Photo: Imago Images
New YorkIn autumn 2013, New York invited an expert from the Netherlands to develop a long-term strategy for protection against flooding. The city was still under the impact of the catastrophe: Around a year earlier, the super storm “Sandy” had caused damage of 19 billion dollars here and cost the lives of 40 New Yorkers.
Jeroen Aerts, who conducts research on water and climate risk management at the University of Amsterdam, did not need long to come to an initial judgment: “That a city like New York, where so many people would be affected by a flood, has no protection system is really amazing. “
US Army Engineer Corps recommends protective wall
In his final report, Aerts recommended a large-scale long-term investment in the city, which has almost 1,000 kilometers of river and sea banks, the core of which is a system of protective walls modeled on the Netherlands. The expenses for this, according to Aerts, would be enormous at first. If you factor in the rising sea levels, however, New York would get away with it cheaper in the long run than with more local measures such as fortifying important infrastructure within the city. Despite this calculation, New York initially chose the more short-sighted, cheaper route. But now the big solution is back on the table despite everything.
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Last week the US Army’s engineering corps – one of the most important tasks of which is protection against natural disasters – published the results of its own investigation into the threats posed by rising sea levels and increasingly intense storms to the east coast. One of the recommended measures by the engineers is a gigantic, ten-kilometer-long flood barrier that would seal off the entire Bay of New York in the event of a storm surge. The project would stretch from the southern tip of the Far Rockaway Peninsula to the New Jersey coast and cost $ 120 billion.
The financing for such a mega-project is of course anything but secure, especially since a large part of the funds would have to come from the federal government. And investments that take climate change into account are hardly to be expected from the current government. But the proposal by the Army Corps reignited the debate in New York on how to deal with the water threat to the city over the next 100 years.
–Graphic: BLZ / Galanty
Computer simulations by researchers at Princeton University show that New York, with its many surrounding bodies of water, is threatened even at best. Even if the climate only warms by two degrees – a rather conservative estimate – large parts of lower Manhattan and entire neighborhoods of Brooklyn will be under water by the year 2100. The rather pessimistic German geophysicist Klaus Jacob, who conducts research at New York’s Columbia University, believes that New York will turn into an Atlantis within the next 100 years.
The city had already initiated the first protective measures after hurricane “Sandy” in 2012. The mayor at the time, Bloomberg, approved $ 20 billion to fortify critical infrastructure such as tunnels, transformer stations and subway stations. In endangered social buildings and hospitals, the entrance areas and cellars were protected and emergency power generators were installed.
Waterfront shopping areas would not survive rising sea levels
In Staten Island, the district that was hardest hit by Sandy, residents in endangered areas have been offered generous sums of money to rebuild elsewhere. And in 2018, Mayor Bill de Blasio approved at least 10 billion for a project to protect lower Manhattan in a ring. This includes parks that can be flooded, levees and ramparts, as well as an embankment near Wall Street, which extends the island by 200 meters.
What the city has not yet dared to do, however, is to restrict and regulate building on the rivers and beaches. It is only in the past 15 years that New York has rediscovered its banks, which had often degenerated into industrial wastelands since commercial shipping moved out of the city to New Jersey after the war.
Since then, the banks have been a popular playground for real estate investors. From the East River in Brooklyn to the Hudson in northern Manhattan, new waterfront residential, work and shopping districts are springing up like mushrooms. Many of them, such as the entire newly built ground zero area, will probably not survive the rising sea levels of the next 50 years.
Do storm walls give a false sense of security?
Now one wonders whether the mega-project proposed by the Army Corps at the entrance to New York Bay would solve these problems. Critics are extremely skeptical. Daniel Zarrilli, the mayor’s representative for resilience and reconstruction, says: “The storm walls are a trap. They give a false sense of security. ”In the event of a major hurricane, Zarrilli said, the walls might prevent the worst. But they would have nothing to do with the long-term consequences of climate change. That being said, the ecological impact of such ramparts on the Hudson’s ecosystem could be devastating.
The science historian Naomi Oreskes, who wrote a dystopian sci-fi novel with the title: “2393 – The Fall of Western Civilization”, formulates the situation as follows: “When I see the latest figures, our scenario still seems far too optimistic . ”In the book, New York has shrunk to a scattered group of islands. They are no longer really habitable.
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