind deployment and maintenance. As we replace and upgrade existing infrastructure along the working waterfront, we account for sea level rise, both observed and anticipated, based on the required project life.

The evolution of NB Resilient has truly underscored the human and environmental systems perspectives that are the basis of Civil Engineering. We increasingly look to natural alternatives to gray infrastructure to manage stormwater to reap the co-benefits of pollutant capture and groundwater recharge, as well as equitable greenspace and heat island mitigation in our most densely populated neighborhoods. Green infrastructure supports the triple bottom line as it also promotes habitat creation and biodiversity.