On the night of October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy roared ashore in New Jersey, driving a wall of water toward one of the most densely populated coastlines in the world. New York City had braced for a flood, but what caught officials by surprise was the magnitude: The swell arrived at the peak of high tide, and the two forces together sent the East River surging over its banks with a fury no one anticipated.
As water rushed upstream, the East River crested its banks and saltwater poured into the control room of Con Edison’s East River Generation Station, located at the northern edge of Manhattan’s East Village. Several blocks inland, at Con Edison’s Avenue A substation, senior operator Donnie Wilson watched the lights on his board flicker and die as the flooded power plant disconnected from the grid. “It was a scary situation just to sit in the dark,” he recalls. “I never experienced anything like that.”
Con Edison is New York City’s largest utility. Its electrical system connects more than 3.5 million customers to energy sources and serves almost 40% of New York State’s electric demand, while covering only about 1% of the state’s geographic footprint.
When the storm hit, firefighters and Con Edison’s emergency rescue group jumped into action. They floated rafts down Avenue C to pull power plant operators out of the rising water. “It was intense because nobody knew how bad the flood was going to be,” Wilson said. “We had to get rafts to get our personnel out during that time.”
The power plant, the substation, and other facilities were severed from the grid, and roughly 200,000 customers lost power, some for several days.
The Fortress on 14th Street
Manhattan’s flood walls during a simulated weather event.The East River Generation Station sits on the edge of a historically working-class, immigrant neighborhood of tenement blocks and housing projects. The homes are separated from the river by little more than a narrow strip of park and the scenic FDR Drive parkway. But the risk the river poses is changing. During the years since Sandy, engineers and construction crews have turned the power plant into what Jamie Brennan, Con Edison’s vice president of engineering, calls “a fortress” surrounded by floodwalls and massive floodgates. The neighborhood is also getting protection: The local park is being rebuilt as a flood barrier.
Today, Con Edison is preserving the control room flooded by Sandy’s waters, as a kind of museum to the night the river came in. Wilson, the substation operator that night, walks visitors through the room. “It rose about this high,” he says, holding his hand at his waist. “All our electrical components down here were flooded.” In 2017, Con Edison moved the control room upstairs to a new, elevated facility. Outside, concrete walls and watertight doors now wrap the campus. Critical control wiring rides on tracks that operators hand-crank into the air 48 hours before the next big storm. New transformers sit on concrete pedestals 14 to 17 feet up.
Just beyond Con Edison’s perimeter, the city’s wall is rising, too. The engineering firm Arcadis designed a 2.4-mile stretch of the East Side Coastal Resiliency project running from East 25th Street south to Montgomery Street, just below the Williamsburg Bridge. When completed, the barrier will be a continuous line of concrete walls, raised parks, and 18 massive floodgates. To design the gates, Arcadis used Bentley Systems’ STAAD structural engineering and analysis software, building virtual replicas that the team could test in extreme situations.
Speed mattered, too. Roni Deitz, Arcadis’s global director of climate adaptation, says the software cut her team’s design time from 30 hours per gate to 30 minutes, while letting them simulate everything from storm-surge waves to a multi-ton garbage truck riding the flood and slamming into a gate. “Anything that could come at it, we need to be prepared for,” she says.
East Side Coastal Resiliency project floodgateBringing People Inside the Story
Most New Yorkers will never see those gates closed, as they should be sheltering in a safe place when the next Sandy hits. To bring the system to a wider audience, Bentley sent photographer Aaron Huey to document the new infrastructure. Not with an ordinary camera, but with a 3D rig that produces Gaussian splats, a new and revolutionary way of capturing real-world spaces in three dimensions.
Named for Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician whose name graces the bell curve, the splats are mathematical functions that render each point in a scene as a soft, semi-transparent blob rather than a hard dot. Each splat carries data about its position, color, size, transparency, and orientation. Layered together, millions of them can reconstruct a 3D scene with striking realism, capturing thin wires, reflections, and even glass that changes appearance as the viewer moves around it—details that traditional polygon-based graphics often miss.
To reconstruct the area around the plant, Bentley’s emerging technologies team, known as Bentley Labs and led by Greg Demchak, combined Huey’s splats with artificial intelligence (AI) and Unreal Engine, the gaming software now widely used in cinema and visual effects. Working from Huey’s captures of the old flooded control room, the new flood walls and the gates around the nearby Asser Levy Playground, the team built an immersive experience that lets a viewer watch the water rise to the level it reached the night of Sandy, then close the gates and see the new defenses hold.
“Seeing is believing,” says Markus Sauerbeck, a senior developer in Bentley Labs who worked on the visualization. “We are using the latest emerging technology to let people understand much easier why these massive infrastructure projects are necessary for New York’s citizens.”
Bentley recently presented the visualizations, which can be viewed in Apple Vision Pro, at London’s ATN conference and the Illuminate 2026 conference in Berlin. Plans are also in the works to bring the visualizations to New York.
“These models,” Huey says, “let us simulate what it looks like when the next Sandy arrives”—and what it will look like when, this time, the wall holds.
FAQ:
When the catastrophic hurricane and Nor’easter hit in 2012, a massive swell of saltwater poured directly into the control room of Con Edison’s East River Generation Station. The flooded power plant disconnected from the grid, forcing emergency rescues by raft and leaving roughly 200,000 customers sitting in the dark.
Engineers have transformed the facility into a resilient “fortress” wrapped in concrete floodwalls and watertight doors. The original flooded control room is now just a museum; critical operations were moved upstairs, transformers were elevated 14 to 17 feet, and operators can even hand-crank vital wiring out of harm’s way before a storm hits.
Named after mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, Gaussian splats are a revolutionary 3D mapping method that renders data points as semi-transparent blobs rather than hard dots. Bentley Labs layered millions of these splats to capture hyper-realistic details of the new flood walls—like reflections and thin wires—that traditional polygon graphics usually miss.
