Sandy may flood New York's transportation system. Meet the Columbia risk researcher who told us this could happen last month.
If you would like to see the definition of prescience, take a look at this New York Times article from September by Mireya Navarro. She quotes Columbia's Klaus Jacob essentially predicting the trouble that New York now faces, namely, that a big storm surge could paralyze its transportation system.
Today, Andrew Cuomo announced the MTA subway, buses, and trains will shut down this evening and may remain out-of-service until Wednesday.Klaus H. Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University's Earth Institute, said the storm surge from Irene came, on average, just one foot short of paralyzing transportation into and out of Manhattan.
If the surge had been just that much higher, subway tunnels would have flooded, segments of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and roads along the Hudson River would have turned into rivers, and sections of the commuter rail system would have been impassable or bereft of power, he said.
The most vulnerable systems, like the subway tunnels under the Harlem and East Rivers, would have been unusable for nearly a month, or longer, at an economic loss of about $55 billion, said Dr. Jacob, an adviser to the city on climate change and an author of the 2011 state study that laid out the flooding prospects.
"We've been extremely lucky," he said. "I'm disappointed that the political process hasn't recognized that we're playing Russian roulette."
Image may be NSFW.We may not know which of those two scenarios we face, however, until just hours before the storm hits. "Sandy is a very moody storm," Dr. Jacob added. "It changes its mind as it goes along, so it will take probably until tomorrow or early afternoon before we know exactly what the exact timing will be."
Regardless, it seems like we're in for some subway flooding. According to Dr. Jacob, the most vulnerable are subway stations are those in downtown Manhattan, particularly along Wall Street -- newswire photographs showed transit workers boarding up subway grates near the Staten Island Ferry on Friday -- as well as on the Upper East Side near the Harlem River, and near the Newton Creek boundary between Brooklyn and Queens.
Besides the subway, car tunnels, coastal streets, and even the airports should expect flooding from a Category 1 hurricane, according to one city report. Both LaGuardia and JFK airports, where serious delays and travel disruptions are already expected, may experience as much as three feet of flooding.
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