Answering storm’s wet wake-up call
some experts suggest a retreat from the U.S. seaside, but many people are likely just to hit the snooze button again
“At what point does it make sense to call it a day and not have people live there?” DISASTER EXPERT IRWIN REDLENER
NEW YORK — Thirty days after hurricane Sandy devastated the coastal regions of New York and New Jersey, a full moon once again shone over the eastern seaboard. Stars glittered in their astral delight and the moon’s glow glistened against the rippling ocean, creating a calm reassurance that life had returned to normal and climate peace reigned.
It was, of course, pure deception. As citizens and government continue the costly business of repairing both their buildings and their lives, global warming and rising sea levels have added big question marks to the idea of “normal” and “climate peace.”
In the few hours it took for a nearly three-metre storm surge to rise up and sweep through the most densely populated area of the United States, Sandy destroyed thousands of homes and dashed the paradisical dreams of millions of Americans living on the barrier islands and coastal regions of an ocean whose rising levels now pose a sea of trouble.
It also was a wake-up call for governments. Officials in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and the Carolinas are rethinking their regulations and building codes, exploring the cost and feasibility of building dikes and storm barriers and restoring wetlands and marshes. Ultimately, however, they are asking the big question: With increasing storm intensity and frequency, should people be allowed to live in high-risk regions? Should the U.S. be making a strategic retreat from its coastline?
“There are millions of people who live in areas like this and, you know, at what point does it makes sense to just call it a day and not have people live there?” said Irwin Redlener, a disaster expert and chairman of one of three New York state commissions examining the aftermath of Sandy.
It used to be that the only solution to the destruction wrought by a massive storm such as Sandy was to rebuild. The insurance industry is predicated on this idea. As Ben Orlove, an anthropologist at the Columbia University Center for Research on environmental decisions, said, the default plan “is just restore.”
“What we know is that sea level has risen about a foot — more than 0.3 metres in New York over the last century,” said Radley Horton, a climatologist at the Columbia University Center for Climate research. “Under conservative projections, we expect at least half a metre of sea-level rise during the 21st century. You raise the floor of the basketball court and you get more slam dunks.”
Protecting the eastern seaboard is also a strategic issue. Sandy hit the U.S. financial centre and narrowly missed Washington and the major naval base of Norfolk, Va., where flooding has become an annual nuisance. Before Sandy’s arrival, New York experienced flooding in 2007 and 2011.
These new weather patterns have changed the vo- cabulary of location. Residents of coastal communities refer to themselves as living in Zone A or Zone B. Before Sandy, Zone A was for the most vulnerable neighbourhoods where evacuation has become the norm. Zone B was on the margins. Sandy blew these categories away when its storm surge blitzed through both zones, flooding every building in its path.
Maureen Cushion is a Long Island veterinarian assistant who lives with her husband on a narrow street of tightly packed two-storey houses that runs perpendicular to Long Beach. Her home in Zone B is no more than a football field from high tide and a few feet above sea level.
She said she watched from her second-floor window as the water suddenly came rushing down her street in foamy waves “like a tsunami,” knocking down fences, carrying away cars and flooding garages and the first floors of everyone’s home. Like pretty well everybody in her neighbourhood, her two cars were destroyed. (U.S. auto sales rose 15 per cent in November largely because of Sandy.) At that point, the entire barrier island was under water.
The sea deposited about three feet of white sand on the street and in gardens. “When you came out the next morning, it looked like a snow storm had hit,” she said.
One month later, workers have trucked most of the sand away to be sifted and deposited back on the beach, a small part of the $62-billion cleanup. Her broken home is still without heat and her first floor has to be repaired before she and her husband can return.
Meanwhile, it’s a house divided. Standing on the street, she said, “My husband wants to move to the mountains, but I want to stay. I love the beach.”
She added with a smile that hurricane Irene last year flooded their mountain cabin.
Farther down the beach on New York Avenue, Don Durando, 59, a retired homicide detective, was adjusting the bungee cord tethers on a giant U.S. flag that almost covered one full side of his corner bungalow. He said he found the huge flag floating in the flood waters and preserved it as a tribute to the people who helped out after the storm.
Like most residents, he hadn’t bothered to move his two cars to safer grounds or even clean out his basement. He even left his parrot in its basement cage and said he had to wade through five feet of water to rescue it.
He can’t live in the house until it’s repaired and so far his insurance company has paid him only $2,000, he said. So he and his wife are staying with relatives.
Durando said he has thought about selling because “I have a funny feeling that this is our weather pattern now.”
He is stuck, however, with a problem typical to floodprone areas. “Who’s going to buy it?” he asked. “With the lower values, forget it.”
Street after street of deserted homes across the Long Island’s barrier islands testify to the heavy price exacted by Sandy. Eventually, market forces could force many people out of high-risk areas as insurers drive up rates to unaffordable levels.
The journal Nature published a report in the summer saying a 1½-metre sea-level rise is inevitable no matter how much we reduce our carbon emissions. One and a half metres would permanently flood seven per cent of New York, nine per cent of Boston, 94 per cent of Miami Beach and 20 per cent of Miami, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Scientists consider Sandy a highly unusual storm that was only partly due to climate change. Other factors such as the cyclical warming of the Atlantic, the high tide, the full moon, and the counter-storm that forced Sandy inland played a more significant role in the height of the storm surge, said Lisa Goddard of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.
Even without climate change in the equation, too many people live in high-risk areas subject to dangerous climate variability, she said. “But people living in Florida, people living on the East Coast of the United States, people in Long Island are just sort of sitting there and crossing their fingers and hoping nothing bad will happen. And so by not taking this information seriously these people are putting themselves in harm’s way.”
What worries Redlener is fear that the lessons of Sandy will be short-lived.
“Sandy has been a big awakening, but there’s a caveat here,” he said. “It’s the phenomenon of the so-called wake-up calls, which turn out to be much more like snooze alarms.”