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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/nyregion/new-york-faces-rising-seas-and-slow-city-action.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all[9/12/2012 1:05:33 PM]

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New York Is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise, CriticsWarn

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Sea walls, marshes and trees in Brooklyn Bridge Park, part of efforts by New York City agencies to cope with rising seas.

By MIREYA NAVARROPublished: September 10, 2012 23 Comments

With a 520-mile-long coast lined largely by teeming roads andfragile infrastructure, New York City is gingerly facing up to theintertwined threats posed by rising seas and ever-more-severestorm flooding.

So far, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberghas commissioned exhaustiveresearch on the challenge of climatechange. His administration isexpanding wetlands to accommodatesurging tides, installing green roofs toabsorb rainwater and proddingproperty owners to move boilers outof flood-prone basements.

But even as city officials earn high marks forenvironmental awareness, critics say New York is movingtoo slowly to address the potential for flooding that couldparalyze transportation, cripple the low-lying financialdistrict and temporarily drive hundreds of thousands of

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Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Battery Park after Hurricane Irene, bythen a tropical storm, hit a year ago.Low-lying areas of New York City arevulnerable to storms.

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Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Raised ventilation grates, like these inLower Manhattan, are intended todeal with flooding in the subwaysystem during severe storms.

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people from their homes.

Only a year ago, they point out, the city shut down thesubway system and ordered the evacuation of 370,000people as Hurricane Irene barreled up the Atlantic coast.Ultimately, the hurricane weakened to a tropical stormand spared the city, but it exposed how New York is yearsaway from and billions of dollars short of armoringitself.

They lack a sense of urgency about this, said DouglasHill, an engineer with the Storm Surge Research Group atStony Brook University, on Long Island.

Instead of planning to be flooded, as he put it, city, stateand federal agencies should be investing in protection likesea gates that could close during a storm and block asurge from Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean intothe East River and New York Harbor.

Others express concern for areas like the South Bronx andSunset Park in Brooklyn, which have large industrial

waterfronts with chemical-manufacturing plants, oil-storage sites and garbage-transferstations. Unless hazardous materials are safeguarded with storm surges in mind, somelocal groups warn, residents could one day be wading through toxic water.

A lot of attention is devoted to Lower Manhattan, but you forget that you have realindustries on the waterfront elsewhere in the city, said Eddie Bautista, executivedirector of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, which represents low-income residents of industrial areas. Were behind in consciousness-building anddisaster planning.

Other cities are also tackling these issues, at their own pace.

New shoreline development around San Francisco Bay must now be designed to copewith the anticipated higher sea levels under new regional regulations imposed last fall.In Chicago, new bike lanes and parking spaces are made of permeable pavement thatallows rainwater to filter through it. Charlotte, N.C., and Cedar Falls, Iowa, arerestricting development in flood plains. Maryland is pressing shoreline property ownersto plant marshland instead of building retaining walls.

Officials in New York caution that adapting a city of eight million people to climatechange is infinitely more complicated and that the costs must be weighed against therelative risks of flooding. The last time a hurricane made landfall directly in New YorkCity was more than a century ago.

Many decisions also require federal assistance, like updated flood maps from the FederalEmergency Management Agency that incorporate sea level rise, and agreement fromdozens of public agencies and private partners that own transportation, energy,telecommunications and other infrastructure.

Its a million small changes that need to happen, said Adam Freed, until August thedeputy director of the citys Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability.Everything you do has to be a calculation of the risks and benefits and costs you face.

And in any case, Mr. Freed said, you cant make a climate-proof city.

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So city officials are pursuing a so-called resilience strategy that calls for strengtheningthe citys ability to weather the effects of serious flooding and recover from it.

Flooding Threat Grows

Unlike New Orleans, New York City is above sea level. Yet the city is second only to NewOrleans in the number of people living less than four feet above high tide nearly200,000 New Yorkers, according to the research group Climate Central.

The waters on the citys doorstep have been rising roughly an inch a decade over the lastcentury as oceans have warmed and expanded. But according to scientists advising thecity, that rate is accelerating, because of environmental factors, and levels could rise twofeet higher than todays by midcentury. More frequent flooding is expected to become anuncomfortable reality.

With higher seas, a common storm could prove as damaging as the rare big storm orhurricane is today, scientists say. Were sea levels to rise four feet by the 2080s, forexample, 34 percent of the citys streets could lie in the flood-risk zone, compared withjust 11 percent now, a 2011 study commissioned by the state said.

New York has added bike lanes, required large buildings to track and reduce their energyuse, banned the dirtiest home heating oils, and taken other steps to reduce the emissionsthat contribute to global warming. But with shoreline development that ranges frompublic beaches to towering high rises and a complex mix of rivers, estuaries, bays andocean the city needs to size up the various risks posed by rising seas before plungingahead with vast capital projects or strict regulations, city officials argue.

Yet the citys plan for waterfront development dismisses any notion of retreat from theshoreline. Curbing development or buying up property in flood plains, as some smallercities have done, is too impractical here, city officials say, especially because the cityanticipates another million residents over the next two decades.

Rather, the city and its partners are incorporating flood-protection measures intoprojects as they go along.

Consolidated Edison, the utility that supplies electricity to most of the city, estimatesthat adaptations like installing submersible switches and moving high-voltagetransformers above ground level would cost at least $250 million. Lacking the means, itis making gradual adjustments, with about $24 million spent in flood zones since 2007.

Some steps taken by city agencies have already subtly altered the citys looks. AtBrooklyn Bridge Park, a buffer between the East River and neighborhoods like Dumbo,porous riprap rock and a soft edge of salt-resistant grass have been laid in to help absorbthe punch of a storm surge. Sidewalk bioswales, or vegetative tree pits that can fill upwith rainwater to reduce storm water and sewage overflows and also minimize flooding,are popping up around the city.

Over all, the city is hoping to funnel more than $2 billion of public and private money tosuch environmental projects over the next 18 years, officials say.

Its a series of small interventions that cumulatively, over time, will take us to a morenatural system to deal with climate change, said Carter H. Strickland, the citysenvironmental commissioner.

Planning experts say it is hard to muster public support for projects with uncertain ordistant benefits.

Theres a lot of concern about angering developers, said Ben Chou, a water-policy

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analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

New York planners have proposed requiring developers to assess the climate-changerisks faced by new buildings so they can consider protection like retractable watertightgates for windows. But no such requirements have been imposed so far.

While some new buildings are being elevated or going above current required floodprotections like a new recycling plant on a Brooklyn pier and the Port Authoritystransit hub at the World Trade Center site most new construction is not being adaptedto future flood risks yet, industry representatives said.

Some experts argue that the encounter with Hurricane Irene last year and a flash floodin 2007 underscored the dangers of deferring aggressive solutions.

Klaus H. Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia Universitys Earth Institute, said thestorm surge from Irene came, on average, just one foot short of paralyzingtransportation into and out of Manhattan.

If the surge had been just that much higher, subway tunnels would have flooded,segments of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and roads along the Hudson River wouldhave turned into rivers, and sections of the commuter rail system would have beenimpassable or bereft of power, he said.

The most vulnerable systems, like the subway tunnels under the Harlem and EastRivers, would have been unusable for nearly a month, or longer, at an economic loss ofabout $55 billion, said Mr. Jacob, an adviser to the city on climate change and an authorof the 2011 state study that laid out the flooding prospects.

Weve been extremely lucky, he said. Im disappointed that the political process hasntrecognized that were playing Russian roulette.

With more rain and higher seas, some envision more turmoil like mile after mile ofapartment buildings without working elevators, lights or potable water.

Thats a key vulnerability, said Rafael Pelli, a Manhattan architect who serves on aclimate-change committee that advises the Department of City Planning. If you have torelocate 10,000 people, how do you do that?

Barriers to Block Tides

Some New Yorkers argue that the answer lies not in evacuation, but in prevention, likearmoring city waterways with the latest high-tech barriers. Others are not so sure.

At a recent meeting of Manhattan community board leaders in Harlem, RobertTrentlyon, a resident of Chelsea, argued for sea gates.

A 2004 study by Mr. Hill and the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brookrecommended installing movable barriers at the upper end of the East River, near theThrogs Neck Bridge; under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; and at the mouth of theArthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey. During hurricanes and northeasters,closing the barriers would block a huge tide from flooding Manhattan and parts of theBronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey, they said.

City officials say that sea barriers are among the options being studied, but others saysuch gates could interfere with aquatic ecosystems and with the flushing out ofpollutants, and may eventually fail as sea levels keep rising.

And then there is the cost. Installing barriers for New York could reach nearly $10billion.

http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/1791http://stormy.msrc.sunysb.edu/link files/Phase I Combined Report.pdfhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricanes_and_tropical_storms/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier



A version of this article appeared in print on September 11, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:New York Is Lagging as Seas And Risks Rise, Critics Warn.

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There is more agreement on how to protect the subway system. Several studies haveadvised the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to move quickly to increase pumpingcapacity at stations, raise entrances and design floodgates to block water from entering.

In 2009, a commission warned that global warming posed a new and potentially direchallenge for which the M.T.A. system is largely unprepared.

Five years ago, a summer-morning deluge brought about 3 1/2 inches of rain in twohours and paralyzed the system for hours, stranding 2.5 million riders.

That prompted the transit agency to spend $34 million on improvements like raisingsome ventilation grates nine inches above sidewalks and building steps that headupward, before descending, at flood-prone stations. All the money came from theagencys capital budget, which also pays for subway cars and buses.

This is a vicious circle of the worst kind, Projjal Dutta, the transportation agencysdirector of sustainability, said of the financial effect. Youre cutting publictransportation, which cuts down greenhouse gases, to harden against climate change.

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