"We are vulnerable," the state's governor, Andrew Cuomo, told reporters this week. "Anyone who thinks there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns is deny reality. We have a new reality and old systems." New York, with its 520 miles of coastline, is second only to New Orleans in the US for the numbers of people living within 4ft of the high tide mark, or about 200,000 people. There is also valuable property at risk – and those risks will only grow.
As New Yorkers discovered this week, subways, power lines, and other infrastructure are also at risk from storm surges and flooding. And time is running out to find a solution. Flooding during Sandy even exceeded the disaster scenarios envisaged in a 2011 New York state government designed to help authorities plan for future climate change.
"The impacts we saw in the last couple of days were actually impacts we did not think we would see until the 2080s, such as the flooding in lower Manhattan, and in Long Island, the vulnerability of subway tubes and some of the airports," said Art DeGaetano, a Cornell University professor and director of the north-east regional climate centre, who was one of the authors of the report.
With sea-level rise, a common storm could prove as catastrophic as Sandy, putting about a third of the city's streets in a flood danger zone. The city is looking at a variety of options from big engineering projects, such as levees, sea walls and pumping stations, to offering a buy-out to people to move out of flood-prone areas.
But protecting a city of 8 million from the consequences of climate change is a monumental undertaking. In the end, there may be no iron-clad guarantees....
The FDR Drive flooded next to Manhattan's East Village, shot by David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
No comments:
Post a Comment