Give New York credit for its efforts to learn from last year's Hurricane Sandy. Less a year after the storm that causing more than $19 billion in damage, New York City, following the State, has now announced proposals aimed at reducing risks of similar damage in future storms.
Last Tuesday, NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg, described plans to protect vulnerable buildings along the city's 520-mile floodplain. The proposals including modifying new and existing buildings to reinforce foundations, as well as raise the levels of critical equipment. They also include proposals to build a system of flood walls, levees, and bulkheads at critical points around the city. The total cost is estimated at $20 billion, although most expect it to go higher as measures would be implemented.
As I noted the other day, New York City currently has nearly 400,000 people living and working within its 100-year flood plain (which these days are often more like 50-year flood plains). Generally, the mayor's proposals are aimed at protecting those residents, and in addition, allowing for that number to double over the next 30 years or so.
What's more, the proposals include one seemingly head-scratching idea to use new residential and office development as a means of protecting against storm surge. The report describes a project the mayor referred to as Seaport City, a complex of apartments and office buildings to be built on landfill extending out from the shoreline below the Brooklyn Bridge. Quite possibly I'm missing something, but it seems that, while the new development might protect existing territory along that part of the East Side, the new developments would themselves become the at-risk, exposed buildings.
I know New York City is very different from coastal areas on Long Island where Governor Cuomo has proposed paying landowners to give up their houses and permit the coast to return to something like a natural protective system of dunes and marshes. I suspect that there's little, if any, of the New York City floodplain where anything similar would be possible. Still, as one researcher observed, you "can't guarantee protection for infrastructure that is in vulnerable locations." Yet Mayor Bloomberg's proposals seem prepared to try.
I'm hoping an interesting debate will follow since there's a lot I need to learn.
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