Flooded Subway – Climate change threatens New York’s lifeline
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| Reading time: 3 minutes
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After the heavy rains, the underground tunnels were flooded and damaged in many places
Source: pa / dpa / TheNEWS2 vi / Niyi Fote
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Cyclone Ida brought an unpleasant truth to New York’s eyes: The famous subway is in a desolate state – and not prepared for a future in which severe weather disasters could become normal. One challenge in particular worries experts.
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Dhe subway stop 116th Street in north Manhattan turned into a waterfall last week: a mighty surge shot down the stairs and flooded the tracks. At one station on Jefferson Street in Brooklyn, water spilled from valves in the ceiling of the tunnel – it looked like the trains that got there initially were going through a car wash.
On Wednesday, New York felt the foothills of Hurricane Ida, which had previously wreaked havoc in the state of Louisiana. Within 60 minutes, eight centimeters of rain fell. A record for the metropolis – and apparently too much for its famous subway. Stations and tunnels filled with water almost instantly. New York’s subway, America’s largest transportation network, had to shut down. Thousands of passengers were stuck.
Now, a few days later, politicians, city planners and environmental experts are discussing how something like this can be avoided in the future. Ida showed everyone an uncomfortable truth: that the subway, now more than 100 years old, is not fit for a future in which extreme weather could become normal.
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Researchers have long predicted that climate change will make some parts of the world more humid. Because a warmer atmosphere can store larger amounts of water. One consequence of this is that storms are likely to bring more rain in the future than before. This is a horror scenario for the New York subway and other underground transportation systems.
“Our subway,” says Robert Freudenberg, an expert on energy and the environment at the New York consultancy Regional Plan Association, “is simply not designed to handle as much water as fell from the sky last week.” It did was just a “short-term shock”. “But the more of these shocks there are, the weaker the system becomes over time,” explains Freudenberg, “and at some point we have a big problem.”
A prolonged outage of the subway would be devastating for New York. During the pandemic, the number of passengers has halved, but on a normal weekday, around two million citizens still travel by train – more people than live in Hamburg. Thousands of wagons run between 472 stops. The subway is the city’s lifeline and a symbol of its energy and dynamism. Hardly anything embodies New York as well as the ever-rolling subway.
“We observe weather extremes more often than before”
In its report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of an increase in extreme weather conditions. Humans have currently already caused global warming of 1.1 degrees. The jet stream has weakened.
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But the system has been underfunded for a long time and is vulnerable. On some lines, every third train is late. One reason for this is that technology from the year it was opened is still used in some tunnels: from 1904. New York’s local public transport system is considered to be the least punctual in the world. And that without heavy rain. So the challenge is enormous: the operator, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA for short, has to renovate the subway so that it works on dry days – and also arm it against the consequences of climate change.
Above all, this has to be done above ground. The MTA will have to install larger, more modern sewage systems in their tunnels and stations. But according to experts, it is even more important to “deasphalt” New York. For example, creating more green areas or providing footpaths with permeable soil into which the water can seep.
“What forest fires are to the west of the United States,” says Freudenberg, “is water to us.” In the future, extreme rain will more and more often paralyze train traffic in New York and other metropolises on the American east coast and turn train stations into dangerous places . “If nothing happens,” warns the expert, “there is a risk of our infrastructure being overloaded.”
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