Of the three major disasters in New York City in recent memory—September
11, Sandy, and now Covid-19—Sandy had the lowest death toll and is not
generally understood to have ushered in a new chapter in the city’s
history, as September 11 was and Covid-19 already is. But it was a
harbinger of greater disasters to come. It is easy for climate change to
be overshadowed by our current crisis, but the two are of a piece, both
global crises stemming from our fraught interaction with the natural
world. When any action on climate change seems so intractable, stymied
by political gridlock or insistence that the economy must come first,
it’s startling that such relatively swift and disruptive—if highly
imperfect—measures to address Covid-19 have been taken in order to
protect public wellbeing. The most obvious explanation for the differing
responses to the two crises is that Covid-19’s devastation is more
immediate and visible. In New York City, Sandy, as a tangible proxy for
climate change, has had a similar mobilizing effect—it has been the
motivating factor behind most of the city’s coastal preparedness plans,
which, as a result, are farther along than similar efforts in most other
American cities.
The fact is that the shore line on Staten Island is one where housing should never have been placed. It is the barrier to the outer harbor and over centuries has been the brunt of many hurricanes. In the early 1950s, while living on Staten Island, I saw first hand the damage to the many home built along South and Midland Beaches from the shore to Hylan Blvd. The land was under water. That should have been a clear warning.
But alas, no. Instead the City made it worse. The City built the road along the water front on an almost twenty feet rise making the homes behind the road now in a basin. When the water would come across the road in a severe storm it would fall into the basis and not be allowed to retreat. The result was a disaster. It was not global warming, climate change, but the abject stupidity of the City in doing what would in effect in my opinion be a death trap.
During the late 50s and early 60s I was a Lifeguard at Midland Beach and Ocean Breeze. I came to understand on an hourly basis the tides and storms, the ebb and flow of the Ocean and the damage it could cause. Designing and implementing roads must take into account the nature of the Ocean movements. It is like the Jersey shore, the outre banks are moving piles of sand, not the solid rock of the Maine coast, and if the land under one's house is continuously moving one must take and accept the risk.
In my opinion Sandy was not a tangible proxy for climate change, It was in my opinion and blatant example of poor engineering and planning. One cannot stop the Ocean, and one cannot assume that putting people on a veritable swimming pool under the right circumstances will have an acceptable outcome.
History and understanding what came before is essential to any form of reasonable planning and implementation. Not everything is due to climate change.
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