Long Beach, New York
The MLK Community Center is located in Long Beach, New York, offering a range of child care services, human/social services and career development support. It sustained significant damage from Superstorm Sandy in 2012, requiring the facility to be repaired and rebuilt. The project wrapped up in 2024, and included BK7 Flood Prevention, which was responsible for solving one of the project’s most important challenges: flood proofing the facility’s front door and surrounding windows.
During the planning phase of the MLK Community Center project, BK7’s Jon Dupre contacted PS Flood Barriers™ to work on the issue. “The windows around the front doors made it necessary to design a custom flood door solution so that it could fit into the original framing without having to alter the look of the entrance,” Dupre explains. “The community center wanted to retain as much glass as possible.”
In response, the team at PS Flood Barriers designed a Hydro1® Flood Door that fit the unique space perfectly. “Having the flood door so well designed and engineered made a big difference when it came time for installation,” says Dupre. “It reduced the time required considerably.”
In addition to the flood doors at the entrance of the MLK Community Center, lift-out flood barriers were also employed in this project. These Louver Cover Flood Barriers had the unique benefit of preventing leakage into vulnerable windows without the need for the flood barrier to cover the building under the window (which was not at risk). The result was a flood solution that provided excellent protection without unnecessary costs.
“When a general contractor who doesn’t work with flood protection gets a job like this, they look at something like those entrance doors or those windows, and they’re stumped,” explains Dupre. “They struggle to gauge how much retrofitting needs to occur and how much that will cost. Having PS Flood Barriers on the team early on meant that we could plan for proven solutions, even if they had to include custom elements. Plus, we had a much better idea of what the budget needed to be.”
In fact, says Dupre, working with PS Flood Barriers throughout the planning stages of the MLK Community Center project provided valuable flexibility to both the contractors and the customer. “The best part of having PS Flood Barriers on this job was the fact that they adapted to the project, instead of making us adapt to their products.”
If you or your organization would like to learn more about flood protection from PS Flood Barriers – including custom solutions – contact us at 877-446-1519. You can also request information via our contact form.