The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has selected ARCADIS (EURONEXT: ARCAD), the leading pure play global engineering and consultancy firm, to provide damage assessments, flood protection planning and sustainable design services to help these facilities better weather the next severe storm.

When Superstorm Sandy pummeled the East Coast last October, much of Lower Manhattan was flooded including three of the HHC's member hospitals -- Bellevue, Coney Island and the Coler Campus. Bellevue Hospital was forced to manually evacuate hundreds of patients due to the loss of power and other utility services. All three of these facilities suffered extensive and crippling damage.

Under the $5 million contract, ARCADIS will perform flood proofing and hazard mitigation planning to make these critical facilities more resilient in the face of future storms. The firm will also provide consulting, preliminary design, pre-construction, construction and post-construction services at the discretion of the HHC.

Using proprietary hydrodynamic modeling, ARCADIS can examine how future storms may impact the hospitals and accordingly design multiple layers of defense to strengthen them against flooding so hospital staff can focus on providing continual essential services to their patients even during severe weather events.

"As major storms like Sandy occur more frequently, hospitals and other critical service providers in our coastal communities will face flood risk management decisions," said Gary Coates, CEO of the US operations of ARCADIS. "Using our Dutch flood proofing expertise in combination with our construction management experience in the healthcare sector, we are well positioned to deliver flood protection and sustainable design recommendations to the HHC."