A storm surge of just over feet could take out the New York City subway system for nearly a month, according to some projections. (Via Transportation Nation. Click to enlarge)
With Hurricane Irene bearing down on New York in late August, the MTA took the nearly unprecedented step of shutting down the city’s subway system. Faced with dire predictions of potential storm surges that could easily flood the various East River tunnels, the MTA had to protect its employees and passengers while attempting to minimize damage to old equipment susceptible to salt water.
As we know, the city was spared the worst of the storm, but Metro-North’s Port Jervis line suffered heavy damage. Some New Yorkers were critical of the city’s reaction and the inconvenience it caused, but others in policy positions worried that we were simply delaying the inevitable. At some point, a big storm will cause serious damage to our transportation infrastructure. It’s not a matter of if but when.
Earlier this week, scientists from Columbia, Cornell and CUNY issued a report at the behest of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority exploring the impact climate change could have on the state. You can read The Times’ top-line coverage right here. I had planned to explore what this report had to say about the subways, but Andrea Bernstein, in a very comprehensive piece for Transportation Nation, beat me to it. Read her piece right here.
For those us interested in subway service, Bernstein’s reporting touches upon two key issues. First, she talks with Projjol Dutta, the MTA’s Climate Adaptation Specialist, who was brought on to make the MTA’s operations more environmentally-friendly but has focused on climate-change remediation issues instead. He helped develop plans to raise ventilation grates in order to keep too much rainwater from flooding the subways as it did back in August of 2007.
Dutta explored how climate change and the anticipated effects has led the MTA to develop ways to cool platforms and how these costs impact the MTA’s capital plans. With higher temperatures expected over the next century, the MTA must keep the air underground cooler. “We have to get that heat out,” Dutta said. “This is not for something as superficial as personal comfort, there’s lots of electronics that a train carries. We had a lot of heat related problems, so we’ve had to introduce cooling into areas that did not hitherto require heating…“Our core mission is to provide trains, buses, and subways. [Climate change] takes something away from that core mission. If you did not need the air tempering, you could have built another station.”
The second part concerns flooding. Bernstein writes:
[Columbia professor Klaus] Jacob has worked with the MTA to model what would happen if you couple sea level rises – the FTA says to expect four feet by the end of this century – with intense storms like Irene. In forty minutes, Jacob says, all the East River Tunnels would be underwater. Jacob says he took those results to the MTA, and asked, if that happened, how long would it take to restore the flooded subway to a degree of functionality?
“And there was a big silence in the room because the system is so old. Many of the items that would be damaged by the intrusion of the saltwater into the system could not recover quickly. You have to take them apart. You have to clean them from salt, dry them, reassemble them, test them and cross your fingers that they work.”
In a best-case scenario, Jacob calculated that it would take 29 days to get the subway working again. But in the meantime, a halted subway would almost halt the city’s economy, which, he says produces $4 billion a day in economic activity. The thing is, Jacob says, the city came within a foot of that happening during Irene. Because the astronomical tides were so high, and the storm so intense, the storm surge mimicked a future where the sea is much higher than it is now. During Irene, Jacob says, the storm surge was 3.6 feet. “Had it been not 3.6 feet but 4.6, we would have been in deep trouble.”
These are dire predictions of dire times, and there’s no easy solution in sight. The MTA doesn’t have storm gates for its tunnels, and its infrastructure is indeed vulnerable to the so-called Big One. As Bernstein notes, Jay Walder said it best: “The worst fear that we had, which was that the under river tunnels on the East River would flood with salt water, were not realized. We certainly dodged something there.” What happens next time?
43 comments
A lot more than subway infrastructure is at risk from a storm surge; road tunnels, utility vaults and individual basements as well. Not to mention our ports and airports. Nor is four feet the high end of possibility. Irene had an ideal trajectory to push a monster surge in but failed to do so thanks to atmospheric conditions that prevented strengthening. Computer modeling have surges much higher than 4 feet and historical records show some previous surges were well in excess of 10 feet. At some point luck will run out.
NY and NJ ought to consider a combined storm wall and river gate system along the coast line. London already has a river gate that pops open to prevent surges on the Thames and it would not be overly difficult to envision a similar system at the three openings to the New York Harbor and rivers (Amboy, Verrazano, and Throgs Neck). It’ll be freaking costly to build but could be some long term protection without having to retrofit individual subway openings all over the place.
NY and NJ ought to consider a combined storm wall and river gate system along the coast line.
Only if they’re willing to pay for the same system in the Ganges Delta.
i dont follow…
Our fossil fuel use is going to cause far more catastrophic damage in poorer countries.
The Ganges River meets the ocean at the boundry of the poorest part of India and Bangladesh. This area is horridly overpopulated, with many people living at sea level. Global warming could mean absolute horror for those people, who contributed little to it.
Some of the global warming denyers have claimed that trying to stop it is ecnomically irrational, because the cost of coping mechanisms is lower than the cost of getting off fossil fuels. Left unsaid is that none of those refusing to get off fossil fuels are agreeing to pay for the coping mechanisms.
Of course, New York isn’t especially responsible for climate change either. Hell, if more people lived more like us, we’d probably have less to worry about.
Totally. This is one of the few places that functions pretty well without depending on personal vehicle use while apartment living by nature requires less energy to heat and cool per unit than suburban house, let alone McMansion.
I get what Alon is alluding to but our decision to build or not build some sort of protection is not dependent on making investments elsewhere in the world to ward off climate change effects.
On the contrary, if more people lived like New Yorkers, climate damage would be even worse. New York’s per capita energy consumption and carbon emissions are well below US average, but they’re above world average.
Moreover, one of the people who are doing the most damage right now, David Koch, is a New Yorker. In general, New Yorkers’ personal lifestyles are more sustainable than the first-world average, but the sort of economic and political activity the city promotes is not sustainable. The finance companies funding new master-planned subdivisions in exurban Phoenix are all located in the big cities. Even Bloomberg, who gets political capital from enacting green policies, tends to do nothing about things that don’t have his name on them.
Let’s not forget the reason I have to leave NYC. The choking winter air full of heavy oil soot from 8000 buildings creating the city’s biggest polluter.
I can’t wait until 2014 to switch to natural gas. The air is killing me with every breath I take and this is my only known allergy.
A billionaire sociopath lives in New York? You’re yanking my doodle!
Yeah, yeah, I certainly didn’t say there no serious problems with New York. I quite obviously didn’t say there are no things that should be done to mitigate the effects of local pollution – hell, I’d wager I’m one of the few people you’d ever meet who walks the walk on that position in actively seeking to lower my carbon and material footprint.
Still, if Americans, and westerners in general (and you can probably throw in the ascendent middle classes of India and China), managed New York levels of environmental impact, we’d have far fewer problems, as I said above. I realize the whole world will need to make due with leaner energy consumption on average. Places like New York are at least somewhat easier to switch to green energy sources when the time arrives – and, yes, I realize it arrived decades ago.
I’m not sure I get your point about financing though. Of course I agree big financial firms financing MOARRR suburban subdivisions is bad. But that is a macroeconomic problem – some of those firms are in big cities in other countries. That many happen to be in New York is rather incidental. Unless I’m missing something, I can’t really say I see the city “promoting” it,* but only responding to the market conditions laid out by the states and especially the feds. The same assholes would cheerfully fund condominium towers in rainforests if politics demanded it.
* Naturally, the likes of Seth Pinsky and Jimmy Vacca want to impose that model locally, but that’s another story.
If you’re part of the 99%, your job will move to India or China.
You could show your concern and move there now.
This nationalist demagogy has to stop. Is there some rule that says people can’t be populist without finding someone beneath them to hate on?
Not a rule, but if you rule that out, you take away most of the impetus for sustainable populism. Even in the rare cases where it actually involves good intentions, populism is more emotive than logical.
But it’s not nationalist, it’s just patriotic jingoism. If Amerikans achieved even western European levels of nationalism on top of their current levels of jingoism, we’d probably have a race war on our hands. 😐
I think the Hudson has too large a drainage basin for this to work by itself; the Hudson River by itself could surge large enough to cause major flooding in Manhattan.
Manhattan is going to need a seawall. Either that, or everyone move several blocks inland, but Lower Manhattan would have to be abandoned, so I think seawall.
In transportation terms, Sunnyside Yard will need a seawall as well.
I dont mean to sound cliche but its true its not a question of if a major hurricane hits NY its a question of when. The MTA did the completely right thing in shutting down the storm would have been much worse if only a couple of things went slightly different (namely if it wasnt for the eyewall reconstruction phase before hitting the OBX of NC it wouldve been a category 2 or 3 when it hit NY) Also how many people were really planning on traveling during Irene.
The biggest problem as it alluded to in the post is that much of the flooding could be from salt water which is corrosive. Some sections would require significant repair before it could be reopened.
It’s always important to plan for the “worst case” scenario, though this wasn’t the first time the subway system survived a near hit — the storm of 9/21/38 was more intense and did more damage to the region. But like this year’s, the worst of it was out on Long Island.
As for the heat problem, citing the added electronics on the NTT trains kind of fudges the fact that since the first air-conditioned cars were introduced back in 1966, the stations have been getting warmer in the summer because all that hot air being pumped out by the ever-increasing number of cars with AC ends up hanging over the platforms at station stops, and the problem gets worse at stations not immediately beneath the street, where the gratings provide at least someplace for the exhaust to escape.
The WMATA-style stations with their higher-vaulted ceilings allow the hot air to rise above the platforms better than the low-ceiling NYC stations, but only a handful of stations in New York (like 168th on the 1) have that type of design. Unless you have a huge, MTA-owned source of platform air conditioning right above the station, as with Grand Central, it’s going to be tough to cool the platforms in a lot of the high-volume stations unless the MTA wants to start reintroducing axleflow fans in place of AC with the R-179 order.
They could also add fans and air flow control flaps (sheet metal boxes/ducts and hinged panels with temp control locks) to the existing sidewalk vents. When the temps underground exceed above ground temps (via sensors mounted at station entrances) and 78F, the system kicks in.
I find it astonishing that anyone is ignorant enough to still buy the global warming/climate change hoax at this point.
You mean, of course, the hoax that climate change isn’t really happening, right?
It really is astonishing that anyone would dismiss the findings of the vast majority of climate scientists — findings which are strengthened with each new study that comes out.
You’d have to believe either that: 1) you know better than 99% of scientists who have studied these matters for their entire careers, or 2) all of those tens of thousands of scientists are lying, and part of a massive conspiracy.
It truly is amazing that anyone could be so daft to believe the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda on this subject.
Climate always changes — how were the Vikings able to set up encampments in Greenland at the turn of the last millenia given the island’s current conditions? The problem is defining the line between serious things that can be done to avoid excessive pollutants in the atmosphere and hyperbolic claims in an effort to force immediate and massive lifestyle changes that end up turning off more people than they convince when those changes fail to occur a few years down the line.
Like I noted above, nothing in the way of climate change legislation could do more to immediately cool down New York City subway stations than to eliminate all the heat being pumped into the stations by the railcar air-conditioners. But we’re not going back to the era of overhead circulating fans on subway cars, so the heat problem is one that’s going to continue unless or until the MTA can also air-condition the station platforms.
Planning for a major hurricane hit on the city is a more practical effort in preparation, but a storm could have just as easily shut down the system in 1938 as it could have in 2011. Over-hyping the global warming angle is just a tactic to try and ratchet up the urgency to pull a few more $$$ into the project (it’s harder to get the money, if based on historical patterns, you’re looking at significant hurricane effects on the city running about every 10-15 years and a near dead-on hit every 75 years or so). Tell them the storm patters are going to increase and the cash may flow more freely, though other than putting doors on the river tunnels to block off water flow similar to what PATH did to the WTC tunnel on the New Jersey side after 9/11, there isn’t much you can do other than to have a post-storm mobilization and repair plan fully drawn out.
What the hell does NYC subway air conditioning have to do with climate change? AC or no, a conservative guess is an NYC subway trip uses about half of the energy per passenger-mile as a private automobile – and when I say that’s conservative, I’m saying it’s conservative in the sense that it’s favorable to POVs in the comparison (granted, other cities don’t seem to do so well). And the difference, of course, between more subway riders and more drivers is more subway riders will tend to lower average energy use per user, while more drivers will not. And that’s before considering all the lifestyle differences that make urban living generally more sustainable than living in a suburban house.
It would be nice if over-hyping were the problem. The problem is not taking it seriously at all because somebody was wrong in 1976.
You can’t go out and say in 2009 the polar ice caps will be gone in 2014. That’s over-hyping. It hurts your own cause in the long-run, and gets you multiple references as a pathetic Man/Bear/Pig loon by the guys who wrote “The Book of Mormon” for Broadway.
As for the AC, part of the story was the MTA seeking ways to lower the levels of heat within the system’s stations. Fine — you want the fastest way to lower the heat in the stations? Shut the AC on the railcars off and go back to axelflow fans. Any other solution is going to require either huge ventilation and/or platform cooling systems which in themselves will require further use of energy.
The climate always changes — always has, always will. And there are cost-effective ways to eliminate excessive energy use and heat generation. But you still have to make choices, like whether or not you want exterior heat-generating air-conditioning in subway cars. My guess is passengers will prefer adding a little bit to the NYC Metro area’s heat island to keep the AC on the cars (and I’m not against figuring out ways to cool the platforms. I just find it funny/ironic to link it to the fight against Global Warming because cooling the platforms is going to boost MTA energy usage).
I take it the emotive point of that link is, Al Gore said it something related to S, and I therefore should dismiss S entirely because Al Gore is a lying liar? Why Matt Stone and Trey Parker are supposed to be authorities on climate change (or humor), I have no idea. Regardless, I really don’t see how one person saying one thing that is probably exaggerated somehow changes the fact that there is a strong possibility of dire consequences. The rest of what Al Gore says can’t even be called incorrect just because he got a detail wrong – the details must be weighed on their own merits. The general consensus among experts seems to be ice-free arctic summers sometime in the next few decades and a high likelihood of catastrophic rises in sea levels during this century. Higher likelihood, but less dire, still: more extreme weather, more flooding, more frequent, hurricanes, higher storm surges. It’s not a binary coin flip, where heads nothing changes and tails we all die. And, oh, look, Al Gore may have been off by 7 years. Or maybe financial market data reporters firm Reuters is lying too, ’cause all finance people do is lie afterall.
I, for one, see the matter of heat in MTA stations as a pointless distraction, and bothering with AC in those stations is probably a waste of time and agency resources, not a meaningful additional waste of energy. Transit in general promotes sustainable land use and energy consumption. Throwing AC into the mix doesn’t change that, it just means we’re “wasting” energy on AC.
What is truly amazing is that anyone is daft enough to believe that climate changes are caused by human carbon emissions. Actually, very few people beleive it anymore as demonstrated by the total flop of Al Gore’s 24 hours thingy a few weeks ago, and the BEST temperature report to congress this week where almost no one showed up (including fellow environmentalists).
These obvious failures foreshadow Durban which will be the biggest failure of them all.
I can’t wait for Durban. I’ve got the beer and popcorn ready, this is going to be so much fun. wahoo!
Even if carbon emissions aren’t the primary cause of climate change, wouldn’t it be a good idea to reduce our footprint and lower emissions anyway? I think people get too caught up in the cause/effect issue of climate change.
Unless there’s some super positive benefit of excessive carbon emissions I’m not aware of??
But very few people believe it. (People = the exalted ones whose opinions count, the John Galts who watch Fox News.)
The causes are fairly clear, and the effects are starting to be noticed. That it is no longer an abstract “theory” as it was in the 1970s, but something that is empirically happening, has led to a very strong right-wing pushback against reality, which our dear friend Klem here has swallowed hook, line, and sinker. Of course, most people to some extent fall for broadcast propaganda, so it’s not a surprise if “most people” are affected. But most people having some reservations doesn’t make the general problem go away.
I see that the delusional Kool-Aid swallowers are out in force.
Well, as climate change caused by human burning of fossil fuels floods the coastlines and causes more fires and crop failures inland, we can only hope the delusional right-wing deniers are the ones who die. Evolution in action.
The number of first-world residents who are going to die of climate change is close to zero. Lots of people in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Vietnam, and Cambodia are going to die, but I don’t know what those countries’ floodplain residents’ politics are.
Oh they’re all Democrats of course, so you need to save them. If they were Republicans, well they can wash away in the floods.
Fortunatly alot of delusional left-wing alrmists will die as well. Intelligent Design in action.
You know what’s funny? Koch Industries (I bet you think they’re great people) paid a skeptic scientist to investigate climate change. His findings? Global warming and climate change are real and getting worse. Woops! But hey, whatever helps your brainwashed mind sleep at night.
Look who’s talking pal.
So all those scientists around the world are part of a big conspiracy to…do what? All the world’s scientists are wrong and oil company CEO’s and Republican congressmen are right and climate change is a hoax. Honestly, what part of that makes sense?
Its not a scientific conspiracy. I know a working scientist who is a closet climate denier, yet he openly admits that in order to secure his annual research funding he always links his research proposals to anthropogenic climate change. He says it goes against his personal convictions, but he’s a pragmatist, he does what is necessary to continue his research and to keep his staff employed. He does it because it works. He simply uses the flavour of the month to keep the ship afloat and CAGW is the flavour of the month. When the flavor changes, so will his research. I don’t blame him one bit, if I were in his shoes I’d do the same thing. This is not a conspiracy, its life.
But it makes me wonder, just how many scientists out there are doing the exact same thing? Not all of course, but I’ll bet its more than you might think.
And I know people in both business and politics who pay people to engage in sockpuppetry and write fraudulent friendly comments on news sites.
I wish I were one of them.
Of course climate is changing. It always has, with our without humans. It happens to be getting hotter right now, which isn’t necessarily “worse” than, for example, getting colder, and there’s a good chance that no human is at fault for causing it.
The Koch-funded study by Richard Muller also said “The “human component is somewhat uncertain.” and “worth some additional scientific addressing.”
Investing in NYC transit to make it cooler and less vulnerable to water sounds like something everyone should agree on, regardless of whether the warming was caused by humans, sunspots, or an increase in solar UV.
You’re making half the point for us with your last sentence. Making things more efficient shouldn’t need the concept of “climate change” to encourage it. As for whether it’s caused my mankind, common sense says there’s a good chance of it when you consider the heavy industrialization in China and India and the last decade’s increase in temperature. Nobody’s forcing you to make any drastic changes. People are just encouraged to maybe overtime become more efficient. Nothing unAmerican or crazy there.
As for the MTA, they need to have plans regarding the tunnels regardless of whether climate change is there. NY Harbor bay is a hurricane’s dream. We got lucky with Irene not flooding the tunnels last time.
You’re cherrypicking. Muller started out a denier but then came out convinced that the climatologists are right. I don’t know if you’ve ever read scientific papers for a living, but practically all of them have lines like “subject of future research,” “requires additional work,” and so on. Sometimes it’s part of the main conclusion. Sometimes it’s in an annex to the main result.
And you too are cherry picking. Muller was never a climate skeptic, he was a science skeptic. here’s what he said recently about that;
“It is ironic if some people treat me as a traitor, since I was never a skeptic — only a scientific skeptic,” he said in a recent email exchange with The Huffington Post. “Some people called me a skeptic because in my best-seller ‘Physics for Future Presidents’ I had drawn attention to the numerous scientific errors in the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ But I never felt that pointing out mistakes qualified me to be called a climate skeptic.”
He is a science skeptic, as he should be.
cheers.
Funny but true.
I noticed signs of climate change as early as 1982 when it started getting progressively warmer around each christmas after several years of having snow storms. Each year was a bit warmer than the prior one & it was odd to be able to go to college in shorts & a polo shirt in the middle of Febuary 1991 when it was 70f each morning. I relay this story since we have been having extreme weather of another sort in the past few winters, greater amounts of snow.
Sometimes you don’t need to be a climate scientist to notice the signs, just how your body feels is enough to tell that something isn’t quite right. This is where theMTA needs to develop new practices in preparing for the once in a century weather events that seme to be happening every few years now.
And what you noticed is evidence that the climate changes, but it is not evidence that CO2 is the cause. I beleive it is called confirmation bias, and this is the same mistake that almost all climate alarmists make.
It is also the reason why climate alarmism has faded and Durban will be a huge failure.
cheers
CO2 (and also methane and other greenhouse gases) is the cause. Try reading any peer-reviewed paper ever published in the field. Or learning some basic climate science.
Wow that sure convinced me.