Brainstorming Ways To Protect NYC From Real Storms 203
A reader writes with this excerpt from NBC News:
"The killer storm that hit the East Coast last month and left the nation's largest city with a crippled transit system, widespread power outages and severe flooding has resurfaced the debate about how best to protect a city like New York against rising storm surges. In a 2011 report called 'Vision 2020: New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan,' NYC's Department of City Planning listed restoring degraded natural waterfront areas, protecting wetlands and building seawalls as some of the strategies to increase the city's resilience to climate change and sea level rise. 'Hurricane Sandy is a wake-up call to all of us in this city and on Long Island,' Malcolm Bowman, professor of physical oceanography at State University of New York at Stony Brook, told NBC News' Richard Engel. 'That means designing and building storm-surge barriers like many cities in Europe already have.' Some of the projects showcased at Rising Currents include: Ways to make the surfaces of the city more absorptive (through porous sidewalks) and more able to deal with water, whether coming from the sea or sky; Parks and freshwater and saltwater wetlands in Lower Manhattan; Artificial islands or reefs (including ones made of recycled glass) to make the shoreline more absorptive and break the waves."
Just buy lots of Shamwow cloths. (Score:5, Funny)
They can absorb like a barrel of water.
What doesn't work (Score:5, Funny)
Naming the roads 'Canal St', 'Water St.', etc. 1821 to 2012 is too long a period for oral history to be effective.
Re:Brilliant Folly (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Only idea sure to work (Score:3, Funny)
Your class envy rhetoric is idiotic. Manhattan has both rich and poor neighborhoods; flooding hurts both. Damaging business districts (which are interspersed throughout the island) hurts everyone.
It has Wall St. on it. Stop whining about idiocy; If there ever was a rich neighborhood in the United States, that would be it. And all of New York has exorbinantly high cost of living, apartments are tiny, real estate is at a premium -- I could go on. All of that is because that's where the financial businesses are. And that's the reason why these areas haven't been reinforced or evacuated. And for the record -- New Orleans also has a location which is important as an "inherent part of its geography" .. along with every other coastal city. You can't say "Oh, but New York is special!" Bullshit. There's no genetic code forcing people to live there. There's no natural resource so valuable it can't be found anywhere else in the world.
This isn't about "class envy", this is about engineering: If every few years your city gets flooded and stormed on, maybe that's nature's way of saying "Hey, dumb fucks -- move somewhere more hospitable." And no amount of tunnel and subway protection is going to help when there's twenty feet of water on every surface street! Now yes, you probably could throw a few hundred billion or a few trillion dollars at the problem and "solve it", but it's a lot more practical to simply build in a place that isn't going to be hammered all the time.
I'm sick of watching billions of dollars every year go to save these asshats that live in flood-prone areas. That costs me -- a person who was smart enough to not live in an area mother nature periodically feels like taking a giant piss in. Why should I have to be paying for your idiocy? So you can have a "by the ocean" view? Fuck you. Build your city somewhere sane.
Re:1664 (Score:4, Funny)
So you're suggesting that a country that is below sea level digs deep holes to contain excess water?