Superstorm Sandy still resonates in planning
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 no place in America is 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 Ocean on the evening of Oct. 29, 2012.
Although billions have been spent to repair the damage, protecting people, property and vulnerable infrastructure across the nation from the moreextreme weather that climate change could bring is going to require investment on a staggering scale, easily costing hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions of dollars.
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 people 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 research group 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.”
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. 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.
Over the summer, New Jersey hired an engineering firm to carry out one of the Rebuild by Design concepts: an anti-flood system for Hoboken, a city of 50,000 across the Hudson River from New York City. The $230 million project, funded by HUD, involves a series of floodwalls, pumping stations and waterretention tanks.
LaTrenda Ross, a 40-year resident of Hoboken, recalls Sandy’s flooding: “To not be able to go to work, to sit there in the dark, no elevators, no way out, was devastating.” If something isn’t done to prevent a repeat, “there won’t even be a city of Hoboken. We might as well pack up and move now.”
Among other improvements in the region, 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 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-mile-long, 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.
It’s not enough, said Klaus Jacob, a Columbia University scientist specializing in climatechange adaptation.
“It’s on a pace that’s dictated by the funds that are available, politically made available,” he said. “And if that snail’s pace continues, there’s a good chance that we may have another severe storm in (New York City) or in the region that will outpace that slow pace of improving the systems.”
Politicians locally and in Congress appear reluctant to get behind enormously expensive and sometimes divisive projects to deal with a threat that often feels hypothetical.
In Hoboken, for example, one proposal for a floodwall that would have protected more of the city was rejected because it would have blocked river views. Cities throughout the country have been reluctant to curtail building on the waterfront, because those spots are in such great demand from homebuyers.
In New York City, FEMA redrew the flood maps after Sandy, nearly doubling to 71,500 the number of buildings deemed to be in high-risk zones. The city objected for fear that would raise floodinsurance rates and stifle waterfront development, and last year FEMA agreed to roll the flood zones back.