Five years after Superstorm Sandy, the lessons haven’t sunk in
Five years after Superstorm Sandy was supposed to have taught the U.S. a lesson about the dangers of living along the coast, disaster planning experts say there is no place in America truly prepared for climate change and the tempests it could bring.
That is true even in New York and New Jersey, where cities and towns got slammed by deadly floodwaters that rose out of the Atlantic on the evening of Oct. 29, 2012.
While billions have been spent to repair the damage, protecting vulnerable infrastructure, people and property across the nation from the more extreme weather that climate change could bring is going to require investment on a staggering scale, easily costing hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions.
Some coastal protection projects are moving forward, but the most ambitious ideas spurred by Sandy’s onslaught are still in the design stage, with questions about whether they will ever be built.
Some wonder whether the nation has the will to undertake such ventures, even after this past season brought more catastrophic storms, including Hurricane Harvey, which swamped Houston, and Hurricane Maria, which laid waste to Puerto Rico’s electrical grid.
“It felt after Sandy as if we might have finally had our wake-up call. We’d start to take these things seriously,” said Eric Klinenberg, director of the Institute for Public Knowledge, a think tank at New York University. “We’d make the kind of investment in climate security that we made in homeland security after Sept. 11. But of course nothing of the sort has happened.”
Some experts worry also that the ascendance of a climatechange skeptic to the White House may put the brakes on coastal protection efforts. In August, President Donald Trump rescinded President Barack Obama’s post-Sandy order requiring future sea level rise to be factored into federally funded infrastructure projects.
“Since the new administration is not using the CC word, the climate change word, it’s very hard to instill this forwardlooking kind of attitude where you have to take into account sea level rise and how the flood zones expand,” says Klaus Jacob, a Columbia University scientist specializing in climate change adaptation.
And yet, some planners still hope that Sandy created momentum for projects that could serve as national models.
After Sandy, which was blamed for at least 182 deaths in the U.S. and Caribbean and an estimated $65 billion in damage in this country alone, a government-funded competition called Rebuild by Design produced audacious ideas for defending the coast.
One concept, dubbed The Big U, would create 10 miles of floodwalls, berms and gates around lower Manhattan. Other ideas include erecting breakwaters around Staten Island that would double as oyster beds, and reconfiguring the Meadowlands, the polluted wetlands of urban New Jersey, with berms and marshes.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development put up $1 billion to get those projects started, but construction hasn’t begun on any of them.
Amy Chester, Rebuild By Design’s executive director, said it will take years to complete all the planning and gain government approvals and community support. And it’s not clear how much these projects will ultimately cost.
While the grandest ideas about post-Sandy protections are still far from reality, there has been progress.
Communities on the New Jersey shore built sand dunes to hold back surf, or fortified existing ones. Power companies and New York’s subway system have put flood protections around key infrastructure. Hospitals moved electrical equipment out of basements.
The Army Corps of Engineers is scheduled to begin construction in 2019 on a 5-milelong, 20-foot-high seawall and promenade that would run along New York’s Staten Island in front of the neighborhoods hit hardest by Sandy. The project, which is still being designed, has an estimated price tag of $600 million and is scheduled for completion by 2022.
Michael Cappannari, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the administration is committed to helping communities recognize the risk and defend against flooding. He cited several federally funded projects underway, including construction of boardwalks with seawalls hidden beneath them and flood-proofing of sewage treatment systems.