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Brainstorming Ways To Protect NYC From Real Storms
SternisheFan writes with this excerpt from NBC News:
"The killer storm that hit the East Coast last month and left the nation's largest city with a crippled transit system, widespread power outages and severe flooding has resurfaced the debate about how best to protect a city like New York against rising storm surges. In a 2011 report called 'Vision 2020: New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan,' NYC's Department of City Planning listed restoring degraded natural waterfront areas, protecting wetlands and building seawalls as some of the strategies to increase the city's resilience to climate change and sea level rise. 'Hurricane Sandy is a wake-up call to all of us in this city and on Long Island,' Malcolm Bowman, professor of physical oceanography at State University of New York at Stony Brook, told NBC News' Richard Engel. 'That means designing and building storm-surge barriers like many cities in Europe already have.' Some of the projects showcased at Rising Currents include: Ways to make the surfaces of the city more absorptive (through porous sidewalks) and more able to deal with water, whether coming from the sea or sky; Parks and freshwater and saltwater wetlands in Lower Manhattan; Artificial islands or reefs (including ones made of recycled glass) to make the shoreline more absorptive and break the waves."
Climate Dome.
They can absorb like a barrel of water.
Truth be told, most of those ideas aren't worth the canvas they were painted on.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
If you know there is impending danger, get out of the way.
This is where it went wrong - if it was still Dutch it would have been properly protected against flooding, and all those electricity lines would have been underground by now. It's absolutely unbelievable that a country that is so technologically advanced still has all those cables hanging in the air. And then those cardboard houses!
The only idea that's sure to work is to move the city to a safer location. Or at least the parts of it most suseptible to flooding. That's what they had to do in New Orleans. Or, perhaps it's because we're talking about rich white guys now instead of poor black people that we should expend many billions fortifying and rebuilding those neighborhoods? Oh, and yes, this comment will probably be flamed into oblivion and modded every which way, but it does have the benefit of being the truth.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Naming the roads 'Canal St', 'Water St.', etc. 1821 to 2012 is too long a period for oral history to be effective.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
it costs extra to protect utilities from disaster. it costs extra to put generators several floors away from the ground where fuel needs to be pumped. it costs extra to test systems and make sure they're disaster-resilient. also, there's potential liability in the case of a failure during a test: if you institute a chaos monkey to kill the power to some random block in your city once per week, when it chooses the hospital and people die because emergency facilities weren't quite ready, lawyers will have a field day.
around here (southeast, where the most destructive things we get are short-lived tornadoes) it's not only cheaper to hang the electric lines in the air than bury them, they don't have to use their own money to repair them when storms hit - that's what insurance and emergency management agencies are for. so we save money overall by hanging wire where they're more susceptible to damage, *plus* the laborers doing the repairs get a boost to their paychecks in emergency overtime compensation.
Has this ever happened before?
What are the odds of it happening again?
Its like terrorism... we need to use it as an excuse to spend lots of taxpayer money.
Wasn't there another recent article on how climate change is an act of terrorism?
People could start taking climate change seriously and reduce CO2 emissions.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I lived in NYC for 3 years and it was little more than a den of mammy rammers, cake eaters, teapot punters, and ramble hosers. Super who was an idiot and a toe stumper if you know what I mean. Regular bloke of the brown, not that he'd ever admit it.
Let the place wash away, nature reclaim the land, and the world will be better off for it.
Is it really that difficult a question? We'vve known for decades but somehow everyone wants to pretend otherwise.
Korma: Good
The entire world would be better off without NYC ... it's a dirty Agenda 21 authoritarian hellhole and home
to the "United Nations" and all the Wall St.. criminals.
I was actually shocked to see a center of Occidental civilisation, New York, seemingly unprepared for an incident that is likely within a 70yrs time frame. It is simply outrageous to see US major websites go down. But you know, within the next 15 years we will most likely get a huge earth quake in Istanbul. Don't expect them to be prepared. The United States need more Kantian rationality and preparation.
Nuke the storms. You know it's coming.
--
Seriously though, let the free market take over the economy, get rid of government regulations surrounding nuclear energy, allow people to research and develop better nuclear energy solutions.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Crack it loose, and tug boat it to north Africa... no storms!, at the same time you can just let the depressed neighborhoods break off (wink,nod) and there's your urban renewal all in one shot!
Sure there's more snow upstate, but there's plenty of land and it would be nice to remake NYC as a modern city, with shorter buildings housing larger apartments, spaced further apart. We could call it New New York.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Protecting Manhattan isn't that difficult. It's clear that the Con Ed station on 14th St needs to be raised; that's too important to be flooded out again. The subway system needs flood gates at several points. The London and Singapore systems have flood gates. The old Pennsylvania Railroad North Tunnels have flood gates, which Amtrak didn't maintain and were supposed to be fixed after 2001 as an anti-terrorism measure.
Some of the subway stations need extra protection, especially South Ferry. They need strong emergency flood barriers. Sandbags didn't work because a big piece of wood (about 1' x 1' by 15') from a construction site crashed through them and ended up in the booking hall. They need steel barriers that are raised out of the ground when necessary. Extra pumping capacity with backup power is indicated, too.
Those are no-brainers. After major hurricanes two years in a row, there's no question that those basic fixes are needed. Beyond that, it might be worthwhile to raise the ground level of the parks in the Battery Park area by a few meters. FDR Drive may need a flood wall south of the Brooklyn Bridge. Those are less urgent.
Barrier islands like Fire Island and the Rockaways, and the Jersey shore, are too low to fix. Just make sure everybody evacuates in time. (About 140 people refused to evacuate Fire Island, and getting them off after the island had been cut in two by the storm risked the lives of emergency personnel. The first group of rescuers had to be rescued.) Require Florida-level hurricane protection in house construction. Require paid-up private insurance for anyone who wants to build in the flood zone. Put in hurricane-resistant solar panel powered street lights (a commercially available product), so there's some light no matter what happens. A strict "no tall trees near power lines" policy may be necessary in the coastal zone.
New York State has a valuable resource - big rocks. Where roads and railroad tracks need to be protected against washouts, big rocks, too big for a storm to move (granite boulders the size of a SUV) should be used extensively.
(Forget the "balloon tunnel plug" idea. Something like that was used at the Penn Station yards, and it burst when hit by something.)
They have worse storms every few months.
NYC is where it is mostly because of shipping, harbors, and the merchants that got rich on that. Those made it a favorable place to live despite the costs of coastal living. These days, that location makes little sense. There is still shipping, of course, but not much reason why our financial center should be there.
So, leave it up to New Yorkers: as long as they want to pay and are able to pay for defending the city against the elements, let them. Once it doesn't make economic sense anymore, people will stop building there and people will move elsewhere. This has happened time and again to cities in human history, it's a natural process.
It's still getting worse, and it still has to be done. Technically it actually seems easier every day to create always more sources of power, but politics and established economic interests mandates that people react to disasters after the fact. I'd just build nuclear reactors and electric trains everywhere, large but gradually increasing taxes on polluters, and subsidies for clean power. Heck, we're spending a ton of money and risks importing shiploads of raw materials for power.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I really don't see what's the deal, besides an oil industry investing in a massive PR program to convince us all that their oil is the only source of power. If all the oil and coal in the world disappeared tomorrow, I'm sure lots of power sources would be built at record speeds. Power of any kind needed, clean or any other, The whole debate just relegated to the history books. Once necessity hits the fan, the creative juices will create self-powering airplanes that run infinetely. Oh wait, that's done already.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Don't build large cities with 10 million people where a bad storm can put them underwater.
Move where? Name one place that isn't prone to natural disasters or other major problems with holding tens of millions of people in one place. California: earthquakes. Gulf coast: cat-5 hurricanes. Midwest: tornadoes. Southwest desert: too little freshwater and too much heat. North Dakota: -40 in the winter.
So much of the infrastructure in NYC (and the rest of the East Coast) is so ancient that it is a wonder it functions from day to day in perfect weather, let alone a storm.
Where newer cities have buried virtually all electrical distribution, huge segments of it are hanging from polls, bridges, buildings, etc.
The push to get this stuff buried in waterproof pipe and tunnels has largely gone un-heeded, due to the sheer volume of the work to be done.
The local distribution systems are old, exposed, and vulnerable. Power lines run through trees, right-of-ways are unmaintained, and faults are fixed as fast as possible with little thought toward prevention.
Residential systems are deemed not critical. But when they short out, they trip other systems off line. When storms hit wide areas it is precisely these so called "non critical" residential feeders that cause the most problems. Large high-voltage lines are designed to handle severe weather, and their breaks or failures are easy to spot, quick to fix. But thousands of downed power lines in neighborhoods take excessive manpower, and a long time to fix.
I suspect that a cost-benefit analysis would not support a wholesale project to bury everything everywhere. After all, the humongous cost numbers of the lack of power are merely bean-counters adding up payroll numbers, speculating about lost business, and guessing.
Still, if every neighborhood that needed a major repair had its power system immediately trenched and buried the most vulnerable segments would be taken care of. Its a lot harder to trench in power in a populated place than it is when building a new subdivision, but its far from impossible. The convoys of mutual-aid power company vehicles rushing into the teeth of Sandy that I passes while I was driving west out of the path are testimony to the fact that the power companies do have a plan. But its the wrong plan. Its still focused on tacking the patchwork quilt back together AFTER the storm. Those trucks should each be pulling a Ditch Witch in fine weather, BEFORE of the storm.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
To be fair, tornadoes are a little less widespread than hurricanes or earthquakes. Think 100-500 yards wide vs square miles of damage.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Let them do what so many of them said to do when Katrina hit New Orleans: Move away from the coast.
Stop burning fossil fuels. After all, we all know not a single hurricane ever hit up there until well after the industrial revolution.........
I suspect that a cost-benefit analysis would not support a wholesale project to bury everything everywhere.
In a rural area, with single phase 14.4kV lines, we were quoted at one million dollars per mile.
Sure, that's going to prevent hurricanes that have happened for thousands of years before anybody in Europe, Africa or Asia knew about America.
Sadly the older cities in America did almost nothing to control population density. It goes without saying that less people and dwellings per square mile reduces the impact of disaters in numerous ways. Assume that NYC will do nothing to get a sane population density. Homes that must be rebuilt need to be built on a strict storm code and in areas where surge is a potential issue the homes need to be on stilts as well. Consideration might be given to making cars and small trucks illegal in the neighborhoods as well. Under ground stirage of fuel or oil or cemetaries or businesses that deal with chemicals need to be zoned out as well. The effect of safe housing will be to greatly invrease the cost of ownership or rents which is a disaster in itself. I am not certain that seawalls or barriers could work in that region. There are many variables.
One stunning issue will be insurance. In Florida we know what occurs when insurance agencies have to make big pay outs. Most will refuse to insure in the area or make the insurance so expensive that it is absurd. Those insurance companies are a big problem anyway as failure might take down banks as well.
The best option is to return the land to a park like area and get rid of all homes and businesses in areas that were hit by storm surge. Fat chance of that takinbg place I suppose.
That sounds about right.
It costs more to get the permits, easements, and document it, than it costs to actually lay the cables.
With armored cable (eliminating the need for conduit) you can trench a mile in a few days with a crew of 6. I've seen it done. I know what those guys get paid and the cost of the spools. The legal bill and permitting process took way more time. Years in all.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Burying cables under the sidewalks and roads seems just as daft. No sooner that they have been buried and the road surface relaid, that the compactor machines damage some other pipe or cable which then leads to the road being dug up again, and the cycle continues. Then one construction team or another doesn't seal the road surface properly and the water starts to wash away the bedsand under the tarmac, and the road starts to distort.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Actually I am not aware of parts of Europe where you have these standards. It's not impossible, it is more a matter of investment and regulation of power companies. Remember, there wasn't much electricity 100 years ago.
Every new construction area in the country must be daft then, because that's how it's done these days. You should get out more often.
Road repair seldom penetrates more than 3 feet. Lines sre overlaid wit plastic warning webs that stops excavation workers in their tracks. Call before you dig is the norm everywhere in North America. There are already water, gas, telephone, and cable trenches everywhere.
It's the norm. Its not any different than business as usual for the construction crews.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Why isn't that a problem in other Western nations?
"Cut down on burning fossil fuels. Doing that now is cheaper than repairing the damage and installing preventive measures agains floods and storms later."
Citation needed. Storm damage is an opportunity for urban renewal, and the casualty rate is trivial compared to accepted activities such as being hospitalized and driving to work.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Fill the skyscrapers with helium to lift Manhattan Island!!!
I propose putting a giant 100% airtight and secure dome over the entirety of new york. Not for just storms... all the time.
I call it thunderdome. season 1.
If you know there is impending danger, get out of the way.
The population of Staten Island, 470,000. The population of Manhattan Island,1.6 million. The population of Long Island, 7,6 million.
The population of metropolitan New York City, 22 million.
The population of New Orleans before Katrina was pretty much the same as Staten Island today --- just under 500,000.
How do you evacuate 10 to 20 million people? Where do you house them? How do you feed them?
Sorry, too late.
Sigh. One more time: it's not the fact of hurricanes that's being blamed on GW, it's the frequency. New York has had "century storms" two years in a row. And this year it may well have more than one. That's a pretty clear sign there's more energy being pumped into the weather system. And that extra energy comes from... anyone? Let's not always see the same hands.
The century storm was in 1938 - all the rest was propaganda.
It is ironic that a city originally called New Amsterdam doesn't have defences against the sea...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Since the killer 1938 hurricane we haven't had a single strong storm
Care to make a statement that isn't easily refuted by 20 seconds of searching on wikipedia? The 1938 storm may have been the strongest but it wasn't even close to the only strong storm to hit NYC.
Artificial islands or reefs (including ones made of recycled glass) to make the shoreline more absorptive and break the waves."
Clearly the author has never been to the NJ/NY shoreline... It's already coated in "recycled" glass.
Take the number of dollars spent since 9/11 in NY spent towards the "war on terror". Compare it to the # of dollars spent protecting NY from weather.
Compare the # of deaths in NY since 9/11 related to terror. Compare to the # of deaths caused by weather.
Good thing we're so effective against the war on Terror, cause we're louzy about spending it on protecting ourselves from the enviroment.
Got lemons? Make lemonade!
My idea is that we should rename New York to New Venice.
The main problem is that storms will intensify as global climate change means higher temperatures means more atmospheric energy means more big storms.
So don't try to defend, go with the change: the goal is to survive the increasing sea level as CO2/ climate change higher temperature melt the poles and Greenland... Let the ground and first floor level flood with rising sea level and retreat up the Manhattan high rise buildings and (bonus) commute by boat!
Now the real (aka "old") Venice in (Italy for geographically challenged Republicans) will be fully submerged by then as Italy will not be able to afford the massive mitigation barrier around the Venice lagoon. Think of the boon in tourist industry as New Venice take the place of "old" Venice as a travel destination.
(Warning: Please keep distribution within Manhattan Millionaires Club, as there is scant provision for the proles in our forward looking plans)
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Either get out of the way of the private business and let people come and charge a lot of money for solving problems when they occur OR think of ways to make government more agile and adoptive to situations as they occur. That doesn't mean over-preparing for everything the way NASA has to. It means finding ways to make government works thinking in adoptive ways. The only alternative is what will probably actually happen -- theatrical preparation which will fall flat on its face whenever the actual disasters occur. A lot of people will make money on the resulting corrupt institutions. Graft is widespread, well-known, and well accepted in NYC. People simply take corruption in NYC as part of the culture at this point. Maybe they are just hoping that disaster recover will be the next wave of businesses to fleece.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
but when you get the cost estimates back people will shut up really quick. everyone wants to talk big but no one will want to pay for it.
James Blish had the solution in his "Cities in Flight" books fifty years ago. Fit a suitable number of spindizzies and fly New York off into the galaxy to look for work.
Infrastructure not just take the money from my utility bill and pocket it.
The 1938 hurricane missed New York.
"Propaganda" is conspeak for "stuff we don't want to hear about".
The geotechnical and engineering knowledge has been known for quite some time --- getting the super-rich jackholes like Bloomberg and his cronies to "allow" it to be put in place is another story . ....... (that's called history).
Sometimes it is best to eliminate the cause of a problem. Quit emitting excessive CO2 into the air.
Sweden.
The 1938 hurricane (a.k.a the Long Island Express) missed New York City. As indeed Sandy did -- it hit Atlantic City, NJ. It did hit Suffolk County, Long Island, which is part of NY State and the NYC metro.
Cover New York with the impenetrable bubble that Fox News and the Tea Party have been living under. It's absolutely impervious all external reality. I'd recommend using it as a nuclear shield for the country, but it just isn't big enough. And if it's not big enough for New York, then it certainly is big enough for Wall Street.
For the most part there is any digging, there is a machine that just pushes the cable or pipe through the dirt. They can get the cable or conduit to go in at an angle, travel considerable distances and pop up with in inches of where they want,. Quite amazing actually, like directional drilling in oil wells.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You can do all sorts of improvements both on land, under the streets and on the bulkheads and with infill outside the bulkheads, but you can't stop the eventual storm that overfloods everything with 30 foot hurricane waves which will come sooner or later. The 1938 hurricane which hit Rhode Island was proof if you need to have reason to believe.
The simple truth is that building on waterfront barely above sea level is not rational for the long term. Eventually the costs exceed the value of the buildings and people in Texas and Arkansas don't want to pay for Manhattan's folly.
Everybtime NYC gets destroyed, they always end up rebuilding. They never prepare for disaster because it's always something different! Why start now?
Start taking global warming seriously and do something about it.
As soon as I saw the topic, protecting NYC from "real" storms, I thought that all of NYC should be replicated virtually on massive servers in a subterranean environment and then all of the people could be dispersed or located elsewhere and play out their parts in NYC as if it were real.
Then I realized that was The Matrix.
Darn!!!
Come play Moral Decay!
Hey, -40 (doesn't matter whether C or F) is perfectly fine given enough warm clothes and heating.
Sure, if you don't mind being inside all the time. It's pretty hard to have a pedestrian-friendly city with regular -40 temperatures for half the year, however. Pedestrian-friendly cities need at least somewhat mild climates so that people don't suffer exposure when walking a few city blocks to the subway station, and also so that people actually want to live there and work there and make the city work.
It's not a big deal, you can survive -40C just fine for 30-40 mins. And no US city south of Alaska gets sustained -40C temperatures.
PS: I've actually worked in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutsk for about a year. Which does get sustained -40C temperatures in the winter. Now, at -50C it is getting distinctively uncomfortable without a face mask.
sky dome !
After going through Great Salt Lake water level rise 8'...there is no holding back Mother Nature, just when you think you've solved for the 100 year event She throws two 100 year events back to back at you. Welcome to Venice NYC
is to simply move to Pittsburgh where you have huge mountains and about 300 miles of distance from the ocean to buffer the effects.
I think they need to plug the tunnels to prevent them flooding, and the Department of Homeland Security agrees with me: http://www.dhs.gov/35000-gallons-prevention
Just call the Dutch already, make proper dykes.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Don't worry, the next ice age will freeze up the ocean and stop the hurricanes: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/09/peat_ice_age_coming_only_co2_can_save_us/
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Have you ever seen traffic in New York? It is something surrealistic, rivers of steel on a geological or even astronomical scale. New York just uses too much energy. It heats up this area, like a giant frying pan, the hot air lifts up in a huge column in stratosphere. And that is where hurricanes are attracted.
I would also suggested compulsory telecommuting days. Then forbidding heavy wool suits, white shirts and ties. They took too much energy to dry-clean and air condition offices for these wool suits.
Protecting the city from a storm surge is a little small-minded. NY worst disasters have been from blizzards (1888), terrorists (2001) and hurricanes ('85, '11, '12). There is no single defense to save the city from all three. Additionally, other cities have been hit by disasters, defending each one against whatever nature can throw would be impossible. On a national level, creating a disaster 'first-aid' organization which can respond to any event is probably the most effective way to go. (FEMA isn't operating at the level, most of there work is long term recovery.)
Move it to the cloud!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!