Sandy teaches New York, US lessons learned on 9/11

Eric Roston in Bloomberg News: ...Superstorm Sandy delivers a message first heard on Sept. 11, 2001: New York, as a proxy for the United States, is unprepared for anticipated 21st century threats.  The storm is different. Sandy elicits no moral shock of war, no blinding national insult, "no unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury," as a columnist put it in Time magazine after 9/11. Instead we're up against something much more elusive, an enemy we're much more poorly equipped to deal with than sleeper terrorist cells: the Earth. 

"No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site," wrote Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert in a provocatively titled 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium."

We can describe the enemy's strategy. We know that the industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases are warming the Earth's atmosphere and changing climates. We know that heat melts ice, that heat makes water expand and evaporate, and that tropical cyclones like warm water and moist air. We know that we are facing the strange, strange possibility that the intersection of rivers, the mountain valleys, the islands off the coast of America, where humans have built sophisticated settlements over the past 10,000 years, might not be the best place for some of them toward the latter part of this century.

...Post Sandy, planners are in a tough spot, trying to bring the city back to speed as soon as possible, and to avoid locking in decisions that might have costly implications later.  "If you have to rebuild, instead of rebuilding what was there, how can you improve upon it?" asked John McDonald, director of technical strategy and policy development for General Electric's digital energy program. "The extremes we're experiencing are more extreme than what we've experienced before," he noted in the same phone interview, on Friday. "Storms are more severe. Flooding is more severe. When you look at the design of the city, you really have to take these things into account."

...Flood protection, subways, tunnels, bridges, aqueducts, electricity grids, food distribution, law enforcement, health and communications and the other infrastructure and human systems now need to be built not only to serve the needs of the present, but to anticipate and avoid the least tolerable risks we can surmise about the future....

Another photo of the boat on the tracks near Metro North's Ossining station, outside New York City. Shopt by Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license