34
CityAndStateNY.com
October 17, 2016
If you didn’t work in politics/government, what would you do? I would run a resource recovery business.
Where did you go to college? Pace University for BA, Pratt Institute for MS, and LIU Post for PhD
V
Vlada Kenniff
MANAGING DIRECTOR OF INTEGRATED WATER MANAGEMENT, NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION Birthday: 4/10
LADA KENNIFF’S fascination with water originated in Uzbekistan, where she lived until age 13, when her family moved to the United States. The country borders the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake. “It’s completely gone, and it’s because of man-made activities,” Kenniff says. “I’ve been following that since I was a kid, and it’s always bothered me. So we’re trying use water more responsibly here.” She h a s spent 1 1 yea rs at t he D e p a r t m e nt of E nv i ron m e nt a l Protection doing just that. She helped develop a $2.1 billion New York City Green Infrastructure Plan.“We went from building gray infrastructure – tanks and tunnels – for managing stormwater to using green infrastructure – gardens, bioswales, really beautiful infrastructure in the street,” she says. She now runs conservation, climate and resiliency programs, including adapting to “extreme rain events.” “Superstorm Sandy had coastal flooding, and we’re now building up walls to protect us from that kind of flooding,” she says. “But the other side of the equation is the really heavy rain events that dump three or four inches in a few hours, and the streets just flood.” While the city’s infrastructure was not designed for such rapid influxes of water, it would be prohibitively expensive to dig up every street and install bigger pipes, she says. “So we’re working on streettype solutions that are really beautiful and use parks and public spaces to act as storage during a really rainy event, and they drain quickly and become functional again.”