First, life has to be rewound to Friday, Oct. 26 — the last weekday before
Hurricane Sandy crippled and disoriented the New York area. To make that happen, repairs to damaged power grids,
transportation networks and housing will grind on for weeks, if not months, at a staggering cost.
The waters surrounding New York City have been rising an inch a decade, and the pace is picking up.
But the bigger question is what occurs after that.
Basic restoration leaves everything just as vulnerable to the next
monster storm. Hurricane Sandy is now a gauge of the region’s new
fragility.
Climate change and extreme weather are presenting government — and the public — with some overwhelming choices.
The authorities must not only reopen the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, but also
ponder whether to put up sea gates or install inflatable plugs to
protect it. Shorted-out circuits in Consolidated Edison’s flooded
substation in the East Village stand a foot off the ground in metal
sheds. They always seemed impervious to flooding but no longer are.
In New Jersey, the historic Hoboken train terminal had five feet of
water sloshing in the waiting room and switches and power substations
exposed to salt water. Will it do just to dry them out?
More broadly, officials must ask whether it is sensible to replace
buildings on the Manhattan waterfront, the Jersey Shore or the Long
Island coast — and continue to dare nature. After all, the waters
surrounding New York have been rising an inch a decade, and the pace is
picking up.
“It’s a no-brainer for New York,” said
J. David Rogers, a professor of geological engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.
“You’ve got such enormous assets and infrastructure that you want to protect.”
But some experts also say that after rhythms return to normal, a no
longer frazzled public may rebel if taxes and fees rise sharply to pay
for better defenses.
The cost of the repairs alone will certainly reach tens of billions of dollars.
Far-reaching solutions will cost many billions more.
And the cost of not doing them, Professor Rogers said, includes the
threat that disrupted businesses might abandon an environment that feels
unsafe. New Orleans, he noted, was the banking and insurance capital of
the South until the great flood of 1927.
There is evidence of what is possible. The Netherlands, one of the
world’s lowest-lying countries, has made storm protection a function of
national security.
Following the severe flooding in 1953 that killed more than 1,800 people
in the Netherlands, the Dutch strengthened their oceanfront defenses to
what is known as 10,000-year protection — something that will repel a
menace that has a 0.0001 percent chance of occurring in a given year.
With climate change rejiggering storm calculations, there is talk of
elevating that protection to the 100,000-year level.
Not that the Dutch system has an unblemished record of success.
Environmental experts point out that by the 1970s, the large-scale
building projects had caused environmental damage.
More recent efforts to harmonize the defenses with nature leave enormous
gates open to allow water to flow. The gates can be shut in the face of
a storm.
In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers erected 100-year protection after
Hurricane Katrina.
Already, most experts feel it is inadequate; efforts are under way to
imagine a 500-year defense system, though such an undertaking remains
years away.
While New York building codes generally set standards to account for
100-year protection, Professor Rogers said he believed that the city
should consider nothing less than 500-year protection.
Few Simple Solutions
Robert D. Yaro,
president of the Regional Plan Association, an independent urban
research group, said the region should consider measures like storm
barriers and sea gates, as well as better ways to seal transit stations,
tunnels and utility plants against water.
Power companies, he said, need to rethink continually putting wires back
on telephone poles — when winds knock them down — rather than burying
them, as costly as that can be.
Robert G. Bea,
a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of
California, Berkeley, said he was unimpressed by the aggressive plans
trumpeted by some politicians, including those that call for a levee
around New York. Some solutions could end up causing more problems,
Professor Bea said.
He said tightening and improving the current system might be more
sensible than an enormous new system. “At least with the current system,
you know where it’s weak,” he said.
In New Jersey, the storm surge swamped the electric switch yards and
substations of Public Service Electric and Gas. But Ralph LaRossa, the
utility’s president, expressed skepticism about the need for making all
of its equipment stormproof.
“If we moved them back, we’d have to condemn property that people are
living on,” Mr. LaRossa said. “Some people say, ‘Why don’t they raise
them up?’ We’ll raise them up eight feet and the next storm will be nine
feet.”
Pumping water out of 7 World Trade Center on Tuesday.
Flooding damaged many electrical systems kept below ground level.
New Jersey’s coast was hit hard by the storm.
Officials must ask if it is sensible to replace buildings there and
continue to dare nature.
Hurricane Sandy flooded the South Ferry subway station.
Mr. LaRossa, who is trained as an engineer, said he would opt to build
in more redundancy, so that when one path was interrupted, electricity
could be rerouted.
‘A Different World’
In the days since the storm, landlords in New York City have begun to
evaluate whether they should move electrical distribution systems or
backup generators from basements to higher levels. One issue is that the
city currently requires that fuel tanks for generators stay in
basements. Nearly every building near the Hudson or East Rivers
experienced flooding and power failures, though newer towers fared far
better.
William Rudin of the
Rudin real estate family,
which owns buildings across Manhattan, said he was weighing moving
generators. The Rudin data center building at 32 Avenue of the Americas,
at Canal Street, has rooftop generators and has remained open.
Most new skyscrapers like 1 Bryant Park, at 42nd Street, have generators
and electrical panels situated on higher floors. But because Con Ed
connected 1 Bryant Park, also known as the Bank of America Tower, to a
downtown substation, it is the only office building in Midtown without
electricity.
Many older buildings have sump pumps to expunge intrusion from the
streams beneath Manhattan. They can handle 100 to 200 gallons per
minute, but not a tidal surge of tens of thousands of gallons. During
the hurricane, they burned out.
Rudin Management had problems at both 80 Pine Street and 110 Wall
Street. Across the street at the 27-story Citibank Building at 111 Wall
Street, water climbed to the second floor. The pumps, backup generators
and electrical panels on the ground floor or basement were rendered
useless.
“Our buildings downtown were all built in the late ’50s and early ’60s,
when 11 feet was the surge level, not 13 or 14 feet,” Mr. Rudin said.
“We’re living in a different world.”
Some downtown building owners
privately expressed fears
that in places like Lower Manhattan — which has blossomed over the past
decade and where the World Trade Center site is being rebuilt —
insurance rates will climb and bankers will impose more stringent
requirements for construction loans.
Steven Spinola, president of the
Real Estate Board of New York, said: “We shouldn’t stop building on the waterfront. People want to live on the waterfront.”
When Hurricane Sandy made landfall, Vishaan Chakrabarti, a former city planner who is director of the
Real Estate Development Program
at Columbia University, was in Rotterdam, where sea gates twice the
height of the Eiffel Tower protect the port. “I don’t think the question
is whether we should develop the waterfront,” he said. “That ship has
sailed. To me, the question is, how do we protect the harbor.”
He suggested the formation of a harbor protection commission made up of city, state and federal officials.
As he toured his state’s wreckage, Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican,
emphasized the charms of the Jersey Shore and declared that people do
not “just pick up and walk away.” At the same time, Mr. Christie said it
was up to homeowners with ruined homes, not the government, to decide
whether to rebuild or sell their property to the state for conservation.
Stephen M. Sweeney, a Democrat and president of the New Jersey Senate,
said: “We just can’t rebuild it the way it was. The worst thing to do is
to have this experience and not learn from it.”
While acknowledging the Jersey Shore’s importance as a tourist magnet,
he said rebuilding should focus mainly on full-time residents. The same
mentality, he said, should apply to flood-prone areas inland near
rivers, like Sayreville, in central New Jersey.
“We’ve spent a lot of money putting back their houses — that’s chasing
good money after bad,” said Mr. Sweeney, who toured Sayreville on
Thursday. “It was $62 million to put everybody back last year, and this
year it’s going to cost way more.”
Marshaling Public Will
Bold solutions wither without public will behind them. In the immediacy
of a disaster, people may demand that it never be allowed to happen
again. But memory recedes.
The sun is shining. The refrigerator cools. The trains are running.
Aren’t electric bills high enough? Don’t we pay enough to ride the
subway?
Virtually all of Con Edison’s network in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn
sits underground. John Miksad, the company’s senior vice president for
electric operations, said the big issue for its ratepayers was whether
to invest the huge sums necessary to waterproof it.
“We’re so focused on customers’ bills, especially with this economy,”
Mr. Miksad said. “To take this system to a different level of protection
is not going to be a $1 million or a $100 million exercise; it’s going
to take billions.”
With this storm arriving so close after Tropical Storm Irene last summer, some experts said the moment might be right.
“It takes two catastrophic events of this kind within a generation to
build political support to make investments of this sort,” said Mr.
Yaro, of the Regional Plan Association. “I’m hoping that Irene was the
wake-up call and Sandy is the hammer coming down.”
Mr. Yaro lives in Stamford, Conn., which was flooded during storms in
1938 and the mid-1950s. In the early 1960s, he pointed out, the city
erected hurricane barriers and has not flooded since.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat who was instrumental
in the rebuilding of ground zero in his district, said the public would
see the virtue in long-term projects to protect itself, in much the way
the country built the Interstate System and helped to develop
technology for weather and other satellite systems.
Hurricane Sandy, he said, should lead to a “massive reordering of priorities.”
Credit : NY Times
service began operating between 179th St and Avenue X, 
has resumed between Kings Highway and Atlantic Ave-Barclays Center. The
Franklin Avenue Shuttle has also been restored. Earlier this morning, 
train service has been extended south to 14th Street.
train service has also been extended and is now running from 241 Street in the Bronx to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. 
train service has resumed from 148th Street to New Lots Ave.Limited service has resumed on the 
line from 205th Street in the Bronx to Bay Parkway in Brooklyn.
and 
lines was restored Saturday, offering customers increased travel
options. In addition, limited service was restored to the Staten Island
Railway. Crews are working around the clock to restore other line
segments.
