New York Climate Change

For entertainment, we had breathless newscasters standing in puddles in their wet-weather gear, heralding the Storm of the Century that no one believed would really happen. “What preparations are you making?” asked an out-of-towner. “We have a lot of tea lights!” said the New Yorker, suggesting that anything more might be overkill. Outside, there... See more

“The city’s sewer system, the storm-water management system does not have the capacity to process water when you go above an inch and a half, an inch and three-quarters, in an hour,” Janno Lieber, the MTA’s chairman and CEO, told PIX11 on Tuesday. “Last night that rainfall was more than two inches in an hour; that’s when you get the backup into the... See more

Their renter’s insurance didn’t cover natural disasters — only flooding from building malfunctions, such as burst pipes — and the FEMA flood relief they received came to just $250.

We were there ten years after the Indian Ocean tsunami, and a lot of the conversations were about how you come up with a place that people know that they can go to and then tell them how much time they have — sometimes it’s only a few minutes — to actually leave. There they are called “escape buildings,” these multistory fortified buildings.

There’s one large-scale plan that I end up critiquing quite a bit in the book called the Giant Sea Wall. It’s a plan to create, really, a whole new city on reclaimed land in the bay, with these very large retention ponds that could be pumped low enough that the rivers and canals in the city could drain into them. The planners think they need... See more