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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.
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)
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?
You should also subscribe to his newsletter.
The story link goes to an NBC news story containing a video of how the Netherlands handles storm surges. NY can do the same thing, though it would cost 15 billion to build. Guess the NYSE isn't considered worth it.
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.)
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/
Tokyo is sheltered from the sea in an inlet. NYC sticks right out into the Atlantic seaboard. What they do in Tokyo won't work in NYC.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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.
Well, to be fair, it took about 2000 dead bodies in 1953 before the Netherlands built the Delta Works, so I guess NY just has to wait for that to happen.
That's how government spending should work, right? You should only want to pay for it after lots of people have died?
Wouldn't that increase the presence of mold and fungus? There are some types of granite that can naturally absorb water and release it slowly. They also have the problem of becoming a reservoir for fungal spores because it it the perfect habitat. If you've ever seen the underside of a brick bridge, you will alway see that stuff.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
Really?
Then care to explain why NYC was hit by regular cat 3 hurricanes all the way through the little ice age? Since the killer 1938 hurricane we haven't had a single strong storm
Sandy was barely a cat 1 storm. It hit at high tide And with the full moon which is what caused the flooding.
Here in NYC the flooding didn't start until it made landfall and the wind died down
Tokyo is sheltered from the sea in an inlet. NYC sticks right out into the Atlantic seaboard. What they do in Tokyo won't work in NYC.
Oh, I dunno about that. I have two Google Maps windows on my screen right now, one of the New York area, the other of the Tokyo area, at the same scale. True, the details are different, but overall they don't seem to be very different in their exposure to the nearby oceans.
If anything, it looks like New York is better protected, especially Manhattan Island. It's at the north end of the 8-mile-lond Upper Bay, which has a rather narrow (~1 mile) opening into the Lower Bay, which in turn has a couple of barrier islands and a lot of continental shelf between Manhattan and the deep ocean.
Tokyo is on the much larger Tokyo Bay, which is rather serpentine, and connected to the Inland Sea by the Uraga channel, around 6 miles wide. But the city area is near the eastern end of the Inland Sea, with no significant continental shelf. So if anything, Tokyo is more exposed, by the closeness of the open ocean and deep water, with wider channels to the central city area.
But overall, they don't look all that different. And Tokyo has the extra problem of being in an active volcanic zone, while New York's geological underpinnings are much older and stabler.
I'd guess that, all things considered, New York's geological, hydrographic and meteorological environment is somewhat safer than Tokyo's, though probably not by much. The general cost of protecting them isn't really all that different.
The difference is that the Japanese are well aware of the dangers inherent in their natural environment, while New Yorkers are either oblivious or arrogantly sure that God/Nature/whatever is on their side. The Japanese weren't all that surprised by the recent epic earthquake and tsunami. New Yorkers seem surprised and offended that the natural world could do something catastrophic to them.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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?
Decades ago we "knew" that civilization was causing a new ice age.
Maybe a few people "knew" that. But the concensus among scientists was otherwise.
I grew up in the 50's and 60's in the Seattle area, and one thing that was mentioned there is discussions of the topic was that in the Pacific Northwest (roughly British Columbia south to Oregon), the glaciers in the Cascades had been growing for most of the century. This was generally recognized as an anomaly, since nearly everywhere else in the world, the data showed an overall slow warming trend. At the time, none of this was explained, though the general warming was usually attributed in part to human activity.
Since then, we've learned a lot more about climate. Well, scientists have; most of the rest of the world hasn't learned much at all. And the cooling in the Pacific Northwest has ended. I visited there last year, for the first time in about 30 years, and one of the shocks was seeing the iconic Mount Rainier, whose glaciers are much smaller than what they were back around 1970. I also visited the mountain, including Sunrise, which used to be a short trek to the nearest glacier. Now the glaciers are miles away, and there are sizable trees growing around the lodge. This really got the idea across that things were changing.
Of course, if it were just that one area, it wouldn't mean much. But it's the same story in most of the world now. And this wasn't a surprise. It was what climate scientists were describing back then. They just didn't predict that the change would be so fast.
But they are having fun studying and explaining it. The large population with economic and/or religious reasons not to believe it are a bit annoying, but this isn't anything new. The powers that be have never paid any attention to suggestions that they might be doing something with long-term detrimental consequences, even when those consequences are staring them in the face.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
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.
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.
Totally false. In the 20th century, there's the one everyone knows about, the Long Island Express (1938), category 3 at landfall. But there were actually several hurricanes which made landfall in NY or NJ:
1985: Hurricane Gloria (Category 2)
1976: Hurricane Belle (Category 1)
1960: Hurricane Donna (Category 2)
1954: Hurricane Carol (Category 2 or 3)
1944: Great Atlantic Hurricane (Category 1)
1938: The aforementioned Long Island Express (Category 3)
1903: The "Vagabond Hurricane" (Category 2) -- NJ; all others were Long Island.
Two hurricanes hit in the late 1800s, also.
That's not counting tropical storms, hurricanes which traveled over land to hit NY (e.g. Hazel, 1954), near misses which caused damage, or noreasters (e.g. the big one in 1962). By this standard Sandy doesn't count, as it went extratropical about an hour before striking NJ.
In the 21st century, we have
2012: Sandy (technically post-tropical, but essentially Category 1, NJ)
2011: Irene (Category 1, NY)
Extrapolating two data points into a trend is dangerous business.
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.
Just call the Dutch already, make proper dykes.
Hivemind harvest in progress..