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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.
encourage 90% of the population to move far far away. the city is asking for it. when "the big one" hits, it will make all previous disasters look like appetizers.
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.
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.
Cut down on burning fossil fuels. Doing that now is cheaper than repairing the damage and installing preventive measures agains floods and storms later.
-- Cheers!
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.........
and level the shit with the ground, thain wait for him to come back and rebuild it in 3 days...
He would com for u americans, would he not?
PS. but check the weather forcast, so you have 3 sunny days commin up :DDD
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.
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?
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.
If you get rid of the heavy-weight parasitic Bantu, cosmopolitan and wetbakk then NYC would rise three-feet from the loss-of-weight and crustal buoyancy.
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 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.
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.
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!
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!