In early June New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced a comprehensive report that analyzed climate risks and made recommendations for protecting New York City’s neighborhoods and infrastructure from a future superstorm.
If every recommendation in the plan were implanted the cost could exceed $20 billion. That’s an enormous amount of money.
But the costs for recovering from Hurricane Sandy have also been enormous and the next major storm could be far more damaging.
We’d like to see a similar study and proposal for Long Island, even though the costs of implementation would also be enormous. The taxpayers of Nassau County can then weigh the costs against the potential risks.
Although New Jersey and New York City suffered greater damage from Sandy than Nassau and Suffolk counties, that was in many ways an accident.
We got slammed, but compared to lower Manhattan and other parts of the city, we got lucky.
The report titled “A Stronger, More Resilient New York,” warns about the potential dangers of climate change.
The panel that produced the report claims that sea levels could rise 2.5 feet by the 2050s, that an increasing number of heat waves could threaten public health and that there will be an increase in the number of days each year with two inches or more of rainfall.
More importantly, the report makes recommendations for protecting the coastline of New York City that include: the installation of floodwalls, bulkheads and levees; the building of surge barriers; installing dune systems in Staten Island and Rockaway Peninsula; repairing floodgates and tide gates and greater protection for Con Edison’s substations.
It discusses the challenge of finding affordable prices for flood insurance in the higher-risk areas and the impact that the next Sandy might have on healthcare, power and telecommunication systems.
Bloomberg estimated that the cost of the 250 recommendations in his report would be slightly less than $20 billion. A large part of that, he said, would be covered by funding already allocated by the federal government.
The full implementation of this plan would take more than a decade. It would also create thousands of jobs.
Hopefully Long Island can benefit from the study and work putting into creating this report.
We share the same risks, possibly to a greater extent, and the recommendations that include working with the Army Corps of Engineers should be considered for the North and South shore of Long Island.
Planning should begin immediately to protect future generations of Long Islanders. There isn’t much, if anything, that can be done on the local level to hold back global warming and its impact on the polar ice caps and rising sea levels – although every community needs to finds ways to reduce its carbon footprint.
But, as New York City’s report demonstrates, there is a great deal that can be done to protect the metropolitan area from the next Sandy.
When it comes to planning for a “more resilient” Long Island, Nassau County doesn’t have to reinvent New York City’s wheel, just see if it fits here.
