One of my enduring childhood memories is going with my mother to the lobby of The Providence Journal, where she had once worked, to see the high water mark of the fearsome 1938 hurricane. It was the worst storm that had ever been recorded in New England, with winds of 115 miles per hour and a storm surge 16 feet high. Parts of Providence were 8 feet under water. Nearly 400 Rhode Islanders died.So much for the myth that Sandy was "unprecedented."
Storm barrier are used around the world to prevent the flooding of important harbors and coastal areas, including the Netherlands, London, a. New York is one of the largest ports in the US, and has been known to be vulnerable to hurricane storm surges for a very long time. Why has no control structure been built to protect New York?
Less than 20 years later, Hurricane Carol hit Providence dead-on. With a storm surge of more than 14 feet, it caused 68 deaths; the damage was estimated at $500 million. At which point, Rhode Island had had enough. In 1960, the state issued $15 million worth of bonds to pay the Army Corps of Engineers to build the country’s first storm barrier, aimed specifically at protecting its capital city.
The Fox Point Hurricane Barrier, a complicated array of dikes, gates, barriers and pumps, completed in 1966, has kept hurricanes at bay ever since. That includes Hurricane Sandy, which wreaked havoc on parts of the Rhode Island coastline, but barely dented Providence.
Part of the reason is that the cost of any such system would run into the billions of dollars. But another reason is that many environmentalists are firmly opposed to a big public-works project, fearing that it would give people a false sense of security about the problems posed by climate change. They prefer taking smaller steps, like raising the height of subway grates to keep water out of the subway tunnels. Bloomberg has embraced this approach.So, they would rather New York suffer from the effects that they claim will devastate the planet than actually attempt to ameliorate the problem?
In 2008, for instance, Bloomberg convened a panel of experts to examine the ways climate change could affect the city. The panel’s report, issued in 2010, documented the undeniable fact that the rivers and bays around New York were rising, and that changes in the atmosphere were likely to make storms both more frequent and more dangerous. Yet Malcolm Bowman, who leads the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University, told me that when he joined the panel, he was pointedly told that barriers were not going to get much emphasis.
Remember, they don't love nature as much as they hate people.