Subway well-armed to fend off another ’cane
HE NEXT rip-roaring hurricane to hit New York is going to have a tough time bursting the MTA’s new steel-reinforced bubble at the South Ferry subway station.
The subterranean station at the southern tip of Manhattan was destroyed when Hurricane Sandy made it an Upper Bay tributary, a heartbreaking loss because it had been rebuilt just three years earlier at a cost of $530 million.
Now, another $340 million later, the station that’s home to the No. 1 train is expected to be a worthy opponent when the next Sandy-like storm brings it on.
Reopened in July, South Ferry has custom-fitted, retractable flood doors at its three entrances that can withstand a flood surge 14 feet high off the asphalt, along with 3-ton steel doors throughout to protect rooms that house critical equipment. It passed one test while still under reconstruction in September 2016, when Tropical Storm Hermine rained down its havoc.
“I feel we are in relatively good shape in preparation for lower Manhattan,” MTA Chairman Joe Lhota said. “If we have another storm that mimicked what happened five years ago, clearly we’ll do much better than we did five years ago.”
After Sandy, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had its work washed out for it in the underground canyon that is New York City’s subway and tunnel system. The transit agency is working its way through a $7.6 billion budget for nearly 300 projects — $4.6 billion just to repair the damage Sandy wrought and $3 billion to keep it from happening again.
So far, the MTA has spent or committed about 80% of the funds, leaving $1.6 billion.
“The first few years after Sandy was, as much as anything, an investigation of what we can do and what’s going to be effective,” said Bill Henderson, director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Council to the MTA.
Repairing the damage, he said, is the easy part. “When you’re trying to figure out what you do to keep water from getting in,” he added, “you can’t run a real world test on it.”
The brass at the MTA recognize the risk climate change presents, calling rising sea levels and coastal storm surges “the greatest threat to the MTA system — as evidenced by the enormous flood damage” during Sandy, according to the agency’s climate-adaptation report from April.
Of the system’s nine early20th century subway tunnels, the four under the East River that flooded with corrosive saltwater have been repaired.
To keep the subway tunnels dry, the MTA has to plug thousands of entry points in lower Manhattan where floodwaters can pour in.
Workers at the Whitehall St. stop demonstrated the agency’s current ingenuity by stacking metal logs on top of each other to seal the station.
There is also a 3,000-pound door at the station that can be sealed tight with a pump, similar to doors found on aircraft carriers, according to Lhota.
Above ground, at the No. 1 train station on Canal St., an MTA worker with a hand crank manually pulled a flexible Kevlar cover over the staircase entrance.
In addition, more than 2,000 sidewalk vents in lower Manhattan are fitted with mechanical hatch doors.
“We’re addressing the low point because water seeks the lowest point, which is downtown,” said Robert Laga, the Sandy program director for NYC Transit.
The MTA can use these flood-fighting devices to seal up 48 station entrances, with 58 to go.
Elsewhere in the transit network, a seawall rising 10 feet from the ground and descending 30 feet below it will protect lowlying A line tracks that lead to the Rockaways. It also will protect the Queens peninsula from storm surges.
Temporary flood walls were erected around the MTA’s biggest train yard at Coney Island as the MTA works toward permanent protection.
“God forbid there’s another hurricane like that, we’ll have the time to be able to shut the system down and in the meantime, lock it up,” Lhota said.
There’s still a lot of work to do, most critically, repairing the L line’s Canarsie tube, which was one of the most damaged underwater tunnels. That project has to wait until 2019, requiring the MTA to figure out the monumental task of moving 250,000 daily L train commuters between Manhattan and Brooklyn.