Can’t replace sewers in city, say officials
De Blasio administration officials admitted Tuesday they have no immediate plan to upgrade the city’s aging sewer system — even though it was quickly overwhelmed by the deadly remnants of Hurricane Ida earlier this month.
Testifying before a City Council oversight hearing on the administration’s response to Ida, the officials said it would be too costly to rip out the more than 7,000 miles of sewer pipes that snake through the five boroughs and replace them with more storm-resilient infrastructure.
“It’s physically infeasible. It’s going to cost $100 billion,” said Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Vincent Sapienza.
Rather, Sapienza and the other de Blasio honchos argued for an incremental approach, whereby the city will build 11,000 rain gardens — which help contain heavy downpours — while taking more aggressive precautions before storms arrive.
As previously laid out by Mayor de Blasio, the officials said mandatory citywide travel bans and evacuations will become more common. Subway stations prone to flooding will also be preemptively shuttered more often, they said.
“I think we’ve learned that we just have to be hyperaggressive,” Emergency Management Commissioner John Scrivani said.
But Council members weren’t convinced.
They argued there needs to more urgency around retrofitting infrastructure, as climate change threatens to make extreme weather events more common and increasingly destructive.
“Why is it that the City of New York isn’t pouring money into arguably the most important issue of our time, which is climate change?” said Brooklyn Councilman Antonio Reynoso, chairman of the Sanitation and Waste Management Committee. “Why is [the Department of Environmental Protection] concerned about money, when, if not handled and taken care of, we have a loss of life for residents and significant longterm structural damage to homes, to businesses and to our local city infrastructure?”
Ida overwhelmed sewers in minutes when it barreled in over the city on Sept. 1, devastating entire neighborhoods and killing at least 13 New York City residents.
What made Ida especially dangerous was that it caused more than 3 inches of rain to fall per hour — and the city’s sewers can generally only contain about 1.75 inches per hour, resulting in pipes overloading and spitting out stormwater into subways, streets and homes.
Sapienza acknowledged the sewer capacity shortfall is a serious issue, but said the city can’t do much to fix it without help from Congress, where lawmakers are considering sweeping public works investments on a national scale.
“We’d love to do more, and we’re hopeful that the federal government will have a large infrastructure program, and we can get some funding from that,” he said.
Manhattan Councilman Mark Levine said he believes the city can play a larger role than Sapienza suggested.
“None of what we have done is enough,” he said. “We need now to think bigger than ever in the midst of a climate change disaster, which is already here.”
Another issue that loomed large in the wake of Ida was the de Blasio administration’s failure to alert New Yorkers.
The mayor didn’t declare a state of emergency until hours after Ida hit, even though the National Weather Service had warned of potentially “life-threatening” conditions. The city also didn’t send out alerts to New Yorkers’ cell phones until flash floods were already inundating several neighborhoods.
The lack of warnings proved especially perilous for residents of basement apartments, with 11 of the city’s 13 Ida victims dying from drowning in such units, many of which are illegal.
De Blasio has pledged to compile a roster on all basement units in the city so residents can be quickly evacuated during future storms — but his commissioners could not provide much of an update on that issue during Tuesday’s hearing, either.
“The basement apartments is a superfocus now, so we got to figure out how to get that message out,” Scrivani told Council members. “We need your help to do that.”