Tuesday, May 7, 2019

The city approves plan to stack sandbags four feet high to mitigate flooding from hurricanes




























New York Times


After Hurricane Sandy devastated New York in 2012, city officials considered some drastic responses to storm surges, like long concrete sea walls and tall earthen berms.

But as the seventh hurricane season since then approaches, the city is relying on something more modest as the first line of defense against another inundation of Manhattan: a row of glorified sandbags.

In the next few months, the city’s Office of Emergency Management plans to oversee the installation of four-foot-tall sacks of soil along the East River esplanade, from Wall Street to just north of the Brooklyn Bridge.

For up to five years, they essentially would form the only barrier to keep water from again rushing into the low-lying neighborhoods around the South Street Seaport.

City officials say they are a temporary step while permanent solutions to New York’s vulnerability to big storms are still being planned and debated.

But the barriers have already provoked derision.

“Six years of studying it and you come up with sandbags? Really?” said Marco Pasanella, whose family owns a 180-year-old building with a wine shop that faces the river on South Street. He said he felt no less vulnerable than he did on the night that Sandy flooded his shop and left the district without power for two weeks.

Along with the doubts about their effectiveness, the barriers have also been panned as unsightly interlopers along a stretch of waterfront popular with pedestrians and bicyclists — one woman called them “atrocities.”

They will cover only about one mile of the waterfront, leaving the area below Wall Street unprotected, possibly for another decade or longer.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's this crap (or bigger crap like 20 foot concrete flood walls) or move, guys.
The ocean is rising and the land is sinking.
Do the math.

Anonymous said...

Sandbagging, how appropo for NYC.

Anonymous said...

And the homeless will build homes with the sandbags?

Anonymous said...

#1 is so right! Time to move. But not to my back yard. I'm doing great and refuse to pay for your health insurance.

Anonymous said...

What in the hell is this!!! I give up on New York City. Now we the taxpayers will pay 100 million dollars for some sandbags.

Anonymous said...

Has this six year study been released to the public? I'm wondering what our resident geniuses spent to finally come up with the sandbag solution. Now my ideas was that every building put up in low lying areas of NYC should be built like the Ark of old and anchored to a concrete implacement. That idea took me just ten minutes to come up with and I know it sounds like it. But, then again, so does theirs.

Anonymous said...

The pols are in over their head and appoint people based on a host of criterion of which competence takes a back seat to political correctness and diversity.

That is how you come up with knuckle brained ideas like this.