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talkpoliticsAfter inflicting havoc upon numerous Caribbean nations Hurricane Sandy turned slowly north. Upon passing the North Carolina and Virgina coast of the United States, the storm was turned back towards land by a high pressure system over the Atlantic as predicted. Also as predicted, a powerful cold front approaching from the upper Midwest began to pull the tropical cyclone in, and, as the storm made landfall in southern New Jersey, it actually grew STRONGER by merging with the cold front and being fed by an unusually low Jet Stream and became the predicted "Frankenstorm" which took direct aim at 60 million people:
The week before the storm, my car spun out on the Jersey Turnpike and hit the guardrail, and it had been living in a tow yard for most of the week. I had to teach in New Jersey Saturday morning, so I took a rental car out to retrieve the rest of our possessions from the car, teach and lay in storm supplies before returning to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. By 1pm Saturday in New Jersey, stores were rapidly selling out of cleaning supplies and bottled water. The mood was not quite panic, but you could tell it was tense. I managed to lay in some more food for us, matches for the gas stove and oven and drinking water, although I had little reason to expect to need them: Manhattan's underground electrical transmission system is rarely vulnerable even to major storms, and while it was clear that the storm was going to have widespread impact, we did not think Manhattan would be especially vulnerable.
Sunday morning saw the very beginning of storm like conditions with occasions of gusty winds. But as the day went on, it was obvious that what they were saying was true about the size of the storm -- it was immense, growing more intense as it moved north and piling up an enormous storm surge in front of it. Bit by bit, the city announced shut downs, including a full transit stop to go into effect by Sunday night and mandatory evacuations from Zone A -- despite the public's impression that the previous year's Hurricane Irene had been a minor event for New York City (it wasn't but people were unaware of how close we came to the transit system flooding in that storm), people were heeding warnings about the approaching hybrid storm system. I did all of our family laundry just in case we did lose electricity and ran out of clothes.
Monday morning, our neighborhood on the Upper West Side was remarkably still active. Many stores and restaurants managed to open for the morning by picking up workers in private cars and buses and even offering them hotel rooms to stay in if they could not return to their homes in neighboring boroughs. We coaxed our children outside to enjoy a little freedom and do a few final errands - including laying in a supply of wine. People seemed fairly calm, perhaps not expecting the storm to really hit as hard -- projected landfall was for south of Atlantic City in New Jersey, several hours of driving south and even a storm as huge as this one couldn't REALLY cause much damage this far north, right?
A former student of mine from Hawai'i stopped by for lunch with us in our apartment and headed back home to hers just in time -- by 2pm the winds were picking up enormously, and we spent much of the afternoon in playdates with other kids in our building while the storm increased in intensity right outside our windows. By 6pm, lights in our apartment began to flicker as our friends on Facebook one by one reported that their power had gone out. Much to our surprise, our friends in lower Manhattan began to report power failures, and I filled our bathtub with water we could use to flush toilets. The lights continued to surge and flicker as landfall and high tide coincided with expected storm surge shortly after we put our two children in bed.
The reports we heard were genuinely as frightening as the winds that howled up and down our street threatening to snap trees.
Battery Park City at the extreme southern tip on Manhattan was under water:
The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn had water pouring into it:
Various streets in the southern half of Manhattan saw water rushing in with the storm surge, lifting cars in the process:
The West Side Highway was flooding up to 42nd Street:
A massive construction crane almost 1000 feet above 57th Street partially collapsed in the wind:
The facade of a building completely fell off in Chelsea:
A ConEdison power station in southern Manhattan exploded:
And Manhattan south of 39th street went dark to prevent more damage as sea water rushed into the city, flooding tunnels and transformer manholes:
That's when I went to bed and tried, fitfully, to sleep. We woke up with the worst of it past, but with rain and wind still causing a stir. I did a walk around the Upper West Side with the knowledge that most of our region was without electrical power, but deeply thankful that our neighborhood still had power and that our position on high ground meant we had wind damage but no flooding in our streets. But our good fortune was dwarfed by the news that was coming in from everywhere else.
A fire broke out in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens overnight, and although over 200 firemen responded, equipment had trouble getting there in the floods and hurricane force gusts whipped the fire out of control:
By morning, the fire had consumed more than 100 homes, leaving the neighborhood looking like a city bombed in WWII:
Corrosive sea water was in numerous subway tunnels and cross river traffic tunnels:
Extensive floods afflicted areas of the city from Battery Park City, to Alphabet City, to low lying areas of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island:
The construction site at Ground Zero became a waterfall as the storm surge rushed in:
The PATH train service between New Jersey and New York City released a security camera photo showing sea water rushing into the Hoboken PATH station via the elevator shaft:
Hoboken, NJ was especially hard hit with flooding continuing to worsen after the storm past and National Guard units evacuating remaining residents.
Devastation down the New Jersey coast was not only dramatic but outright shocking:
And Atlantic City, just north of landfall, suffered extensive flooding and damage, although initial reports were of a much worse situation:
The news has been devastating to digest, especially as both my wife and I were able to absorb it in a neighborhood that feels something like an oasis of comfort surrounded by neighborhoods suffering not only major discomfort as night temperatures dip into the low 40s without heat, light or water but also genuine loss. We are simultaneously trying to extend the comfort of our amenities to family and friends without while keeping our two very young children feeling safe and cared for. I suppose the best way to express it is to note that when Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey looks humbled and shaken, it is a very big deal:
My daughter asks us every night to help her think of good dreams she can hold in her mind to keep away any nightmares. Tuesday night, we held her tight and told her that the best good dream she could have was that we were all together. We were safe. We were warm. We had all the things that make us comfortable and we are going to try to offer them to people who need them too. She agreed that those were good dreams.
Almost immediately, work began to restore service to New York City -- The national unwatering SWAT team was brought and while water has been removed rapidly, it will be weeks before the entire system is operating properly, and it is a system that is utterly vital to the economic life of the city. Friends from other states report that fleets of electrical repair crews are being spotted on highways heading east. When all is said and done, the east coast and New York City will recover.
But to what future? Forget the argument over carbon input driving climate change for the moment and stipulate to an observable fact that climate IS changing. Sea ice in the Artic Ocean disappears in greater extent every summer, and less predictable weather systems are becoming, oddly, more predictable. Last summer, Hurricane Irene came terribly close to flooding portions of New York's transit infrastructure, and this year, the Superstorm did it, in a manner that has, in fact, been predicted. Sea levels rose an inch a decade in the past century, and they are on track to rise even faster in the next few decades, making our vulnerabilities even more clear as even weaker storms will have the potential to cause breakdowns in our system. A changing climate is, therefore, poised like a knife at New York City's jugular.
Planning for such eventualities means public works projects on a massive scale. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg are planning to push for potential sea wall projects to help protect America's largest city and financial hub from future storms. Whether or not we have the national will remains to be seen, but communities up and down the Atlantic seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico will need to think about serious long term planning to protect themselves from the combination of rising seas and emerging storm patterns, and we will need planning at every level of government to achieve it even if we began to take vigorous action aimed at slowing down climate change ten years ago. The truth is that this is very likely our future.
When Hurricane Katrina breached the levees and New Orleans flooded in 2005, I remember a subset of commentators, mostly livejournal wags, who made snide comments about the wisdom of living in a city below sea level and that people "knew the risk" of living in "The Crescent City". The insinuation was, of course, that it was stupid to live in New Orleans and victims of the storm were partially responsible for their plight. Apart from the daftness of suggesting that the nation really didn't need a major port city at the mouth of the Mississippi River I was personally thunderstruck by the lack of compassion such sentiments expressed. New Orleans has been where it is for centuries, and while it is today a community with challenges brought about by its geography, it is also a vital and vibrant community that contributes both culturally and economically to the overall health of the nation. If being a nation means much of anything, it should mean that we recognize the value we all have to each other.
The daftness of the sentiment seems even more daft today, as 60 million people are still looking around them and assessing what we've lost and what we still have. Where is a place to foolish to settle now? The entire eastern seaboard? A nation does not function by rejecting our obligations to figure out long term solutions to long term problems, whether those problems are looming debt crises or looming impacts from natural disasters. "Out of Many, One" is not just supposed to be an answer to a Trivial Pursuit questions...even if we did foolishly displace it in an effort to demonstrate we had greater piety than Communists.
Preparation takes careful planning done by analytic people using data to drive their decisions. But it takes something else. It takes will. And will takes compassion. And compassion is a part of America's national character that needs some serious work.
The week before the storm, my car spun out on the Jersey Turnpike and hit the guardrail, and it had been living in a tow yard for most of the week. I had to teach in New Jersey Saturday morning, so I took a rental car out to retrieve the rest of our possessions from the car, teach and lay in storm supplies before returning to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. By 1pm Saturday in New Jersey, stores were rapidly selling out of cleaning supplies and bottled water. The mood was not quite panic, but you could tell it was tense. I managed to lay in some more food for us, matches for the gas stove and oven and drinking water, although I had little reason to expect to need them: Manhattan's underground electrical transmission system is rarely vulnerable even to major storms, and while it was clear that the storm was going to have widespread impact, we did not think Manhattan would be especially vulnerable.
Sunday morning saw the very beginning of storm like conditions with occasions of gusty winds. But as the day went on, it was obvious that what they were saying was true about the size of the storm -- it was immense, growing more intense as it moved north and piling up an enormous storm surge in front of it. Bit by bit, the city announced shut downs, including a full transit stop to go into effect by Sunday night and mandatory evacuations from Zone A -- despite the public's impression that the previous year's Hurricane Irene had been a minor event for New York City (it wasn't but people were unaware of how close we came to the transit system flooding in that storm), people were heeding warnings about the approaching hybrid storm system. I did all of our family laundry just in case we did lose electricity and ran out of clothes.
Monday morning, our neighborhood on the Upper West Side was remarkably still active. Many stores and restaurants managed to open for the morning by picking up workers in private cars and buses and even offering them hotel rooms to stay in if they could not return to their homes in neighboring boroughs. We coaxed our children outside to enjoy a little freedom and do a few final errands - including laying in a supply of wine. People seemed fairly calm, perhaps not expecting the storm to really hit as hard -- projected landfall was for south of Atlantic City in New Jersey, several hours of driving south and even a storm as huge as this one couldn't REALLY cause much damage this far north, right?
A former student of mine from Hawai'i stopped by for lunch with us in our apartment and headed back home to hers just in time -- by 2pm the winds were picking up enormously, and we spent much of the afternoon in playdates with other kids in our building while the storm increased in intensity right outside our windows. By 6pm, lights in our apartment began to flicker as our friends on Facebook one by one reported that their power had gone out. Much to our surprise, our friends in lower Manhattan began to report power failures, and I filled our bathtub with water we could use to flush toilets. The lights continued to surge and flicker as landfall and high tide coincided with expected storm surge shortly after we put our two children in bed.
The reports we heard were genuinely as frightening as the winds that howled up and down our street threatening to snap trees.
Battery Park City at the extreme southern tip on Manhattan was under water:
The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn had water pouring into it:
Various streets in the southern half of Manhattan saw water rushing in with the storm surge, lifting cars in the process:
The West Side Highway was flooding up to 42nd Street:
A massive construction crane almost 1000 feet above 57th Street partially collapsed in the wind:
The facade of a building completely fell off in Chelsea:
A ConEdison power station in southern Manhattan exploded:
And Manhattan south of 39th street went dark to prevent more damage as sea water rushed into the city, flooding tunnels and transformer manholes:
That's when I went to bed and tried, fitfully, to sleep. We woke up with the worst of it past, but with rain and wind still causing a stir. I did a walk around the Upper West Side with the knowledge that most of our region was without electrical power, but deeply thankful that our neighborhood still had power and that our position on high ground meant we had wind damage but no flooding in our streets. But our good fortune was dwarfed by the news that was coming in from everywhere else.
A fire broke out in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens overnight, and although over 200 firemen responded, equipment had trouble getting there in the floods and hurricane force gusts whipped the fire out of control:
By morning, the fire had consumed more than 100 homes, leaving the neighborhood looking like a city bombed in WWII:
Corrosive sea water was in numerous subway tunnels and cross river traffic tunnels:
Extensive floods afflicted areas of the city from Battery Park City, to Alphabet City, to low lying areas of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island:
The construction site at Ground Zero became a waterfall as the storm surge rushed in:
The PATH train service between New Jersey and New York City released a security camera photo showing sea water rushing into the Hoboken PATH station via the elevator shaft:
Hoboken, NJ was especially hard hit with flooding continuing to worsen after the storm past and National Guard units evacuating remaining residents.
Devastation down the New Jersey coast was not only dramatic but outright shocking:
And Atlantic City, just north of landfall, suffered extensive flooding and damage, although initial reports were of a much worse situation:
The news has been devastating to digest, especially as both my wife and I were able to absorb it in a neighborhood that feels something like an oasis of comfort surrounded by neighborhoods suffering not only major discomfort as night temperatures dip into the low 40s without heat, light or water but also genuine loss. We are simultaneously trying to extend the comfort of our amenities to family and friends without while keeping our two very young children feeling safe and cared for. I suppose the best way to express it is to note that when Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey looks humbled and shaken, it is a very big deal:
My daughter asks us every night to help her think of good dreams she can hold in her mind to keep away any nightmares. Tuesday night, we held her tight and told her that the best good dream she could have was that we were all together. We were safe. We were warm. We had all the things that make us comfortable and we are going to try to offer them to people who need them too. She agreed that those were good dreams.
Almost immediately, work began to restore service to New York City -- The national unwatering SWAT team was brought and while water has been removed rapidly, it will be weeks before the entire system is operating properly, and it is a system that is utterly vital to the economic life of the city. Friends from other states report that fleets of electrical repair crews are being spotted on highways heading east. When all is said and done, the east coast and New York City will recover.
But to what future? Forget the argument over carbon input driving climate change for the moment and stipulate to an observable fact that climate IS changing. Sea ice in the Artic Ocean disappears in greater extent every summer, and less predictable weather systems are becoming, oddly, more predictable. Last summer, Hurricane Irene came terribly close to flooding portions of New York's transit infrastructure, and this year, the Superstorm did it, in a manner that has, in fact, been predicted. Sea levels rose an inch a decade in the past century, and they are on track to rise even faster in the next few decades, making our vulnerabilities even more clear as even weaker storms will have the potential to cause breakdowns in our system. A changing climate is, therefore, poised like a knife at New York City's jugular.
Planning for such eventualities means public works projects on a massive scale. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg are planning to push for potential sea wall projects to help protect America's largest city and financial hub from future storms. Whether or not we have the national will remains to be seen, but communities up and down the Atlantic seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico will need to think about serious long term planning to protect themselves from the combination of rising seas and emerging storm patterns, and we will need planning at every level of government to achieve it even if we began to take vigorous action aimed at slowing down climate change ten years ago. The truth is that this is very likely our future.
When Hurricane Katrina breached the levees and New Orleans flooded in 2005, I remember a subset of commentators, mostly livejournal wags, who made snide comments about the wisdom of living in a city below sea level and that people "knew the risk" of living in "The Crescent City". The insinuation was, of course, that it was stupid to live in New Orleans and victims of the storm were partially responsible for their plight. Apart from the daftness of suggesting that the nation really didn't need a major port city at the mouth of the Mississippi River I was personally thunderstruck by the lack of compassion such sentiments expressed. New Orleans has been where it is for centuries, and while it is today a community with challenges brought about by its geography, it is also a vital and vibrant community that contributes both culturally and economically to the overall health of the nation. If being a nation means much of anything, it should mean that we recognize the value we all have to each other.
The daftness of the sentiment seems even more daft today, as 60 million people are still looking around them and assessing what we've lost and what we still have. Where is a place to foolish to settle now? The entire eastern seaboard? A nation does not function by rejecting our obligations to figure out long term solutions to long term problems, whether those problems are looming debt crises or looming impacts from natural disasters. "Out of Many, One" is not just supposed to be an answer to a Trivial Pursuit questions...even if we did foolishly displace it in an effort to demonstrate we had greater piety than Communists.
Preparation takes careful planning done by analytic people using data to drive their decisions. But it takes something else. It takes will. And will takes compassion. And compassion is a part of America's national character that needs some serious work.
(no subject)
Date: 1/11/12 22:45 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 08:21 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 12:05 (UTC)Many many others are not so fortunate. Truth is, I've been feeling something akin to survivor's guilt.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 17:50 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/11/12 23:27 (UTC)I wonder whether there's still the will to do the sort of investments that we'll need to make to respond adequately to these issues. I was listening to an NPR report on levees in New Jersey, which said that some 90% of levees in affected areas can't get federal government assistance for upkeep because they haven't met minimum Army Corps of Engineers standards for some thirty years or more. What's worse, most of those areas should have levees that exceed the ACoE standards -- and should prepare to upgrade them as sea levels rise, with constant budgeting for upkeep. But they're all handled on a very local level, without even state-level oversight or assistance with planning and upkeep. Try selling a county-run system with constant costs and probably constant monitoring and upgrades required, see how far you get before they get out the pitchforks and chase you off. But if you don't, well... things didn't need to be so bad as they were in Jersey.
I made passing mention to it in another thread, but we really are a country built on our grandparents' infrastructure, with no desire to upgrade it for this generation.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 01:29 (UTC)Eloquently written.
I'd love to nominate that for QOD.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 02:48 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 21:51 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/11/12 23:30 (UTC)So glad your family is safe and doing as well as can be expected.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 00:12 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 12:06 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 16:54 (UTC)Be easy on yourself. Just having to be so close to all that devastation is a lot to carry, and acknowledging that doesn't minimize the harm of people who are going through hell right now. Just reading about Staten Island has been breaking my heart. I can't imagine being in the same city and having to deal with that level of helplessness.
I've always had a larger fear of witnessing disasters than being in one. I'm pretty excellent in an emergency. My mind switches to "what happens now", and I'm so wrapped up in logistics, I don't have to deal with the emotional fallout until well after the fact. I realize that's projecting a lot assuming other folks are the same, and probably leads to a warped impression of my empathy. Or maybe my empathy is warped. Takes all kinds, I guess.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 17:00 (UTC)We're starting by offering to host kids from our daughter's elementary school that have been without and then we're having a toy cull so we can donate to families who lost everything. The student group at my university is likely to start doing the same. One of my former students contacted me all the way from California wanting to know what her school can do to help.
I know some people who are bonafide angels, I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 17:42 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 00:38 (UTC)It's kind of like stopping smoking (or smoking less) when you got lung cancer. It's a little too late for that. Since we got cancer, let's fight the effects that the disease to doing to us.
I heard today that there has been a plan to construct some sort of wave-dampening-berm off shore of NYC, estimated to cost $1billion. Sounds like cheap insurance to protect one of the most important cities in the world. Especially if this kind of once-in-a-century type storm has been predicted to increase in frequency and intensity due to global warming.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 00:44 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 01:28 (UTC)Yeah, those people are sadly misinformed. Irene was within inches of breaking the flood surge record last year and flooding the subway system. So, two large surge record breaking storms one year after the other, that's pretty unprecedented.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 05:16 (UTC)Tornados in the mountains of West Virginia is uncommon. Most of the elders where horrified, " Tornado touches down in Prosperity." Now a foot of snow and severe winds for four days. Two once and a lifetime storms in three months, this is a sign of things to come.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 01:00 (UTC)At a press conference on Tuesday, someone asked the mayor about climate change and using sea gates (unfortunately the reporter clumsily used the word "seawalls"), to which the mayor was pretty dismissive and my heart sank when he showed how misinformed he apparently is about the topic. The city uses several consultants from Columbia and SUNY about protecting the city's infrastructure, but Mr. Mayor seems to be out of the loop. A proposal by a Dutch firm was made in 2007 and the projected price tag for three structures would be six billion dollars.
What is so maddening, is seeing the hopeless defeatist "oh well, you can't fight Mother Nature!" (what Bloomberg essentially said), and then people put their hands on their hips and ask "Yeah, who's been successful at keeping the sea out?!" They seem to have forgotten the Dutch have a remarkable record building structures keeping out water. St. Petersburg Russia has sea gates, London and Venice Italy too. Hell, the really sad thing is: I don't even think I've heard a single remark about changing city laws to require emergency generators now be removed from basements and placed on an upper floor, or the roof of a building. Subway entrances in Flood Zones A / B should be modified immediately to have five foot entrances, instead of being flush with the street level, and something needs to be done about storm drains not emptying into the system. It's a daunting task, the subway on a business as usual day has to remove 11 MILLION gallons of water. But as the city mangers, and architects and engineers have noted:
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 02:47 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 02:53 (UTC)And Nevada!
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 14:35 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 23:47 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 07:14 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 14:34 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 14:46 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 20:32 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 21:55 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 18:16 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 20:33 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 04:16 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 23:48 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/11/12 00:00 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 04:02 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 12:09 (UTC)But my university is in NJ and my students can do hurricane relief drives -- is there anyone in your town coordinating direct relief efforts?
And has anyone heard from
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 22:44 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 23:12 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 08:24 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 17:32 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 17:38 (UTC)What's so frustrating is how hard it is to get anything to anyone or for them to get to us.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 17:47 (UTC)But on NBC Nightly News last night, Brian Williams was talking about how just a few miles from where he was, people in Lower Manhattan were overturning dumpsters looking for food (the video was unreal).
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 20:40 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 21:59 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/11/12 23:04 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/11/12 00:17 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/11/12 14:07 (UTC)