The storm next time

Hurricane Ida was no picnic for New Orleans, leaving more than a million homes without power, waterlogging many suburban areas and causing billions of dollars in losses. But the flood walls breached by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 held, having been reinforced thanks to $15 billion in investments. Washington made it a priority, and the Army Corps of Engineers delivered. It wasn’t on time, but it was just in time for the next huge storm.

Cut to New York, where nearly nine years after Superstorm Sandy put many of us underwater, there’s been far too little progress toward protecting the city from the ravages of Mother Nature when the frequency and intensity of major weather events may be increasing, and sea levels are unquestionably rising.

It’s not that there aren’t studies and blueprints; we’ve got reams and reams of those, nearly enough to build a seawall with. There’s the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency plan, meant to protect the financial district and the Seaport area. The East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, which a few years ago got some major surgery, aims to safeguard another swath of the East Side. A levee is supposed to protect the East Shore of Staten Island, ETA TBD.

This goes well beyond the 520 miles of Gotham’s coast and the floodplains a million New Yorkers live in or adjacent to. Just 10 days ago, a downpour dumped record rainfall. The remnants of Ida will dump lots more water today and tomorrow. New York needs new flood risk assessment and strategic projects throughout the five boroughs to absorb billions more gallons and improve sewer capacity. (A city map shows many piecemeal projects complete or underway, but we need many more.)

Washington has sent billions of dollars. What we lack is the collective will to light a fire under the federal bureaucracy, which largely stalled under President Trump, and keep local and state officials moving ever forward. They say success has a thousand fathers, but that’s really more true of inertia.