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http://www.registercitizen.com/artic...f705951970.txt
Keeping the oceans back from the shorelines
Sunday, December 02, 2012

On Monday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said that the response to Hurricane Sandy will cost $42 billion. On Wednesday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) claimed that his state needs nearly as much.

On the same day, a group of climate researchers released calculations that indicate the world’s oceans are rising 60 percent faster than the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change anticipated five years ago. Projecting how Greenland’s ice will behave in a warming world or what will happen to the polar ice caps decades from now is difficult. But sea levels appear to be on track to rise by several feet over the next century, with every inch putting more Americans at risk.

Sea-level researchers Robert Kopp and Benjamin Strauss estimate that a five-foot rise would produce Sandy-like floods in New York every 15 years, on average.

Protecting New York City, America’s skyscraping metropolis, from the advancing ocean is likely to be one of this century’s great infrastructure investments. Some work, such as constructing sea walls and retrofitting subway entrances, is already happening. Part of Cuomo’s $42 billion request includes money to prepare for the next storm — funding for waterproofing electrical infrastructure, retrofitting sewage treatment plants or floodproofing subway tunnels. The last is especially important; damage to the subway system was the biggest-ticket item in the state’s cost estimates, topping out at $5 billion.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0c083...44feabdc0.html
Climate: Storm warning
November 29, 2012
By Ed Crooks and Robert Wright

City and state authorities have been worrying for years about what would happen if a great storm hit, without doing very much about it. Now they do not have to wonder any longer. The question of how to protect New York and the surrounding area from future storms has become urgent.

“It’s common sense,” said Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York state, this week. “Rather than sustain another $30bn of damage, why don’t you spend some money now to save money in the future?”

Christine Quinn, the speaker of New York City council who is expected to run for mayor next year, has gone further, calling for up to $20bn to be spent on flood defences.

Sandy’s impact has been a dramatic demonstration of a much wider problem: the weakness of vital parts of US infrastructure.

Engineers have put forward plenty of ideas to reduce the damage done by future storms, from a five-mile barrier across the lower bay of New York, to putting back-up generators high up in buildings rather than in basements. There is much that could be done. The question is: will it?

Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado-Boulder, who studies the damage done by hurricanes, argues that although much of the talk since Sandy has been about the possible influence of climate change on the storm, the level of uncertainty in projections of hurricane activity makes it hard to use them as a guide to decision-making.

“The next storm could hit next year or in 20 years,” he says. “The real question for New Yorkers is, given that there will be another storm, what do they want it to look like? And if they don’t want it to look like Sandy, they are going to have to spend some money.”

Not every precaution is expensive. The most important factor in limiting the death toll and damage done by Sandy was effective disaster planning, helped by the early warning of the storm’s approach given by highly accurate weather forecasting using satellite data.

Knowledge that the storm was coming several days in advance enabled governments, businesses and individuals to take precautions ranging from evacuating some areas to moving televisions and stereos out of basements.

“The cost of Sandy was very high but it would have been very much higher without good forecasts,” says Stephane Hallegatte, an economist at the World Bank.

Early warnings made it possible for the MTA to avoid some damage, according to Richard Barone, director of transportation programmes for the Regional Plan Association.

Learning lessons from recent severe weather, the MTA shut services down well before the storm hit, to ensure equipment was kept safe and dry for a quick resumption of service.

Other measures to improve resilience are more expensive. Mr Cuomo has put a price tag of $9bn on what he calls “common sense” actions, such as flood protection for the World Trade Center site and back-up power for the fuel supply system, which suffered disruption for over a week.

Storm gates can be fitted to subway stations, and other defences strengthened. Lower Manhattan suffered a blackout caused by flooding at the electricity substation on the East River at 14th Street, which had a flood wall to protect against a 12-foot storm surge but was overwhelmed by the 14-foot surge caused by Sandy. That flood wall is likely to be raised.

However, many of the changes needed to safeguard New York’s infrastructure would be very expensive. Electricity substations and back-up generators in Manhattan are often located in basements, leaving them vulnerable to flooding. (Goldman Sachs, for example, had the foresight to place its generators on the roof of its headquarters, enabling the firm to keep its lights on when most of the buildings around it went dark.) But moving every piece of electrical infrastructure to a higher elevation would be difficult.

Jeroen Aerts of the Free University of Amsterdam, who is preparing a report on flood defence options for New York City, believes a comprehensive package of reinforcements, including protection for subway stations, airports and Wall Street, could cost about $20bn.

Mr Aerts argues that for about the same price, New York could have a system of flood barriers similar to those that protect London or Rotterdam.

Taking estimates from various engineering companies, he suggests a system of two barriers – the larger spanning five miles from New Jersey to Long Island across the lower bay of New York, with associated reinforcements to beaches at the end of the barriers – would cost $15bn. A more complex system with four barriers would cost $22bn.

With Sandy having cost New York City an estimated $19bn, that might seem like money worth spending, even if the lack of understanding of hurricane activity makes the cost-benefit analysis uncertain.

“If you look only five or 10 years into the future, then it’s probably not worth it,” says Malcolm Bowman, a professor of oceanography at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “But if you look 50 or 100 years ahead, then maybe it is.”

The problem, though, is that even if politicians decide investment in barriers makes sense, financing that scale of infrastructure investment in the US is extremely difficult. For all New York’s wealth and economic importance, there are many cities in Europe, and some in emerging economies such as St Petersburg and Shanghai, with stronger flood defences. The same unflattering comparisons can be applied to rail systems, airports and highways.